Eureka!

Having been sick this past week with a serious case of a head-cold, you can imagine how antsy I am getting, being cooped up inside all week long, and all. I figured I’ll blog about my latest computer hardware disaster, that has had my Ubuntu 7.04 machine out of commission for the last 2 months.

It all started when I started experiencing random shutdowns, as if someone had just pulled th plug. At times I would literally have to wait 10 minutes for the power button to even turn the computer on again. Being the logical type I naturally deduced that it was the Power Supply. I figured that it had finally given up the ghost, after 2 years of 24/7/365 operation at 80% load. It probably had lost its edge (power supplies do experience a drop in wattage output over time).

So off I went to newegg.com to get something that would last a while: HIPER HPU-4S730-MS 730W. I know that usually modular PSUs are to be avoided, but this one turned out to b e excellent with its industrial-grade connectors.

Silly me. As if that would get rid of the gremlin that had invaded my computer… of course it was still randomly shutting off - no, not shutting down, just OFF … poof - after about 20 seconds. This would happen during boot, while I was in the BIOS, or just being idly waiting for me to insert a bootable floppy (I removed all the hard drives to eliminate any OS or HD hardware). Well, what else could it be, but the motherboard now? Right?

Having no obvious answer in mind (any other piece of defective hardware connected to the motherboard would prompt beep errors) I was at newegg.com in two clicks, buying this baby: ASUS A8N32-SLI Deluxe. Maybe this wasn’t going to be so bad after all, looks like I’ll get a whole new PC out of this when I’m done. (I didn’t want to spend too much money, so I wanted to keep my 939 AMD Athlon64 3500+, which meant I had to go with a 939 motherboard.)

Figured I would throw the gremlin out with my old motherboard. Boy, was I wrong.
Man, I was at my wits end. The only other thing that it could possibly be was the CPU. But the CPU doesn’t just shut a computer off if its bad. Well, I’ve heard of stranger things, so off I went to newegg.com, again: AMD Athlon 64 X2 4400+ Toledo.

Nothing could possibly go wrong now. And on top of it all, I now got myself a dual-core processor, which would help me multi-task the hell out of programming! muahaha… haha.

Having delusions of grandeur, I eagerly plopped in the new CPU … booting … loading OS … nice, I can get back to work! … PFFFT. Blackness. The gremlin was back! I couldn’t believe it. I requested an RMA, having tested all the hardware (memory, video, cdrom, floppy, harddrives, etc.) I made a call to ASUS tech support. After explaining the situation, and convincing them that my CPU was NOT overheating, they admitted it might be the motherboard and authorized an RMA for me.

10 days later I got the package with my now refurbished motherboard in the mail. Unfortunately I was heading to the otherside of the Globe that day for vacation in the Philippines. My computer would have to wait.

Coming back 3 weeks later, I looked forward to assembling my PC and being able to get back to work. The gremlin was still there. Someone must have soaked it in a lake of water, because this was one evil gremlin I could seem to shake: my computer STILL kept shutting off anywhere between 20 and 60 seconds after starting it up. I have tried various PSUs, video cards, memory sticks, removed all peripheral drives and PCI cards. All to no avail. The gremlin still had to be in the motherboard. So I called into ASUS again, and they admitted that it must be the motherboard. Sometimes this happens, they acknowledged, and gave me another RMA number.

I now have to send in my motherboard again (this coming Monday, since I was sick this last week) and hope for the best. My last resort is to go out and buy another motherboard, but I don’t want to waste the $170 I already put into the new ASUS.

Hoping for the best, your aspiring gremlin-slayer.

PS: if anyone has slain a gremlin of this nature in the past, please let me know what I’m overlooking here!

Update: as per Mista_Random’s comment, one of the best suggestions I’ve heard regarding this issue so far, I tried using a surrogate case (plugging in the case connectors from another case, while being connected to the PSU of the original case). Unfortunately it still is pulling the plug on itself after about a minute. Great suggestion, Mista, thanks! Too bad itdidn’t pan out.

