right, so headed in a different direction with this post, I have made several updates/changes to my home computing setup since last I posted about it, and have decided it is time to do something about that. Currently I am setup and using the following:
PC components
- Thermaltake V9 Black Edition ATX Computer Gaming Chassis with Dual Oversized 230mm Ultra-Silent Cooling Fans VJ400G1N2Z Mid Tower
- ECS BLACK SERIES A790GXM-AD3 AM3 AMD 790GX HDMI ATX AMD Motherboard
- AMD Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition Deneb 3.2GHz 4 x 512KB L2 Cache 6MB L3 Cache Socket AM3 125W Quad-Core Processor HDZ955FBGMBOX
- XFX Radeon HD 4890 1GB DDR5 PCI Express (PCIe) Dual DVI Video Card w/TV Out & HDCP Support
- OCZ Reaper Edition 8GB (2 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1333 (PC3 10666) Desktop Memory Model OCZ3RPR1333C9LV8GK
- ION 90+ Gold Series AXP-700W14FG 700W ATX 12V v2.2 / EPS 12V v2.91, v2.92 SLI 3 Way SLI Ready CrossFire Ready 80 PLUS GOLD Certified Modular Active PFC Power Supply
- Western Digital AV-GP WD2500AVVS 250GB 8MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5″
external RAID enclosure
- Rosewill RSV-S4-X 4 Bay SATA to eSATA (Port Multiplier) JBOD / RAID 0, 1, 1+0, 5 Enclosure
- Western Digital Caviar Green WD20EARS 2TB 64MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5″“
- SAMSUNG EcoGreen F2 HD154UI 1.5TB 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5″
- Western Digital Caviar Black WD5001AALS 500GB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5
- Western Digital Caviar Green WD5000AAVS 500GB 7200 RPM 8MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5″
now not all of the HDD models are exact, I tried to pick the ones that were right, but I know I have one WD that ends in AACS, although that might be my 500GB PATA in my external WD case… The Radeon 4890 had a cooling fan failure so I replaced it with a 29.4 cfm case cooling fan that I epoxied onto the outer hard plastic cover (would not have fit inside anyway…) I think that ought to keep it cool… 
ok, so all was purchased from Newegg.com except the video card, which I actually got on Craig’s list for $60 (he was asking $75 I believe) nice guy, also an HTC Evo owner and friended me on facebook, although that is the only time we have talked… Anyway, the Rosewill case and the 2TB HDD were holiday presents to myself in early Jan, the 1.5 TB I got last spring, the Radeon and 8GB RAM (upgraded from 4GB) I bought this past summer, most of the rest I got in may of 2009. Currently, the first list is what is in my case, the second list is all in the RAID enclosure (not running any for of RAID on the box, just using it so I do not have to keep the drives in the V9 for now). (getting used to these shortcuts on this cr-48 notebook, starting to enjoy using it more!)
Ok, so I am running Ubuntu 10.10 on the 250GB drive, with both mine and my wife’s home drives mounted from partitions on the RAID enclosure, my music folder is on the WD green 500GB drive, which is then bind mounted on to my wife’s music folder, so we share the same files (I’ve been working on setting up labels in Guayadeque (the music player I am using, more on that later) to separate out her music, so she doesn’t have to listen to mine on random play). The 500GB Black edition drive is my Windows 7 installation I Was using last year. Then ll my data is stored on the 2TB and 1.5TB drives, with the Virtual machines spread across the 1.5TB and the 2TB drives, I am looking into another 2TB drive to replace either the Win7 Drive or the other 500GB and to spread the VM’s a bit more as I am finding myself using at least 2 VMs that are on the same drive simultaneously. Although right now I am not having space issues, I am having CPU issues with frequent 100% 100% 100% 100% showing across all cores. The good news is AMD just dropped prices a little on their 6 core CPUs, hopefully that means they have a new family launching soon, I haven’t been keeping up with the news that much lately. If a new family is coming out this year (unless they are 8 core AMD CPU’s I’ll pick up a 6 core when the price goes down again (again my current MB supports 6 core phenoms, another selling point when I bought it), or I catch them on special on newegg. Right now the 1100 is $239, when it hits $199 I’ll snatch one up. That should give a nice boost to my VM’s, although at that point I might be running low on RAM and need to pick up another 8 or 16GB of DDR3 (thankfully my MB supports 32GB, although that was the deciding factor when I chose it).
Last on my upgrade list will be a 100GB BD burner so I can make an easily store-able backup of all my data (which by that time will be so outdated I could delete most of it…), by that time there should be 100GB Blue Ray discs, so it won’t take too many to do it. I’ll make two sets and mail one off to my parents on the other side of the country, any changes after that I could probably do an incremental on DVD’s…
Getting ready to setup my PC as a VMWare Server, got a new WD Caviar Black 500GB 32MB cache Internal drive so I can dump all my files on it to clean off a pair of 250GB drives to run the VM’s on. I learned a long time ago you want different HDD‘s for each VM if they are to be active, as the slowest part of a computer these days are the HDD’s and the last thing you want is more than one OS trying to run off the same HDD. Would be nice if I could talk myself into the cost of a few SSDs. Below are some links I am finding while I research that sound useful or interesting, not all are exactly pertaining to what I am trying to do, some may be helpful with things I am going to do after I get it setup, so I’ll be adding things to this post as I find them, to build up some information links for setting up my VMWare server.
