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| 11/23 |
| 2003/12/15-16 [Computer/HW, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:11459 Activity:low |
12/15 U.K. Sodans can get a free PC that comes with Adware until the
sponsoring company goes bankrupt. In other news, 1999 called. They
want their business plan back. http://tinyurl.com/zc3a
\_ sounds like you're stealing your wit from fark. |
| 2003/12/12-13 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:11444 Activity:kinda low |
12/12 I have an external hard drive (in a case with a fan). If I want to
maximize the lifetime of the drive, should I leave it on 24/7 or turn
it off at the end of the day (~50% duty cycle)? It's in a low
vibration enviornment.
\_ All right, fine fine. Here's something which came off google:
http://themeyers.org/HomeRoast/Topic7316.htm
\_ Thanks. It's a bit roundabout, but the concensus seems to be
that leaving it on is good except for the fan, which isn't
that necessary in this situation.
\_ umm, you're going to take computer advice from a mailing
list for coffee roasters?
\_ Turn it off.
Scenario: Your hard drive fails after 3 years. Are you going
to kick yourself for having left it on 24/7, or for turning
it off at the end of the day each day?
\_ That's not helpful. Do I kick myself for wearing out the motor
faster, or for inducing thermal stresses turning it on and off? |
| 2003/12/12-13 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:11430 Activity:kinda low |
2/12 Experiences with inexpensive disk arrays of ~1-2TB? RAID would
be good, cheap < $7k or so. NFS speed is "nice". Thanks! -PeterM
\_ Haven't used them yet, but the Promise UltraTrak's look promising.
\_ I like used NetApps. Check some of these out:
link:tinyurl.com/yyvl (stores.ebay.com)
http://www.stores.ebay.com/berkeleycommunicationscorporation/plistings/list/all/dept1/index.html
This does not include a license though. -ausman
\_ Build a box with four-eight 250GB ATA drives!
\_ i've heard nice things about the storcase line.. there is a
4U rackmount that takes up to 12 ATA/SATA drives and seems
This does not include a license though. -ausman
\_ Build a box with four-eight 250GB ATA drives!
to sell for ~$4k sans disk. |
| 2003/12/9-11 [Computer/SW/OS/FreeBSD, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:11387 Activity:nil |
12/9 Can someone recommend a way to read the contents of a FreeBSD
partition with UFS filesystems from a Windows box? It's a laptop
disk which won't boot properly by itself, FreeBSD doesn't like the
USB case I've put it in very much, and I don't have a Mac handy. -John
\_ You need an NT (I'm assumming you are running NT version of Windows)
filesystem driver for UFS. Once that is installed you should be able
to read it. You need to basically buy this from someone. If
it was an ext2 partition I have a driver for it, but alas UFS
isn't amongst the list of highly utilized fs --williamc
\_ I hope that last bit is sarcasm.
\_ williamc seems to think John is a n00b
\_ Probably not what you're looking for, but perhaps you can burn
and run knoppix from the CD? |
| 2003/12/7 [Finance/Investment, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:11343 Activity:nil 50%like:29695 |
12/6 Can a modern hard disk operate reliably in a garage with the temperature
change that happens when you open the garage door? Like 50 -> 30 deg F.
\_ shouldn't be a problem, i presumed. The internal temperature of
harddrive shouldn't change that drastically. |
| 2003/11/29-12/1 [Computer/SW/OS/Linux, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:11265 Activity:nil |
11/29 What linux command shows the current RW or RO status of a partition.
on my debian server, mount shows these same partitions as the same:
/dev/hda2 on /home type ext3 (rw,errors=remount-ro)
/dev/hda3 on /sto type ext3 (rw,errors=remount-ro)
but /dev/hda3 has some disk error and is now read only. thanks. |
| 2003/11/23 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:29663 Activity:nil |
11/22 Anyone know of a USB 2.0 hard drive enclusure that supports drives over
137GB (48-but addressing limit)? --dgies |
| 2003/11/23-24 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:11199 Activity:nil |
1/23 Any recommendations for a Linux tool to merge two disk partitions into
one. Does the partition that will get deleted would need to me
empty? I don't want to loose the data that's on it. Thanks.
\_ Get PartitionMagic ($70 or steal), I believe it works on merging
Linux partitions. Get a PC running Windows, install it, then attach
the HD to a free IDE (or SCSI) port and repartition. Non-optimal
solution, but hey, you don't partition on a daily basis.
\_ PM has a boot disk version. You don't need to move the HD.
\_ partition-mergeTwoToOne is a good tool.
\_ You probably don't want to "lose" the data, either.
\_ hey you're so funny!
\_ I'm on a roll, baby!
\_ any experience with parted for resizing ext/fat partitions? |
| 2003/11/7 [Computer/SW/OS/Windows, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:10977 Activity:moderate |
11/7 I have an XP installation that reboots itself before it finishes
booting up, and I'd like to do a fresh install but it was cd-key'd
by my old school and I don't know the key. Is there a way to get
the CD-key from the repair console or from a rescue disk?
\_ that is why I hate XP. This may sounds unproductive, but I would
just reinstall Windows 2000 instead. Same kernel, same File System
thus, same OS. Personally, I can live without those eye candies
\_ Yea, some military doctors says her some of her
wounds are unlikely to be caused by the Humvee crash.
