News

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Date	Title	News
18/06/2004 15:30:00	Passed Designing and Implementing Desktop Applications with Microsoft Visual C++ 6	I passed the "70-016: Designing and Implementing Desktop Applications with Microsoft Visual C++® 6" exam today! You can view a transcript by visiting my "cv > mcp" section.
28/06/2004 17:11:47	Passed "70-015: Designing and Implementing Distributed Applications with Microsoft Visual C++ 6"	I passed the "70-015: Designing and Implementing Distributed Applications with Microsoft Visual C++® 6" exam today! You can view a transcript by visiting my "cv > mcp" section.
30/06/2004 13:20:51	Passed "70-100: Analyzing and Defining Solution Architectures"	I passed the "70-100: Analyzing Requirements and Defining Solution Architectures" exam today! You can view a transcript by visiting my "cv > mcp" section.
19/08/2004 22:33:36	Server Overheated	This server locked up last night, froze on startup and then refused to start up at all until it was left for a while. I had installed a second hard disk recently, which was running quite hot, so I moved it to a slot away from the first and turned both hard disks upside down. This seemed to work, but it froze again when running an anti-virus scan this morning. I had a closer look and discovered an awful lot of dust, especially on fins of the Zalman Flowercooler heatsink and fan. I vacuumed the whole thing out, powered up and started the anti-virus scan again. Everything is now working and the CPU is running seven degrees cooler than before. It looks like the CPU gives up at 50 degrees Celcius, so I have configured Motherboard Monitor to set off an audible alarm and email me whenever the temperature reaches 48 degrees. I also need to remember to vaccuum it out every six months, as it has been that long since I last did it.
20/08/2004 03:12:40	Server Locked Up Again	I have just finished getting the server up and running again after it locked up for the fourth time at 23:45 (when I was just about to go to bed early for once). I have enabled S.M.A.R.T. on the hard drives and installed S.M.A.R.T. Monitoring Tools to see whether it is the hard disk overheating this time. The Maxtor and Seagate Barracuda's maximum operating temperatures are 55 and 60 degrees respectively so we shall see what temperatures are reported in the system log.
20/08/2004 05:25:59	Finally (Hopefully) Sorted	The server continued to lock up until I removed the DVD-ROM drive, which was slave to a DVD-Writer. I have been suspicious of the drive ever since I acquired it, as it used to lock up another PC when set to use bus mastering. It seemed to work fine with bus mastering on this server, but since I installed the DVD writer four months ago, there have been a few bluescreens when accessing it. I don't think a device likes being on the same IDE channel as a bus master (Ultra-DMA) compatible drive when it doesn't support it properly itself. I never had much use for the DVD-ROM drive after installing the DVD-Writer anyway, especially considering it can't read DVD+R/RW. Ho hum. Now I really should try get some sleep.
20/08/2004 22:45:32	Server Still Locks Up	This server is still locking up, but this time even with the second hard disk removed. This means the problem is software, hard disk or other hardware. The standard Windows disk check doesn't find anything, so I think a comprehensive hardware check is necessary.
26/08/2004 20:12:03	Yahoo Slowed My Connection to a Crawl	D'oh! Yahoo decided to download all my photographs while crawling my web site today, which slowed my internet connection to a crawl. I have changed the robot information so they shouldn't follow any of the links on the gallery page in future.
26/08/2004 22:52:50	Heat	What a waste of time the last week has felt with most of my time spent trying to sort out the server, which overheated on Wednesday 19 August 2004. I installed a second hard disk two weeks ago and the system overheated three days later due to excessive dust which I duly vacuumed out thereby reducing the temperature by seven degrees! I then had to contend with intermittent lockups, which mainly occurred when doing a backup between hard disks. I tried the following: I wondered if the hard disks were overheating, so enabled S.M.A.R.T. support, which allows a monitoring program like the OpenSource S.M.A.R.T. Monitoring Tools to display information about the drive like its current temperature. The Maxtor and Seagate Barracuda are operating 10% below their maximum operating temperatures of 55 and 60 degrees respectively, so this is not a problem. I ran diagnostics on the whole system, including a non-destructive read test and everything passed. The symptoms led me to believe it had something to do with a known VIA 686B Southbridge chipset problem where buffers would overflow and data would be lost due to the CPU only getting access to the PCI bus after three busmaster cycles when the BIOS setting, "PCI Delay Transaction", was enabled. This was further supported by the fact the problem seemed to go away when I had the second hard disk as a master on the secondary IDE channel rather than the slave of the primary. The following documents: VIA Issues with IDE and SoundBlaster Live Original Report Update More Testing Update George E Breese "PCI Latency" patch for VIA Chipsets This is all very well, but the changes are temporary and only apply in Windows. Details George Breese's Software Crash Test: Problems with VIA's KT133/KT133A chipset 1/2 and Crash Test: Problems with VIA's KT133/KT133A chipset 2/2 Aargh! It mentions changing the IDE controller registers, which sounds mad to me, so I won't try this. VIA should supply a patch to solve this problem, which indeed it did. Other: VIA Arena IDE Set Up viahardware.com > 686bfaq viahardware.com > Agp4xfix amdzone.com led me to try the following: Update BIOS - I upgraded the BIOS for my motherboard (Jetway 663ASPRO) ages ago and it hasn't changed since, so this is not an option. Disable "PCI Delay Transaction" - This seemed to make things worse, as the event log started displaying corruption errors, so I re-enabled it. Apply version 4.32 or greater of the VIA 4in1 drivers - I installed 4.49 ages ago, so this should not have mattered, but I tried the latest version (4.51, which is actually 4.49v) anyway, as the revision history mentioned a few IDE related fixes. It didn't make any difference. Use Ultra ATA cables and set all the drives to Cable Select - This made no difference as far as lockups were concerned, but it did stop the bluescreens that I had been experiencing with the DVD writer ever since I bought it, so it looks like even UDMA 33 drives benefit from interference reducing Ultra ATA cables. all to no avail!!! The problem seemed to go away for a day until a certain email was opened, which led me to believe that the hard disk must be corrupted, so I did a disk check, defrag, Ghost image and restore. The restore took 9 hours, as I had to reduce the size of the extended partition so I could increase the size of the primary partion so that Ghost 2003 could restore the partition. Ghost insisted that the partition was too big to fit into the space it had originally occupied. It doesn't take into account the fact that NTFS compression was used on a few directories, so it is looking at the uncompressed space, which is larger than the physical space. Hooray, this seemed to sort out the problem for a day. I performed another diagnostics test on all components, which passed. The lockups then even happened without any drives in the system and when I entered the IDE section of the BIOS, it only displayed half a page, which meant that something was seriously wrong with the system and it was time to condemn it. No, the only other candidate for the server is a PIII 600 which has noisy fans and no way to fit the Zalman Flowercooler to quieten it, so I am left with the choice of either buying a new system, which I can't afford at the moment, or trying one last time to sort out the current one. All of a sudden, everything seems to be fine. The system has been running fine for three days now, which leads me to believe that the Southbridge is overheating and taking a while to recover. I have ordered the following to prevent this in future: One round floppy cable. Two round Ultra ATA IDE cables. AcoustiFan Temperature Sensitive 80mm Case Fan from QuietPC Watch this space to see what happens when they arrive next Wednesday, 1 September 2004.
30/08/2004 11:26:50	Give up on the Server	I think it is time I gave up trying to get the server to work with a second hard disk, as the fan and change of power supply from 100W to 250W made absolutely no difference. I will therefore leave it as 80GB only and maybe someday upgrade to RAID, but as part of a motherboard upgrade. I will just have to do backups across the network for now.

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