- a forum post where someone describes exactly what they install as their host linux machine to run the VMWare server on, unfortunately this is for CentOS, which is okay, just not my preferred Linux distro. and unfortunately according to VMWare’s website, Ubuntu, CentOS, and RHEL are the only supported Linux Distro’s… I wonder while they do not support FreeBSD as well? oh well, we shall see how it goes.
- a great article on setting up Ubuntu JeOS, although JeOS is designed for being set up as a virtual machine, I want to see if it can be used as the host OS for VMWare Server also, and will be the first Host OS I will try when my new drive arrives. (that should be interesting, I’ll try and keep good notes)
- Using Kernel Mode Virtual Machine on any Linux Distro with kernel 2.6.20 or newer. Also not what I was looking for, but a great alternative, this is a guide book giving step by step instructions for setting it up and installing your guest OS, including command line inputs for setup.
- setting up an IPCop Virtual Machine to manage your internet traffic, of course now I need to go and figure out exactly what it does (I can guess, but like to know more details). Still not exactly what I started looking for, but these are the things I have been finding while looking and are still useful. Setting up IPCop like this is definitely something I would be interested in doing to simplify my network protection; although I have a Sheeva Plug computer that I purchased specifically to do this, and just never got around to setting it up. (Still have to get it flashed to a new version on it’s NAND rom so the SD cards can work, so I can put a decent sized storage card on their to do all I want to do with it.)
(must be a problem with IE8 that is preventing me from inserting the web links, I’ll update this post later from Google Chrome and if it doesn’t work, then I’ll try it from Fedora and see if it works then. Until then, I am sorry but I will not be posting referrence links to everything I type.)
(well everything works fine from Google Chrome under Windows 7, as you can see from the improvements to this post. Unless of course you are seeing it for the first time now… :)
Right, so lets see if I can close this back story up now (edit: okay, I broke it up into 2 posts, as it was getting pretty long!!). not that I am not enjoying recalling my endevors, but it might actually take me longer to recount all of it if I keep up the pace I have been following. So, onward.
I RMA’d one of my Seagate HDD’s, a 240gig, I was disappointed they did not offer me an “upgrade” option. When you RMA with Seagate they “may” give you the option of upgrading to a different model (in the same series) at a discounted rate; however this was not an option with my drive. Needless to say I was disappointed, as I would have loved to get a larger drive in exchange as I may just be upgrading it anyway. well after almost 3 months of begging and hunting for a box from someone to ship the drive out, I started getting bad sector reports from another drive (may have mentioned this in a previous post) so I decided I was going to buy a 640gig 7200 RPM SATA2 with a 32 meg cache drive and ship my RMA out in the box that the new drive would come in. Things happened, and I ended up doing something else with the money. So one day I was digging around for stuff in the bin I keep my pc parts and cables in.
time for another tangent… at least this one is related. I move a LOT, actually right now is the first time I have stayed in an apartment complex for more than 12 months, and on average I move every 6-9 months. Except for the few times I have lived in a house, this is actually the first time my street address has not changed at least once in a calendar year since the 18 months I spent at the same apt in college (that was a decade ago if you are curious). So anyways… I have found that moving in garbage and grocery bags is very non-productive. so one year (I have no idea how long ago, although I do at least know in what state!!) I was wandering around in a Target (I think, could have been Walmart, but I do not think so) and saw that Christmas colored 14-18 gallon plastic bins were on sale ½ price (this would be either January or February) so I bought 23 +/- 3 or 4 plastic bins, and have been moving in them ever since, several of them got left in my parents place in Las Vegas, but other than those (and the ones I returned after moving that year (late 90′s)), I still have some of those that I am using today. Since then I have picked up some lovely Halloween colored bins as well, and a couple blue ones when I had to move in the middle of the summer a couple of times these last 4 or 5 years.
So, my pc parts are in a Halloween bin, onwards… I was digging through my PC parts bin and came across the box for the 500gig Maxtor (Maxtor is now Seagate) Western Digital Caviar green HDD I bought in Best Buy 2 or 3 years ago, it had a plastic clam shell instead of the foam padding, but it was “original packaging” so I figured it should count… got it packaged up and shipped out (this was late October, early November. yes I sent the RMA in during late June, early July, and YES, I had to submit a new one). my replacement drive came back nice and quick and is working well.
(edit: right forgot to mention this post was generated using Firefox on a Fedora 12 Virtual machine)
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