She herself remembers nothing except that she was
treated well througout her captivity.
and product activation "features."
\_ Yes, there is. Look for "XPKey". It took me about 10 minutes to
find both a working key extractor and a new key generator. The
key generator took about 2 hours to create a valid key on my
ancient PIII. The key extractor takes zero time to find and display
your current key. No, I won't give you my name or put copies in
/tmp or anything like that. google.
\_ is this why MS wants to buy google?
\_ How about an URL from google?
\_ I'll sell you a full install CD (from Dell) for $60 obo, including
the certificate of authenticity.
\_ A little effort and you can find a copy of XP Corporate (same as
Professional, except without activation). That + XPKey will get you
working without activation. If you have a legal license of XP Pro,
it is (IMO) an ethical solution.
\_ Saving files off USENET isn't any effort. |
| 2003/11/4-5 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:10923 Activity:nil |
11/3 A good place to find various SCSI cables (specifically a 50-pin to
50-pin internal with termination block) in the Bay Area? Thx!
\_ http://www.l-com.com Stores are for people who don't value their
time.
\_ Just about any computer store? Frys? Compusa? |
| 2003/10/28 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:10816 Activity:nil |
10/27 If I'm getting a new EIDE hard disk for my 4 year old computer, do I
have to worry about hardware incompatibilities? My old computer
has an EIDE drive in it, but I'm not sure what the deal is with
terms like Ultra ATA/133 and so on. Thanks.
\_ No. It'll work as expected. You may not get the super peak
performace the drive is capable of but you won't notice since
the rest of your computer is just as slow. I stuck a modern 120gb
drive into a first generation HP celeron box yesterday. The shitty
bios didn't know what to make of it but it worked when I put my
own c/h/s numbers in.
\_ uh, there might also be an addressing problem. the old computer
may only be able to address ~137 GB of a disk.
\_ which is true of many newer computers |
| 2003/10/24 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:10773 Activity:nil |
10/24 I was on a singapore airlines plane recently and they had Video On
Demand on every seat. All recent movies that you can pause/reverse
etc. That tells me that the movies are all in digital form in a
file server on the plane. Anybody know more about the format of the
files of these things? Is it a bit-by-bit replica of whatever info
is on a DVD? Thanks.
\_ Several different technologies and patents; see US Patent Nos:
4,688,106; 5,574,662; 5,590,381; 5,671,386; and too many more.
The list is probably even longer now - it has been a while since
that patent search was run.
\_ learn to use motdedit
\_ yeah damnit
\_ google |
| 2003/10/24-25 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:10767 Activity:nil |
10/24 I bought an external USB case for a hard drive, and it came with a
fan attached to the power supply which constantly runs. If I just
have my hard drive in there can't I safely turn the (annoyingly loud)
fan off? thanks
\_ Just get a 2.5" enclosure and spend a bit more for a laptop drive.
Not only is it more transportable, you won't have to worry about a
fan.
\_ Drives can run hot which means you're shortening the life span of
the device. The same is true for all computer stuff. You can run
a 3.2 ghz P4 without a fan, too. It just won't run for more than
a few seconds before it shuts itself off or burns out.
\_ I thought P3s shut themselves down, but P4s and later throttle
its speed down until temperatures falls?
\_ If it was runing 100mhz would you consider that running?
\_ If it's a low-speed drive (5400rpm), then you might safely get
away with it. Anything higher, and what the above poster said is
true. Inside a regular computer case, all your parts depend on the
cooling the multiple fans provide.
\_ Detach fan. Close case. Do continuous read/writes on your hard
disk (defrag? large file copy?). Open case. If drive is too hot
to touch, put fan back on. While it's true that a 3.2 GHz P4 will
stop in a few seconds w/o fan, heat dissipation has varied widely
for 5400, 7200, and 10K drives of different makes and models.
\_ Risky. It's going to take some time for it to really heat up.
It'd be shame if it OP tested cold and then it died over night. |
| 2003/10/22-23 [Computer/SW/Virus, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:10739 Activity:nil |
10/22 My sister's computer has been making weird "clicky" sounds at startup,
and she's also having probs starting applications (win98). She's on
a dialup modem and uses those free AOL discs. The weirdest thing is
that when she checks her email (hotmail) the username "ihatedeva"
keeps popping up in the username field of the form. This is not her
email nor any of her roommates or anyone she knows. Has anyone else
seen/heard about this? Google shows one livejournal user called
ihatedeva, but nothing about viruses.
\_ clicky sounds: Your hard drive is due for imminent failure. Get
a new one. Reformat, re-install WinXP or Win2K.
ihatedeva: Someone clicked "Yes" in Internet Explorer when asked
whether they want to install a random ActiveX control. You have
adware! Install SpyBot and Norton AntiVirus.
\_ is ihatedeva specific to a certain adware program?
\_ I don't know; it's purely a guess that it's related to
adware. Also, there are settings in IE for auto-complete
and cookies that you can clean.
\_ ihatedeva = Roomate's friend who used your computer?
\_ ihatedeva = her password she accidentally typed into the wrong
field, now IE remembers it.