The D-Link WDA-1320 is supported by Ubuntu 6.10 “Edgy Eft ” ‘out of the box’. This is great news, as so far there have been innumerable issues with wireless support in Linux. Let’s get right down to business:

1. Get your Ubuntu installation CD and insert into the CDROM of the computer you will be installing the network card into.
2. Go to a command prompt/terminal and type:

   sudo apt-get install linux-restricted-modules-`uname -r`

3. This will install all the packages necessary for the system to ’see’ your new card.
4. Close the terminal window.
5. Open Synaptic Package Manager (System -> Administration -> Synaptic …).
6. Click the Search button and look for “network manager”.
7. Select the packages network-manager and network-manager-gnome to be installed.
8. Click Apply to invoke the installation.
9. After the installation completes close Synaptic.
10. Now you will need to disable any wired networking cards (network manager tends to get confused easily if there are some still available). If you don’t have any wired network devices (ethn, where n is a number) skip ahead to step 13.
11. Open the network connections (System -> Administration -> Networking) and uncheck any checked connections.
12. Close the Networking window.
13. Now power down the Ubuntu computer (turn it off).
14. Open the case, install the card into an available PCI slot, and close everything back up again.
15. Turn the computer back on again.
16. You can now see the wireless networks in your area by clicking on the networking icon in the panel notification area. To connect to one, simply click on it.
17. You may or may not need to provide security information to access that network.

Well, it looks like this beta build won’t support RAID arrays yet. I tried to install it on my raid computer, and it wouldn’t read the disk information. So much for that idea. I have it installed on my other comp at the moment, but I’d like to take Longhorn through the paces of everyday use (I use my other computer as a server, and Longhorn is on an inactive removable harddrive, so it’s not getting used at this point).

What have your experiences been so far? Successes, failures?

[Edit 8/3/2005 09:11]
In the interim, here are some links about Longhorn, or ‘Vista’ as it’s now called (eventhough the boot screen still shows ‘Lonhorn’):

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Vista

Well, if you were wondering about the advantages of SATA-II over regular IDE ATA or Ultra ADA harddrives, you’re not alone. I built myself a new computer from scratch this past week, and part of is was moving to SATA technology for performance reasons. Now that I have this new system, and went through the effort and money to get some more performance, I want to know if it really was worth it. Are they better?

These following tests are comparisons between different SATA-II RAID-0 arrays and my old Ultra-ATA 100 harddrive. I never invested in SATA harddrives, because I felt their performance was only marginally better than IDE ATA drives and that the little gains weren’t worth the investment. However, now with SATA-II 300 (triple the speed of Ultra ATA 100), I felt this was definately worth a shot. And to gain even more performance, I set up 3 identical SATA-II drives in a striped raid configuration for maximum performance.

I did not test performance differences between the various raid setups (RAID-0, RAID-1, RAID-0+1, RAID-5). My tool of choice for benchmarking my harddrives was to use HD Tach due to its easy of use, clear graphical reporting, and small file size. Additionaly I purchased some aftermarket SATA-II data cables that can deal with a throughput of SATA-II 3Gb/s. I will compare these with the standard SATA cables that came with the Motherboard (DFI LanParty nF4 SLI-DR). I would also like to note that the Hitachi drives come stock at SATA 150. To ‘unlock’ the SATA 300 capability you must download the Hitachi Feature Tool (should it not come with your drive).

Let’s get started:

Benchmark A: Seagate Barracuda ST3200822A
Purpose: To get a baseline to compare SATA-II performance against.
Specs: 200GB, 7200 RPM, 8MB Cache, IDE Ultra ATA100
Results: Not very impressive, but I suspect the performance of this drive reflects drive performance of the average Joe’s computer. Bottom line is that it’s top data throughput was very close to the labeled 100 MB/sec: it closed out at 95.6MB/sec.

