WeaponsGradeCode » Computers

I Thought My CPU Fan Was Working Hard…

Brian — Tue, 12 Jul 2011 04:31:26 +0000

Clogged CPU Heat Sink

Got My Replacement Asus P8P67 Pro Motherboard from Newegg

Brian — Wed, 16 Mar 2011 17:41:19 +0000

Old and New Asus P8P67 Pro Motherboard Boxes

Fedex’d overnight with a free UPS return label. I got it installed and running within an hour. Here’s the new and old boxes. Note the new sections highlighted in red indicating the new revision. It shipped with the 1305 BIOS so I didn’t have to upgrade it.

Recording MMS Streams with Mplayer

Brian — Sat, 05 Mar 2011 03:29:18 +0000

Sometimes open source really comes through. Here’s how to record MMS streams with mplayer:

mplayer -dumpstream -dumpfile stream.wmv mms://

My New Intel Sandy Bridge 2600k Computer

Brian — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 03:38:39 +0000

Intel Sandy Bridge 2600k Computer

My MacBook Pro serves me well but I really wanted something with a little more horsepower, and the laptop’s always hooked up to 100 things so its not so easy to pick it up and move around. I’ve been looking at prices and options for a while and nothing’s struck my fancy until I saw the Intel Sandy Bridge 2600k processor. Easily overclocked and a good system only ran about $1000 with a hot new hard drive and reasonable graphics.
This is the system I bought and a picture:

Intel Core i7-2600K Sandy Bridge 3.4GHz (3.8GHz Turbo Boost) LGA 1155 95W Quad-Core Desktop Processor
ASUS P8P67 PRO LGA 1155 Intel P67 SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX Intel Motherboard
G.SKILL Ripjaws Series 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600
MSI N460GTX CYCLONE 1GD5/OC GeForce GTX 460 (Fermi) 1GB 256-bit GDDR5
Seagate Barracuda XT ST32000641AS 2TB 7200 RPM SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5″ Internal Hard Drive

Intel Sandy Bridge 2600k and Cooler Master Hyper 212 Plus

Brian — Wed, 16 Feb 2011 22:32:24 +0000

Per a previous post I built a new computer using the Intel Sandy Bridge 2600k processor. When I purchased the system it wasn’t clear if that trick tower CPU cooler would be included so I simply ordered the retail 2600k package and hoped for the best. A traditional flat cooler came with the unit. Here are the temperatures at idle and full load with the stock heat sink and without overclocking:

Intel Sandy Bridge 2600k and Stock Heatsink at Idle

Intel Sandy Bridge 2600k and Stock Heatsink at Full Load

This processor is supposed to overclock trivially so I thought I’d give it a try. Punching the processor up to 4.1GHz and running it flat out on the stock cooler brought temperatures up to 90 degrees. I wasn’t comfortable with that and bought the Cooler Master Hyper 212 Plus based on price and its reviews. Here are pictures of the unit:

Cooler Master Hyper 212 Plus Box

Cooler Master Hyper 212 Plus Opened

Cooler Master Hyper 212 Plus Back

Cooler Master Hyper 212 Plus Side

Cooler Master Hyper 212 Plus Parts

Installation was a bit tricky but not too bad. You’ll need full access to the back of the Motherboard to install it.

Performance after installation was great. Here are the results:

Intel Sandy Bridge 2600k and Cooler Master Hyper 212 Plus Full No Overclock

Intel Sandy Bridge 2600k and Cooler Master Hyper 212 Plus Full Overclocked

The stock, retail cooling system really sucks. It works within the published specs but do not overclock the 2600k using it. Here’s the abysmal thermal transfer paste pattern after removing the heatsink. What a disaster.

Intel Sandy Bridge 2600k Stock Thermal Paste Pattern

Intel Sandy Bridge 2600k Stock Thermal Paste Pattern Heat Sink

The best part is the cooler fits nicely in my ThermalTake V3 case.

Growing A Huge XFS Volume

Brian — Fri, 19 Nov 2010 06:15:29 +0000

K, I’ve got 4 2GB drives mirrored and welded together with LVM. I backed up everything on the old volume (twice in some cases).

I deleted the old 6.5 TB Volume. That takes balls.

I created a new 1.5TB mirror with two drives and grew the new Volume with the command:

mdadm –create /dev/md3 –level=1 –raid-devices=2 /dev/sd[bc]2
pvcreate /dev/md3
vgextend RaidDataGroup /dev/md3
lvextend -l +5126 /dev/RaidDataGroup/RaidData
xfs_growfs /Volumes/data

I’m now restoring the data.

Building a New Massive MythTV Media Volume with RAID 1 and LVM.