\_ Lesson: IE and yahoo and aol suck. I agree with the above, the HD
is going soon. Unless... is there a floppy in there? A bad cd? |
| 2003/10/15-16 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:10638 Activity:nil |
10/15 I am looking for an mp3 player for my brother as a gift. What
features should I look for in a low-end (<$100) player? I haven't
yet decided whether to get the small memory type or the larger
ones that fits a CD yet. Any brands I should get/avoid? TIA.
- brendal
\_ I got a Panasonic mp3/cd player for $50 that I like. Having the
CD capacity was a major factor in my choice though.
\_ does he run? if so, you have to get one of those non-CD ones.
does he like a large capacity (for < $100). Then get the
CD one.
\_ definitely a thing to consider. Even HD based players are
known to skip when running. As for quality, iRiver has a
die-hard following. And iRiver constantly releases firmware
updates to add features. Ogg supporting FW should be out
sometime this month for most of their products. I personally
have the iFP-380T from iRiver. Oh, and I heard Costco sells
a cheap flash player that acts as a usb storage device, with
the USB connector right on the device. But it doesn't have
any sort of display.
\_ I had the Creative Nomad. The one that doubles as a USB storage
device. It broke on me after the warranty period. I replaced it
with a Sonic Blue Rio and it's been fine ever since.
\_ Pony up the dough and get your brother the CW300. Search for this
on http://newegg.com. My brother got one and he loves it. See amazon
for the 5-star rating/reviews. Blows everything else out of the
water. I have a Creative Muvo, piece of crap compared to the CW300. |
| 2003/10/11 [Computer/HW/Laptop, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:10592 Activity:nil |
10/10 My laptop hd is having problems. Won't boot. Plugged into USB hd
caddy, and see the two partitions on it from my desktop. (Both
running XP). Both partitions show up as drives from an explorer
window on the desktop, but accessing the second partition gives
errors like "incorrect parameter" or "drive not formatted." Tried
using Partition Magic 8 to copy the whole laptop hd to my desktop
hd, but it returned "Error #56, Can't read sector" or something to
that effect. Suspecting physical error, but software still seems
to detect the partitions. Can't afford to go to data recovery
specialist. What tools are there (Windows or Linux) that can help
me recover data off laptop drive?
\_ linux: dd each partition to a file on another drive
then try mounting file as a loopback device.
with like: mount -o loop -t type filename /mnt/tmp
"type" depends on the filsystem type. win98 is vfat. donno XP.
\_ restore from tape. you made backups, right? |
| 2003/10/10-11 [Computer/HW/CPU, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:10576 Activity:nil |
10/10 Well I need to build a new firewall seeing as my old Linux box is dead.
After figuring out my set up for my studio I've come to the conclusion
that I will have half a rack slot free while the other half is being
taken by a MIDI module. Well can't have that last slot empty now can
we? So I go over to http://www.mini-itx.com and see quite a few good things
there. Get plenty of ideas for my next home stereo and what not. Only
problem, I can't find a case that will be 2" high by 9.5" wide (half a
u). Anybody know where I can get one?
I'm not going to be slapping a ton of gear into this machine. The
board I'm thinking of getting is the EPIA CL10000 board. It has two
nics already there. The only thing I need to put in there would be
a compact flash to ide converter for the file system. Any other disk
space needed can be mounted off a central file server with samba if I
want. For logging I'll just use syslog-ng and log remotely.
So, anybody know where I can find a case to meet my requirements?
\_ If you're feeling cute, set up a box, cut a bootable CD from
it, and don't bother using the drive for anything but swap. -John
\_ http://iDOT.com AKA Medialand Systems, Hayward CA |
| 2003/10/9-10 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:10559 Activity:nil |
10/9 Can somebody post the SJ Mercury News link to the weekly Fry's
newsprint sales ads? Thx.
\_ http://techbargains.com posts a link for the Bay Area and Orange ads
on fridays.
\_ http://newspaperads.mercurynews.com/advertisers.asp?aid=32664&ppg=1
\_ Thanks. Is there any such equivalent site that shows Fry's ads in Southern Cal area?
\_ OC Register and LA Times used to, but it doesn't
appear that they do anymore. |
| 11/23 |
| 2003/9/24 [Computer/SW/Security, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:10308 Activity:nil |
9/23 I have some data tapes that I haven't touched in 5 years. I used
nbackup in DOS on a 486 to make the tapes. Using the same program
on the same computer, I am trying to restore those files. I was
able to open the tapes, but when I try to restore, it says
"Cannot access tape drive" or just keeps asking me to insert the
tape when it's already inserted. Is it possible that the tape is
old and that the data is lost, or is the problem more likely the
tape drive? How can I retrieve this data?
\_ Does it say this for *every* tape? Unless *all* your tapes have
been damaged by some environmental event or they were shitty tapes
to start with, it is more likely the tape drive is shot. If you
have a unix box with the right tape drive you should be able to
at least use dd to read raw data from the tapes as a test.
\_ Actually, since I posted that, I was able to get some data
from one of the tapes. But then it kept giving me error
messages again. I looked closely at the tape, and the tape
is physically only connected to one spool (this was not the
case originally), and it's not as easy as you might think
to get it back on the other spool neatly.
