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News
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| 19/10/2004 13:30:13 | Web Server Instability | This web server currently stops responding every few hours, possibly when more than seven simultaneous requests are made to it. I have reported it as apache bug 31764. Please bear with me while this problem is resolved. | | 18/10/2004 21:00:00 | File Server is Definitely Stable | This is probably tempting fate, but the File Server has not crashed in over a month - ten days of which were with the new DVD writer installed. I burned ten backup DVDs today without any problems, which confirms the problem was related to the old DVD writer. | | 16/10/2004 03:51:09 | New Gallery and Journal of Ambleside Walking Holiday | My new photograph and movie gallery is available at http://gallery.theunissen.cc. The family section is password protected - access granted on request.
I used it's automatic resizing capability to help journal my recent walking holiday in Ambleside, which is available in its new location with photographs at http://theunissen.cc/christopher/holidays/2004/09_30_ambleside_lake_district.
The following pages have been changed to use the automatic resizing capability of the gallery, which will significantly improve the rate at which new photographs appear on this site:
While I was at it, I added the missing journal of Holidays > 2002 > 7 - 13 September: Frejus, France
Yes, it is 03:51 on a Saturday morning (I got carried away again), so please let me know if you spot any mistakes. | | 08/10/2004 16:00:00 | Replacement DVD Writer Finally Arrives | A replacement DVD writer has finally arrived and it was worth the wait, as it is their latest 12 speed dual layer LG GSA-4120B. I am happy with the result, but LG customer service leaves a lot to be desired, as it took a month of unreturned phonecalls. Here's hoping the File Server remains stable after installation. I will remove the CD Writer, which only leaves an 80GB and 40GB hard drive to co-exist with the DVD-writer. | | 20/09/2004 18:00:00 | New Web Server | This website has moved to new hardware and uses Apache to provide virtual hosting, so http://theunissen.cc and http://www.wildstyleware.com are separate sites rather than using frame based redirection. I will refer to it as Web Server and the original one as File Server from now on. | | 11/09/2004 12:15:00 | Server Definitely Stable Without DVD Writer | This server hasn't crashed since the DVD writer was removed, so it is looking ever more likely that it was the problem. I even added a 40GB hard disk and CD Writer without any problems. | | 06/09/2004 15:00:00 | DVD Writer Stopped Working | My LG GSA4082B DVD-writer stopped working half way through burning a DVD and then wouldn't even read CD-ROMs, so it has been returned for a replacement. The server seems more stable with it removed, but it is probably just a co-incidence. | | 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. | | 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:
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:
- Watch this space to see what happens when they arrive next Wednesday, 1 September 2004.
| | 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. | Page: All << 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 >>
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Currently Reading
"Eats, Shoots and Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation", Lynne Truss
"Change the World for a Fiver: We Are What We Do", Tim Ashton, et al.
"Web Usability for Dummies", Richard Mander PhD and Bud Smith
"MCSD: Analyzing Requirements and Defining Solution Architectures Study Guide", Ben Ezzell "Search the Scriptures", Alan M. Stibbs "Seven Habits of Highly Effective People", Stephen R Covey "Complete Time Management System, The", Christian H. Godefroy, John Clark
See more...
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