The Treehouse Blog

Monday, Doug and I hiked up to Lewis Rocks, or what Ian calls South Mountain Falls… both names are equally applicable. The lighting was awesome, and we got some great wallpaper photos. Wow, my camera is pitiful in quality compared with Doug’s ;).

Tuesday, the last piece (motherboard) arrived for my Oak upgrade. I proceeded without much problem (except for nearly destroying the processor via misapplied heatsink… my thanks to the A7V8X motherboard for shutting the machine off when it detects the processor is about to melt…). Oak is much faster processing-wise, and transfer speeds have improved, but are not quite at the media-limiting point.

Isaac and Ange organized a Capture the Flag event, which I was able to attend. I think they had 16 people at peak, divided over two teams. We got three games in between around 11:00 and 1:30. Due to the moon, only the last game was *really* dark. And this morning, the family went to the Silver Springs Flea Market. I didn’t get anything except for my usual breakfast sausage… most of my past purchases had been junk for treehouse assimilation, and that pretty much came to an end when I started working.

Well, I spent (wasted?) most of the evening working on my Thinkpad R40 review, which, no, isn’t yet done.

That having been said, Ship got new toys to plug into toys, including a huge Brocade SilkWorm 12000 switch. All I have to say is… I hope it supports SNMP.

In preparation of Doug‘s upcoming LAN party I’ve had to order some parts for computer upgrades. I’m currently running a GeForce 2 MX 400 (64 MB) which is a few generations behind the times, and it started showing its discontent for UT2k3 at last year’s LAN party. Since there is a UT2k4 out this year, I’m clearly doomed. So, I ordered a GeForce 4 TI 4200 (128 MB), a step back from Ian‘s 4600, but should still prove acceptable. Also… realizing that UT2k4 needs something like 5 GB of drive space, I had to do something about the 30 GB drive in Pine. I considered augmenting it with the 10 GB in my FreeBSD/Solaris x86 test box, but that seemed pretty horrible. Trying to run the game off of the network looked equally grim. So… back to pricewatch it was, and a new 80GB SATA drive should be headed my way. Pine should be happy.

Of course, Pine isn’t the only thing complaining. Oak is a bit underpowered when it comes to things like, say, transferring files at 200Mbits/sec, or compiling NetMRG. So, much to Pine’s chagrin, parts were ordered to make Oak almost as powerful. I am pretty ticked that I had to pay more for RAM than last year… and it’s even not as good of RAM. So, 7 independent orders later (worst case of order fragmentation I’ve ever had) things should be fine…

Well, sorry to bore you with that, but I spent far too much time on this today to not devote an entire blog to it 😉

The gigE card arrived today. The kernel shipping with FC2 has broken drivers for it, but the updates take care of it. I was able to push about 15 MB/s out it to my switch (same file to two machines) which pegged the CPU on Oak. Upgrade in the works, but not sure to what.

I’ve pretty much given up on S3 ACPI suspend on my Thinkpad R40, despite getting a kernel compiled that mostly works after resume, this suspend mode seems to use way too much battery. I’ve got the swsusp stuff working tho, slow but effective.

Done with DS9, too.

So, instead of watching DS9 or making my laptop more usable, I spent last evening trying to do APRS in Linux. Linux has drivers for using your soundcard for doing AFSK1200, but they are hardware-dependent, requiring a plain SoundBlaster or Windows Sound System-compatible card. Since I don’t believe I have any of these anywhere at the moment, let alone in a usable or mobile form, I started looking for alternatives. Soundmodem is a user-mode sound card interface for Linux that can do various encodings and interfaces with the Linux AX.25 stack, or can behave as a TNC sitting on a pty. It seems to work really well (and has awesome configuration tools) but it also consumes 25% CPU on my 1.5GHz Pentium-M… which is way too much, I think. Multimon, which is written by the same guy, uses almost no CPU, but can’t do transmission or interfacing with other things, just provides text output of what it decodes. The oscope feature it has crashes my box badly if you try to close it… no clue why, but I’m teaching myself to always disable that option.

Doug and I were talking on Thursday about the slowness of the Linux boot process, and it seems some guy at IBM has already discribed the parallel service starting that we were theorizing. I’ll have to ask Ian if Gentoo has implemented anything like this yet.

I won a Netgear GA620 (1000BaseSX) card on eBay last night for <$10. If works out OK, I might need to get one or two more. It seems appropriate that I’ll have gigabit in my house before CTI does at Trindle Commons… Fiber cable looks pretty cheap on eBay too, but there’s more singlemode than multimode it seems.

…And Ship’s 24TB 1.2M$ SAN has been moved from the basement of a dining hall to the computer center. Monday we’re moving all of KLN’s Sun boxes in preparation of its installation.