\_ I had this same thing happen years ago. There is an
"end of tape" optical sensor in the drive, and if it
gets dusty, the drive unspools the tapes. You could
try to put the tape back together after cleaning the
dust out of the drive, but I suspect you might be out
of luck. This is why I abandoned tapes, and switched
to hard disks backups. and disks don't make that
annoying whining sound when searching for files. Look
in the Sunday paper and get a 150GB disk for $90. use
an old extra computer as a backup server, or get an
external drive, but either way, make sure to spin it
up often: hard disks can die from stiction if left
unused in an "off" state for too long (years). |
| 2003/9/19-20 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:10253 Activity:low |
9/19 Computer manufacturers sued over hd sizes:
http://biz.yahoo.com/rc/030918/tech_computers_suit_1.html
\_ How about 'Memory manufacturers sue consumers over mem size'?
Said one spokesman "We're selling them 512MB chips, but they're
getting 536MB. We feel we should be compensated for that 24MB."
\_ this is good news, it is time to put them in the right place.
If the law suit succeeds, the next one should be SD/CF cards
Since they are also falsely advertised. I bought a 256MB SD
card, and it turns out it only holds 241MB that is about 15MB
of space missing. 15MB extra on a SD can store so much more info.
\_ It's called "formatting". The lawsuit is garbage.
\_ No, it's 1024 versus 1000, 1,048,xxx versus 1Mil.
\_ Just because computer scientists like to call a gigabyte 2^30 bytes
doesn't mean HDD designers (engineers) have to abandon their 10^9
scientific notation.
\_ I'm an engineer not a scientist, but I go by 2^30.
\_ Dammit Jim, I'm a doctor not a bricklayer!
\_ Arrr!
\_ Avast! |
| 2003/9/17 [Recreation/Shopping, Finance/Banking, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:10221 Activity:nil |
9/16 What's the deal with http://amazon.com? These days, half of any given order arrives damaged (scuffs/black marks on the book, bent covers, mashed corners, etc.) If I'd wanted my books pre-damaged, I'd have gone shopping at Barnes & Noble! \_ I've orders books and other stuff from them recently, never a problem. They will accept returns and satisfy the customer. \_ I had an excellent experience regarding this. My book cover was bent, and they replaced it and paid for the shipping. \_ yeah, amazon is much better customer service wise than say, http://half.com (where the 'half' stands for half-witted customer service, half-witted buyers, and half-witted sellers; on the other hand, ebayers seem much more responsible on the whole.) \_ oh yeah, i forgot, amazon did ship me a 10,000 Maniacs CD with a damaged case(CD was fine), but they included a new CD-case and a note saying "we noticed damage and have included a new case". The "damage" was a scratch on the CD-case. \_ I've seen a version of their shrink-wrap packaging that bends up the corners of soft-covered books. A supid design. They gave me a $5 discount on a slightly damaged order. |
| 2003/9/13 [Computer/HW/CPU, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:10181 Activity:nil |
9/12 Really cute case mods. http://csua.org/u/4av |
| 2003/9/10 [Computer/SW/P2P, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:10131 Activity:nil |
9/9 RIAA Rocks! They got $2,000 off of the girl who liked "nursery
rhymes"!
\_ urlP
\_ http://csua.org/u/48n
\_ A 12-year-old living in the projects who misunderstood
copyrights, and they got $2000. I think I start file
swapping just on principle for that one....
\_ Lets boycott the mainstream music industry. Stop buying
albums.
\_ I think not. That felon shared over 1,000 copyrighted
songs. And you tell me she didn't have an idea it
was wrong.
\_ Anyone knows how many song she downloaded or stored on her PC?
\_ I read it was over 1200.
\_ i threw out all my Metallica albums cuz they were at the
forefront of this wussiness.
\_ of course, it's very convenient that metallica had already
started to suck by the time napster happened.
And Justice For All was their last decent album.
\_ Started to suck? They *always* sucked. All that changed
is you got old enough and your taste improved enough to
see it.
\_ That's probably one of the stupidest things I've ever heard.
\_ albums you already paid for? yeah that'll hurt them.
\_ why don't the go after the $29.99 guys instead?
\_ duh, they've got lawyers
\_ So, motd oracles, explain this to me: if I rip CDs that I own
and share them on my hard-drive, will the RIAA have a case? Or
does it have to be a case of mp3s I've obviously dl'd from another
user? And if I can't share mp3s I've ripped myself, is it even
legal for me to be making mixed tapes/CDs for friends? For my
own use? And does any of this hold any legal water or is it all
a case of "comply or we'll bankrupt you with legal fees"?
\_ Look, cut the semantics, just turn yourself in.
Criminal. -John
\_ Ah, I see. I'll just report to the nearest security
booth for termination, shall I, friend Computer? ;-)
\_ Yes, no, maybe, yes, yes.
\_ you want to stop the RIAA, help develop a celestial file sharing
program. broadcast/relayed queries, distributed archiving in an
encryped partial format (so nobody knows what they've really
cached), and swarm file downloading via UDP, ICMP, or other
connectionless protocols with obfuscated and/or FORGED or SOURCE
IP ADDRESSES. It'd be nigh-unto-impossible to track where a file
came from. They'd have to find a way to sue the entire internet.
Good luck RIAA.
\_ Fight the Power. Music yearns to be Free.
\_ Not while it's in the vested interests of the big labels to
keep it in chains:
http://www.taxi.com/transmitter0307/tips0307.html |
| 2003/9/2-3 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:10042 Activity:low |
9/2 Any recommendations for CD/DVD burning software? I need it mostly
for making mix-CD's, data backup, and making copies of rarer CD's
that I have (Uneasy Listening and Brainfreeze).