Brian — Tue, 16 Nov 2010 06:46:43 +0000

So I’ve got four new 2TB drives mirrored together in pairs with mdadm, then welded together with LVM. Here are the commands I used to execute the build.

fdisk /dev/sdf

# note the mdadm arguments below are prefixed with double dashes.

mdadm –create /dev/md1 –level=1 –raid-devices=2 /dev/sd[fh]1
mdadm –create /dev/md2 –level=1 –raid-devices=2 /dev/sd[gi]1
pvcreate /dev/md1
pvcreate /dev/md2
vgcreate -s 256M RaidDataGroup /dev/md1 /dev/md2
lvcreate -l 14904 –name RaidData RaidDataGroup
mkfs.xfs -i size=1024 /dev/RaidDataGroup/RaidData
mkdir /Volumes/newdata
mount /dev/RaidDataGroup/RaidData /Volumes/newdata

Access a MSSQL Database with Perl Quickie

Brian — Mon, 15 Nov 2010 18:33:06 +0000

use strict; use FindBin; use lib("e:\\re\\scripts\\lib"); use vars qw($opt_h); use Getopt::Std; use Util; use Logger; use DBI; use LWP::Simple;


if (main()) {

	exit(0); # DOS Success Code

} else {

	exit(1); # DOS Failure

}
sub main() {
	if (! get_options()) {

		log_error("Error getting options.");

		return 0;

	}
	if ($opt_h) {

		usage();

		return 1;

	}
	my $dest_dsn_name = "pms";

	my $dest_db = DBI->connect("dbi:ODBC:$dest_dsn_name", {'RaiseError' => 1, 'AutoCommit' => 0} );

	# my $dest_db = DBI->connect("dbi:ODBC:$dest_dsn_name", $dest_user, $dest_password, {'RaiseError' => 1, 'AutoCommit' => 0} );

	if ( ! $dest_db) {

		log_error("Failed connecting to: " . $dest_db);

		return 0;

	}
	my $sql = "";

	my @result_array = $dest_db->selectrow_array($sql);

	my $url = $result_array[1] . $result_array[0];
	close (IN);
	$dest_db->disconnect();
	return 1;

}
sub get_options() {

	if ( ! getopts('h') ) {

		log_error("Failed getting options.");

		usage();

		return 0;

	}
	return 1;

}

sub usage() { print "Usage.\n"; return 1; }

Antec 650 MythTV Home Server

Brian — Mon, 08 Nov 2010 02:45:40 +0000

Here’s the stats of the server and some gratuitous pictures:

Intel Core 2 Duo E8500 Wolfdale 3.16GHz LGA 775 65W Dual-Core Processor BX80570E8500
Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 ST31500341AS 1.5TB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5″ Internal Hard Drive
ASUS P5Q-E LGA 775 Intel P45 ATX Intel Motherboard
G.SKILL 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 1066 (PC2 8500) Dual Channel Kit Desktop Memory Model F2-8500CL5D-4GBPK
ASUS EN6200LE/TC256/TD/64 GeForce 6200LE 256MB(64MB on Board) 32-bit DDR PCI Express x16 Video Card
COOLER MASTER Real Power Pro RS-750-ACAA-A1 750W ATX12V / EPS12V SLI Certified CrossFire Ready 80 PLUS Certified Active

Antec Titan 650 Drive View, with Cooler Master Module

Antec Titan 650 Inside

Upgrading the Antec Titan 650 Server With Rosewill 4 Channel PCIe to SATA II and 5.25 Drive Bay

Brian — Mon, 08 Nov 2010 02:04:20 +0000

When I built this system two years ago I decided to span a volume across multiple large hard drives with LVM to get the storage capacity I wanted. I would also keep backups of everything I had so if even one drive went bad and lost everything, I could restore from backups.

That decision’s been haunting me ever since. Sure I’ve got backups, but it’d take a while to get everything back the way it was…

So I’ve decided to rebuild the storage system using a collection of RAID 1 (mirrored) drives LVM’d together into a single volume. This should be better than RAID 5 in that the chances of a second read error on multiple massive 2GB drives when rebuilding is too great. With RAID 1, the chances of a successful recovery of a drive failure go up, of course, at the cost of more drives. I’ll continue to maintain backups though…

Oh yeah, what’s really driving this is one of my drives is indeed failing and I don’t have a good way of recovering.

So, the Antec 650 has six cooled, hard drive bays. I need a bunch more to maintain the current five drives, and add a bunch of new ones while I rebuild the storage system. So I started with the Cooler Master 4-in-3 Device Module STB-3T4-E3-GP. For $20 from Newegg it’s perfect. It uses three 5.25″ bays in the Antec Titan 650 and provides four 3.5″ cooled hard drive bays. Perfect.

Cooler Master Device Module Hard Drive Chassis Box

Cooler Master Device Module Hard Drive Chassis Packaging

Cooler Master Device Module Hard Drive Chassis Right Side

Cooler Master Device Module Hard Drive Chassis Parts

Cooler Master Device Module Hard Drive Chassis Fan

Cooler Master Device Module Hard Drive Chassis Front

Cooler Master Device Module Hard Drive Chassis With Drives

My motherboard only supported six SATA drives so I had to cheaply add four more SATA Ports. The Rosewill 4 Channel PCIe to SATA II Controller. I think it does some kind of RAID, but I’m just using it for the ports and let md and LVM in Linux to the Raid.

Rosewill 4 Channel PCIe to SATA II Box

Rosewill 4 Channel PCIe to SATA II Packing

Rosewill 4 Channel PCIe to SATA II Card

Everything went in perfectly.

Empty 5.25 Drive Bays in Antec Titan 650

Cooler Master Device Module Hard Drive Chassis Installed In Antec 650

The first two Seagate Barracuda LP ST32000542AS 2TB 5900 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5″ drives have been in the system for a week running badblocks. Two Western Digital Caviar Green WD20EARS 2TB SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5″ Internal Hard drives will be here next week. I’ll run bad blocks on them, then start rebuilding the storage system. The first configuration will be these four 2GB drives in RAID 0 for 4GB of storage and as I migrate data off the old drives I’ll add another four 1.5 GB drives in the same configuration.