Grump

[mdlbear]

Nova (the fileserver) fell over on its nose while I was printing some business cards. No damned reason for it; top shows that the rasterizer hardly uses any resources at all. (That's no explanation for why it's so slow, especially when printing to the inkjet, but...) It handled backups just fine.

So it's either memory, or something weird on the MB (possibly involving writing the disk). In either case, I don't have time to track it down. Sometime between now and Wednesday I'll swap disks with Harmony (my workstation) and worry about building a new workstation when I get back from Conflikt. One more fscking expense I don't need...

In other news, my XO still hasn't arrived, and I got an email from them saying they didn't have my complete shipping address. More likely their cobbled-together software thinks that "suite 115" refers to a mailbox and not a connected set of offices. (I almost wrote "office suite", but that would be something else again.)

Comments

[andyheninger.livejournal.com]

I hate hardware problems.

I upgraded my ancient main desktop Linux box last November with this motherboard
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128056
Gigabyte MA69GM-S2H

It was the least expensive I could find with the features I wanted - DVI onboard video, firewire, and reasonably good user reviews for not being flaky. So far it's been perfect, not a single hang or force reboot (knock on wood). Ubuntu Gutsy recognized all the hardware without incident, other than an the usual unfortunate battle with xorg.conf over my wide-screen monitor.

My only complaint is that it has just a single PATA plug. I was originally planning on keeping one of my old parallel hard disks, plus the parallel DVD drive, but cable routing was impossible and I ended up buying a second SATA drive. They're both working fine. Not RAID, though.

I went AMD for a combination of cheap and a lingering resentment against Intel's monopoly tendencies. There's no question that an Intel Core2 processor is faster, but the AMD X2 is plenty fast enough for anything I'm doing.

It's not a bad, or a particularly expensive, time to be upgrading a system.