\_ I've been using Ahead Nero. Haven't had any issues with it.
\_ Only thieves make copies of copyrighted works. You should be
purchasing those extra copies.
\_ It's legal to make backups.
\_ Uneasy Listening and Brainfreeze are both bootleg mixes
of copyrighted works themselves.
\_ Whatever happened to 'fair use' rights ?
\_ The rights to fair use have been bought by the RIAA.
All your tunes are... well you know how it goes.
\_ under US copyright law as it stands now, this post will
be protected for the next 90+ years. if you copy my post
70 years from now, I can still sue you. if the RIAA
gets their way, and it becomes a felony to put
copyrighted material on the web, the CSUA would then
be guilty of a felony if they posted the motd on the
web. isn't it fun letting corporations write our
laws?
\_ really miss the days when copyright protects only
7 years and one 7-year extension.
\_ you're thinking of trademark, goob. |
| 2003/8/26 [Computer/Networking, Computer/SW/OS/FreeBSD, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:29466 Activity:kinda low |
8/25 Do people actually verify md5 sums? I recently ftped a linux
distribution iso and installed it. It seems to run fine. Then
by chance I run md5sum on the image and the first disk failed.
Is this just some transmission error or something more sinister?
\_ freebsd ports do this automatically. You should probably try
pulling the image again and rechecking. it could be truly sinister,
it could just make your system unstable down the line. look at it
as a strong litmus test.
\_ I already did and the new download passed the check. I am
going to reinstall the whole thing. But if it is the installer
itself that got corrupted maliciously, should I worry about
all the partitions of my disks and all the disks that was
mounted when I did the installation? That would be really
too much pain.
\- based on the strength [sic] of the tcp checksum
and the error base rate you can figure out how often
you can expect an undetected tranmission error.
we made some calculations a few years ago and when you
started shoveling gigabytes around you needed to start
worrying about these and doing some kind of stronger
application level checksumming. lately i havent done any
measurements to see if the base error rate has gone down
[or up say in wireless or whatever] and what the new
expectations might me. however i certainly am not sur-
prised to hear large iso or tarballs coming over long
paths arrived frayed at the edges. if you are interested
in techical details and have a general familarity with
tcp, you can mail me. any discussion of this on say
NANOG? --psb
\_ Google, as a result of their work, keeps track of
these numbers. Look up their research.
\- oh yeah i remember asking the google folks
if they do higher level checks, what chksums
they ue etc as the copy around parts of the
they use etc as the copy around parts of the
cache. do they "publish" these things anywhere?
--psb |
| 2003/8/22-23 [Computer/SW/OS/OsX, Computer/HW/Drives, Consumer/TV] UID:29437 Activity:nil |
8/22 Has anyone installed a DVR-105 in a Mac? Did you have to install
the firmware patch to get DVD-RW working? tia. |
| 2003/8/13 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:29331 Activity:very high |
8/11 What's the fastest way to confirm that two 8GB files are exact
copies of each other? Is something faster than md5sum?
\_ on a reasonably fast PC, md5sum saturates the disk channel
while hardly using any CPU. so nothing is going to be
faster (less I/O).
\_ running an md5sum on the image, I get "File too large".
any other program you can recommend?
\_ md5sum compiled with large file support
\- if it isnt physically sitting on one disk, there are
various things you can do. say with erasure codes.
\_ I ran "sum". files appear to be the same. -op |
| 2003/8/12-13 [Computer/SW/OS/Linux, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:29323 Activity:kinda low |
8/11 How does one determine which debian CD a specific package is on.
I've searced google and debian, and can't find out where to look.
\_ No reason to. You use CD1 to install, and then net to grab the
rest. If you don't have net, put the package on a CD or on a
floppy, and use dpkg to install.
\_ Well, actually I DO have a reason: I've installed debian
(via my net) for somebody who doesn't have good net, and I
want him to have the option to easily install more packages
from CD in the future, as needed. I would like to know which
CD's contain which packages, so that I can possibly rule out
downloading all 7 CD's with jigdo.
\_ I guess you could install your own system packages with
apt-get install package --download so you save the debs
and then burn those to cd
\_ 'the .jigdo file for a CD contains a list of all packages that
are on the CD. The files are compressed with gzip, so use
"zcat somefile.jigdo | less" or similar to view them.' |
| 2003/8/11-12 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:29311 Activity:high |
8/11 So I downloaded a ISO disk (Redhat). What do I do with it?
\_ Burn it to a CD. Any cd-burning software should have an option
to write an ISO image to a blank CD.
\_ turns out I need to get WinISO, that converts from
BIN to ISO. But WinISO costs $$$ :(
\_ WTF? Just burn them.
Download trial version of Ahead Nero. That definitely
burns ISOs
\_ There's a zillion freeware ISO burners and converters.
It's a standard format. obgoogle, jeeze.
\_ Don't forgot to download the second and third ISOs.
\_ no need to burn those though as you can make a boot floopy
off the first cd and point the install to where the iso's are
on your hard drive. |
| 2003/8/9-10 [Computer/HW, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:29288 Activity:moderate |
8/8 I know this has been asked before but what is a good place to get
rid of a really really really old PC Case (not ATX)? BTW I'm keeping
the power supply just cuz it's cool.
