not my blog

So working on this Gentoo box today and I setup the three 80GB Hard Drives that it has in a Software RAID 5. Small issue with that, once I was informed of it was painfully obvious, that GRUB can not read from a RAID 5 partition! Many hours worth of work all down the drain cause I don’t think about my actions. Live and learn, as long as I don’t do it again we shouldn’t have too much of an issue… I hope.

Really though, someone needs to make sure they note this earlier than the very last entry into the wiki articles that reference software RAID in Gentoo. Ok, granted, I probably should have read the whole thing before starting, but hey, I’m a technical guy, I don’t read the articles.

Off to go restart this process again, and this time I’ll try and make sure not to do anything stupid.

Well, I’m sitting here still waiting for Gentoo to finish building the RAID 5 array in the box I’m working on. Only 30 minutes to go!

For those that don’t know (that is probably everyone), I’m working on our customer data backup box for the office. We use it to store customer data and whatnot while performing reloads at the office. This thing has had Red Hat 9 on it for like a year and about 2 months ago started doing some seriously wierd things, so I was at the office last night and finally said screw it and brought it home with me. So right now I’m building out the box and should hopefully have it done and ready to go back tomorrow.

And as a side note, Soyo makes crap motherboards for Linux compatibility.

Dropped off my Dad’s new PC to him on Sunday. I have to say I am quite thrilled with how the box turned out, especially with the price we paid for all the parts ~$1250 for the whole thing. I have always enjoyed build nice solid machines as I find it relaxing to do the whole cabling thing and whatnot. I was quite impressed by the new model of the case (which I have been using for like 3 years in machines) now has a modular cable PSU! Granted Antec’s cases are not always the flashiest, but they are solid and well built and you almost never can go wrong with one! For those that are interested in the full specs:

• Antec TX1050B Case
• Abit AN8 Ultra Motherboard
• AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ CPU
• 1GB Corsair XMS PC3200 Dual Channel
• Ati FireGL V3100 PCIe 128MB Video Card
• Western Digital Caviar SE16 250GB SATA 300MBs
• Plextor PX-716AL DVD/RW Drive
• Asus DVD-E616A DVD-ROM

Nice speedy little system to replace my Dad’s current Athlon XP 2100+ with 1GB of PC2700. Not that his old system is bad, but it is three years old, so it was time for the upgrade. Did not get to go with the 64-bit version of XP yet because he still has some old 16 bit apps that he has to use for his job, and the company that develops them hasn’t bothered with updating them yet. Hell, one of them still writes a DOS program. Could be worse I guess.

Got everything all setup on his system and made sure I got all the FOSS stuff that was needed installed and configured. Now is just the long transistion period for all the software. You figure my Dad has probably close to 50 programs that he owns that need to be transfered to this new computer, so it will probably be a good 2 weeks or so before this new machine actually gets put into play.

For those that want pics of the build start here and work from there. Have to start with the General Tso’s Chicken and Beer pre-build dinner! Which reminds me, I really need to purchase a Flickr! Pro account. So if anyone wants to send me some money (or *cough*visit sponsors*cough*) I would really appreciate it!