Benchmark B: Hitachi Deskstar HDT722516DLA380
Purpose: To determine the stock performance of a SATA-II 300 drive.
Specs: 160 GB, 7200 RPM, 8MB Cache, SATA-II 300 (also referred to as 3Gb/sec*)
Results: The results are undoubtedly higher than the Seagate drive. This drive clocked in at 223.6MB/sec. While nowhere near the theoretical throughput of 300MB/sec, it performs more than twice as good as the Seagate.

Benchmark C: Hitachi Deskstar HDT722516DLA380 w/Aftermarket Data Cable
Purpose: To determine if aftermarket data cables are necessary for 3Gb/s drives (all SATA data cables can perform at least at 1.5Gb/s.
Specs: 160 GB, 7200 RPM, 8MB Cache, SATA-II 300 (also referred to as 3Gb/sec*)
Results: These results had me a bit surprised: 223.7MB/sec. I expected the greater quality of the aftermarket cables to outperform the stock MoBo SATA cables. They don’t seem to. I heard on various forums that data cables can be and often are a bottleneck for the 3Gb/s drives, but I have to take from this that DFI really had their act together when they put this motherboard and its accessories together.

Benchmark D: 3x Hitachi Deskstar HDT722516DLA380 RAID-0 Single Partition
Purpose: To compare a RAID-0 setup to a standalone drive and see if RAID-0 really has marked performance gain.
Specs: 3 identical drives, 160 GB, 7200 RPM, 8MB Cache, SATA-II 300 (also referred to as 3Gb/sec*)
Results: RAID rocks! It makes SATA-II standalone look like an old whimp: 340MB/s. I’m sold.

Benchmark E: 3x Hitachi Deskstar HDT722516DLA380 RAID-0 3 Partitions
Purpose: I don’t want to use a single 480GB drive for all my stuff, so this test is to determine if there is any performance loss using partitions.
Specs: 3 identical drives, 160 GB, 7200 RPM, 8MB Cache, SATA-II 300 (also referred to as 3Gb/sec*)
Results: The difference to the previous test is so small, that I wouldn’t even consider it a factor: using partitions I still got a throughput of 338MB/s on my RAID-0.

Conlusion: If you want to get the most out ouf your drive performance without going to SCSI and spending tons of money on controllers and drives, get SATA-II 300s. I couldn’t find them in stored, but people are selling them on Ebay for cheaper than the standard IDE drives! Even if you’re not going for a performance upgrade you might want to consider them if your motherboard supports SATA-II 300. Total cost for my upgrade:
3 Hitachi drives on Ebay: $250
1 DFI LanParty nF4 SLI-DR: $190
Total Cost: $440
I definately think it was worth it, since I expect my new setup to last me between 3 and 5 years without needing an upgrade.

Please: let me know your SATA experiences. Are you satisfied, or are yours not performing up to par?

* Please note that the advertised 3Gb/sec (giga-bit) is not 3GB/sec (giga-byte). The actual transfer rate of 3Gb/s is 0.375GB/sec, or 375MB/sec.

Ever since I installed Linspire, I couldn’t figure out how to give standard users access to the other (windows) partitions on my computer. However, the admin user had access, but it’s a pain to always log in and out of that account just to copy over a few files, etc.

After some resarching and asking around on the Linspire forums, I was presented with the following answer:

1. Open /etc/fstab with Kate or a similar text editor.
2. Change the partition entries to include ‘umask=0′ in the options column (the 4th column that also has entries like ‘exec,suid,users’, etc.
3. Save the file and to a quick restart.

Now your entries should look something like:

/dev/hda1    /mnt/hda1        ntfs      noatime,user,exec,dev,suid,umask=0  0 0

I would like to thank pvdl-of-afu.com of the Linspire forum, and all the others that made an effort to try to solve this dilemna. Also, I’d like to wish pvdl-of-afu.com all the best with his upcoming book on Linspire: http://afu.com!