\_ Sell? Try ebay or CL. Get rid of it? CL, motd, or throw it out.
\_ CL?
\_ craigslist
\_ Alameda County Computer Resource Center http://www.accrc.org
1501 Eastshore Avenue, near Gilman
\_ Thank you for this. It's the most useful thing I've seen
on motd in at least a decade. -pld |
| 2003/8/1 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:29203 Activity:very high |
8/1 "When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically
repeating the familiar phrases--'bestial atrocities', 'iron heel',
'bloodstained tyranny', 'free peoples of the world', 'stand
shoulder to shoulder'--one often has a curious feeling that one is
not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy: a feeling
which suddenly becomes stronger at moments when a light catches
the speaker's spectacles and turns them into blank discs which seem
to have no eyes behind them."
- from George Orwell's 1946 essay "Politics and the English Language"
\_ Stop picking on Gore. He's not coming back. Let him be.
\_ Clinton and Reagan had charisma. They could really connect with/
entertain the American people. |
| 2003/7/26-27 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:29145 Activity:nil |
7/25 http://www.maxtronic.com/products/enterprise.html for that raid array I was talking about. |
| 2003/7/25-26 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:29141 Activity:very high |
7/25 Anyone changing their file-sharing behavior in response to recent
RIAA subpoenathon?
\_ When I get one I'll worry about it. There is nothing to fear but
fear itself!
\_ i don't really do any file sharing. but i will *never* ever
buy another cd from those evil motherfuckers ever again as long
as i live.
\_ Ditto. -John
\_ So all three of you are going to stop buying music and
only listen to radio and MTV??? Forever?
\_ I barely ever watch TV, rarely listen to radio,
and have bought 1 CD set in 9 months, in addition
to very rarely burning a copy off a friend. So
why shouldn't I be able to change my consumption
habits because of something I loathe? -John
\_ If you don't buy music then a boycott doesn't
mean anything. I'm going to launch a boycott
of Russian wines.
\_ I've found an acceptable compromise is to buy only used
CD's. This allows me to consume new music, without
directly supporting the RIAA. Also, since there are great
independent music stores in the Bay Area, I can support
local business. I think it's a good balance. On a side
note, I think it would be cool if someone implemented tip
jars for used CD's. Basically, when you buy a used CD, you
can voluntarily pay a few bucks extra, and that money gets
passed directly to the artist. If artists saw significant
revenue from something like this, it might encourage them
to pursue alternatives to contracting away all rights to
the majors, and this, in turn, could lead to real choice in
the music market. -dans
\_ tip jars? you think raw cash on the counter top is going
to go to the artist and each will get the right amount?
\_ I always have sharing turned off. I'm a leecher. I'll worry about
the RIAA once they start cracking down on those people.
\_ http://www.haxial.org/products/kdx/index2.html |
| 2003/7/25-26 [Computer/HW/Memory, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:29137 Activity:moderate |
7/25 On a related note, what's a fast CompactFlash brand? Or are they
all about the same speed? Thanks.
\_ The new Lexars have pretty fast write times.
\_ Vikings.
\_ http://www.dpreview.com/articles/mediacompare
\_ Thanks!
\_ According to the forums on that site, a lot of people love
Transcend for their speed and reliability. I have their 1GB
model, and it's worked like a charm. |
| 2003/7/25 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:29133 Activity:high |
7/24 How can it be that writing to a 1GB microdrive is slower than writing
to 1GB of compact flash ram?
\_ why would you think that a spinning platter would be faster than
solid state? -tom
\_ because you had a lot of memory keys that worked at USB speed,
and it wasn't unreasonable to assume that the flash memory
itself was about as fast as the USB 1.1 interface speed. -!op
\_ aren't there slow elements in a microdrive? Like say MOVING PARTS?
\_ maybe spin up, disk seek time? Isn't flash pretty fast?
\_ What's your interface? USB 1.1, 2.0, or FireWire? Even if it's
one of the last two, you have to remember it wasn't too long ago
you had 4 GB full-size hard drives with < 5 MB/s transfer.
I can imagine flash memory can be 5 MB/s or faster. I just
looked it up, and an IBM microdrive has a 5.6 MB/s media transfer
rate.
\_ Perhaps within a camera? My Canon S45 takes both compact flash
& microdrives
\_ I did another search, and one page has a microdrive using
a CompactFlash II interface. The drive has a max sustained
transfer rate of 4.2 MB/s, whereas the interface can go
up to 13.3 MB/s. So sure, you can have flash memory faster
than the microdrive.
\_ Dunno why you'd want microdrive in a camera anyway.
Compact Flash costs less and has no moving parts
\_ because there was a time when microdrives
were much larger than compactflash
\- i use microdrives and 256, 512 CFs. is the
data xfer rate really a big deal? i rarely
am shooting continuous mode ... and suppose
it is epislon faster on playback but that sucks
up a lot of batt power. the only case where i
would for sure prefer one over the other is if
you are going to altitude. then pick cf. --psb
\_ There is no reason to use a microdrive these
days. They are slower, use more power and
are significantly less reliable than CF. -tom
\- dont be an ass tom. if you have one, you
might as well use it. perhaps there isnt
much reason to buy one today but as usual
you overstate things based on your own
limited experience --psb |
| 2003/7/24-25 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:29120 Activity:moderate |
7/23 I know it was on the motd a while back, but wasn't paying attention.
