[tech] the aftermath

[Nick Bannon]

On Sun, Aug 17, 2003 at 12:39:50AM +0800, Bernard Blackham wrote:
[...]
> Skipping over the long and convoluted story, meito had it's drives
> transplanted to a new motherboard & CPU (mine) and seems to be
> running a little faster (IDE speed). The new CPU is a P3-450. The

So it is! 4.1MB/sec read speed, up from about 1MB/sec!

> only downside is that there's no facility in the BIOS to tell it to
> switch on when it powers up - so it'll stay off in a power failure.
> But we're looking to fix that with a small circuit.

We could just link the +5VSB line to the PS_ON line on the ATX
connector.

> At certain points during the day it was feared that both meito's
> disks had died horrible deaths, which proved quite distressing
> without a backup. (Even RAID1 wasn't enough to save them). Turns out
> it was the motherboards' at fault, but it still raises the question
> of backups at UCC... do we need a plan?

I was thinking automated DVD image creation to mussel:/space . If a
blank DVD is left in cybium overnight, it can ( fetch the next image &&
burn && delete it ).

The slight problem is that Michal just just been burning some more DVDs
and he's noticed that he gets occasional bit errors copying files
around on cybium, which probably means the VIA DMA driving is FITH. It's
not a complete killer because the backups would still be 99% OK, but
still... cybium should probably get a new motherboard. ::-)

In addition to anything else, we have a 20/40GB DLT and [GMB] says UCS
have a spare 20/40GB DLT autoloader...

Nick.

-- 
   Nick Bannon   | "I made this letter longer than usual because
nick-sig at rcpt.to | I lack the time to make it shorter." - Pascal