Any recommendation for a RAID enclosure that uses IDE HD, but has
an external SCSI interface to connect to your computer?
\_ I use this:
http://raidking.com/rk800rfc.htm which is the same as this:
http://www.excelmeridiandata.com/products/raid_ss16000/index.shtml
It's really made by "miti" or something like that in San Jose.
I'll find out if you really care.
\_ It would be appreciated. I'd rather deal with a local vendor.
-op
\_ I'll look at the box tomorrow or ask my local vendor for you
and repost. I'm sure this whole thing will be gone by then. |
| 2003/6/28-30 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:28852 Activity:high |
6/28 I'm "upgrading" my basement server. I got a free new PCI-ATA133
card with a Promise PDC20269 chip. (not raid, just fast IDE). How
would I research if this card will work in a particular used P2
mobo that I haven't bought yet (an Asus P2B). I also wondering how
a computer boots from hard disk connected through a PCI IDE
controller card? It can't depend on drivers, cause they'd be on
the disk, so I suspect it needs bios support? Seems like a silly
question, but I've never used an add-on IDE controller before.
\_ it'll work.
\_ How do you know, pray tell.
\_ Could you indluge me with a breif explanation of the
mechanism by which that will occur?
\_ automagic
\_ The card has it's own bios. The same way you stick a scsi card in
and can automagically boot off that without drivers from disk, etc.
As the other person said, it'll work.
\_ Thank you!! -op |
| 2003/6/24 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:28822 Activity:very high |
6/23 What exactly is a refurbished hard drive? I've been running
my replacement Seagate refurb drive for a few weeks and
ActiveSMART already thinks its going to fail in a 2 weeks.
Do they just low-level format all the defective drives and
reship them out?
\_ Please tell me this is a troll.
\_ well, it's a chance you took, and be a man and live with it.
\_ well, if it is true, this is class action lawsuit material.
\_ So you scored in the bottom quartile on the LSATs huh?
\_ chance he took? many hard drive manufacturers replace returned
drives with refurbished ones. It's as if consumers generally
get to choose what kind of replacements they get. anyhow, it's
still under warranty, right?
\_ Yea. But remember you loose $$ for shipping the defective
\_ "lose"
drive back everytime and warranty time while doing the
swap. (It also wastes your valuable time and effort.)
So if I have to swap a drive a few times during its 3 year
warranty, the effective cost is incredibly higher than
the original purchase price. This is wrong.
The consumer shouldn't haveta pay for the manufacturer's
defects when a product is still under warranty.
\_ I personally had better luck with my IBM SCSI harddrive.
I mean, for some reason SCSI harddrive gets much better
treatment than the IDE counter part. Having said that,
if I have choice, i really don't want to go through that
again. A defective Harddrive is a pain in the butt.
\_ Yeah, and you pay for it. At least it use to be true
that each and every SCSI drive is tested, while IDE
drives are only batch tested.
\_ This is a case of getting what you paid for. Don't ever buy
refurb drives. Period. --Motd Storage Guru
\_ Hrm. I've had very good luck with all my refurb
drives. I haven't lost any. Then again, I'm talking
about 1995 SCSI drives that work even after they start
to lose their bearings. But yeah, I wouldn't touch a
refurb IDE drive.
\_ Do you use the refurbs as temp space or for real data? -MSG
\_ I don't use them any more, because of space limitations,
however, I used them for years as my only storage, without
backups. Drives *used* to be reliable, even if refurb.
\_ I second this. My failure rate on refurbed drives is probably
10X what it is on new ones.
\_ I never buy refurb drives. I buy retail drives that fail
in a few months and get refurb drives in exchange. Perhaps
the guru could enlighten us on the best storage strategy in
his/her opinion.
\_ Depends on how much cash you've got and how important your
data is. For home use, a simple IDE mirror is probably a
good choice. For work I do raid3,4,5, mirrors, or 3,4,5
plus mirror for some stuff. Which of 3,4,5 I use and whether
or not it gets mirrored as well depends on what data goes on
it. Nothing is refurb. Things like the database goes on
fiber channel with stripe and mirror. Customer owned data
is raid4 or raid5 on IDE. Only a little bit of scsi here and
there. I figure if I'm going to shell out scsi level prices
I might as well get fiber channel and be done with it. -MSG |
| 2003/6/19 [Computer/HW/Memory, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:28767 Activity:nil |
6/18 I want to buy a cheap reliable server. It doesn't need to be fancy.
It doesn't need to be blazingly fast (though it would be nice if it
was.) It doesn't need insane amounts of disk or anything. What I
want is it to be reliable and for it not to cost too much. Anyone
have a good recomendation? Would I be stupid to go with dell or
someone like that?
\_ try explaining what you want to do with and how much you WANT to
spend. you can find homemade stuff for $1k or you can buy something
like a dell which comes with onsite warranty service.. etc.
\_ it is a machine I want to have up for personal use but stuck
somewhere where getting to it is hard, so if the machines goes
down it will be a pain in the ass to fix. It won't be hit too
hard, I mostly want it as a machine that is up 24/7 that I have
full control of.
\_ i.e. porn collection in the attic / basement
\_ Where will you be putting it? I'm looking at colo options
right now. Would be interested to know. --aaron
\_ I've seen some good deals from Dell that seem to fit this.
(Like a 600SC for like 399 one time with SCSI disks)
\_ If you want cheap, ryo is the only way to go. Get a decent
decent mb with an athlon 2400+ (or faster) along with about
512 MB DDR RAM and a couple of 80 or 100 GB ATA/100 drives.
It will cheaper and faster than a Dell and just about as
reliable (provided you run a decent OS on it).
\_ for under 500 there are lots of random vendors on the net willing
to custom build. choose good motherboard, choose a cpu based on
the heat it puts out, not it's speed, choose good fans and put it
in well vented place, put in slower, lower heat drives and mirror
them, put in N+1 power supplies. it's sad to see the rest of you
either remained silent or posted cluelessly. it should go without
saying that your unused video will be on the onboard chip and don't
put in more memory or anything else more than you'll actually need.
my crappy very low use server runs openbsd on a p5-166 with 96 megs
of ram and under 10 gigs of old crappy drives and has stayed up
24x7 since 1994 (minus a few moves or OS upgrades). you can do
better and safer today with modern low-heat parts.
\_ is it me, you really meant p3-166 ? |
| 2003/6/17-18 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:28751 Activity:nil |
6/18 How does the transfer rate of a 4x DVD drive compare to a 4x CD drive?
\_ The 4x DVD is faster.
\_ in terms of raw KB/s, multiply the DVD speed by 9 to get CD speed
\_ Thanks |
| 2003/6/17-18 [Computer/Companies/Apple, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:28749 Activity:nil |
6/17 I've got some old 3.5" Apple ][ disks that I'd like to read. I
remember that old Macs (SE, LCII, etc.) could read Apple ][ disks,
but I haven't been able to find any. Anyone know where I can find
one to use for a few minutes? Thanks. -- mikeym
\_ Same question applies for 5.25 ][e disks -!op
\_ maybe weirdstuff? probably sell you one for next to nothing. |
| 2003/6/13 [Finance/Banking, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:28723 Activity:nil |
6/12 Extreme CDs: http://www.powerlabs.org/cdexplode.htm |
| 2003/6/9 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:28675 Activity:very high |
6/8 Are Maxtor disk drives reliable?
\_ No.
\_ examples? sources? tests?
\_ http://csua.berkeley.edu/~tom/fireball.jpeg
\_ I second that no.
\_ My past two HDs have been Maxtor DiamondMax's (the ultra quiet
ones). No issues with either. In my limited experience, I've
had shit luck with Quantum (are they even still around?)
\_ http://www.storagereview.com
\_ Maxtor bought Quantum's HD division and sacrificed their own
DiamondMax for Quantum's Fireball line (on the SCSI they also
chose Quantum's Atlas line).
\_ Not really. At my job I maintain about 3/4s of a gazillion TB. I
replace a lot of maxtor drives. I hardly ever replace scsi or FC
drives except Fujitsu which I don't allow in my machines anymore.
In general IDE drives are not reliable, period. Get what you pay
for in the data storage world. All drives will break at the least
convenient time. That's what raid is for.
\_ For those interested, IBM bought Fujitsu a short time ago. I
don't know if it's just Fujitsu's IDEs or if IBM's using all
Fujitsu all the time.
\_ actually you got that backwards. IBM sold it's storage
business / division to Fujitsu. Fujitsu now manufactures
and sells what were IBM drives (such as the Deskstar and
TravelStar). That's why IBM is using Fujitsu drives...
So now for the most part, Maxtor is Quantum and Fujitsu
is IBM.
\_ BZZT. Wrong. IBM sold it to hitachi. -jon
\_ sorry, yes. jon wins. fatality
\_ Doesn't matter who owns them. Fujitsu drives suck.
\_ Thank y'all. Those are good answers -op |
| 2003/6/8-9 [Finance/Banking, Consumer/Audio, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:28670 Activity:kinda low |
6/8 recommendations for settings to use for cdrecord
in unix/linux to make cds that will play in one of those
cheap mp3/cd players? I tried burning at 4x and
getting rid of spaces and joliet extensions.
\_ 4x? If you were serious you'd burn at 1x.
\_ many of those cheap mp3/cd won't do above 128k bps, or VBR |
| 2003/6/1-2 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:28601 Activity:very high |
6/1 I want to put together a reasonably large (~250GB), reliable, and
cheap disk array for important files and documents on a FreeBSD box
which currently only has a couple of IDE drives in it. I'm thinking of
running vinum on a bunch of external drives--any recommendations on
dependable, not-too-expensive disk racks/cases? Speed's no issue,
so what about scsi-2 vs. USB vs. Firewire? Any opinions welcome. -John
\_ John, you can use any of a number of scsi<->ide external raid array
units which handles raid in hardware and exposes a single 'drive'
to the unix system. Typical box has 8 slots and handles raid5.
You aren't specific enough about your needs and budget, but from
what you say I might slap a bunch of 80/100/120 gig drives in a
box and do raid5. If the data is important enough, I'd mirror it
too. Do not buy 3ware cards. --raid guy and 3ware victim
\_ Good tip, thanks. I just need something that's fault
tolerant if a single disk goes--don't need hot-swap, which
is why I was thinking vinum (this'll all get backed up
anyway. The prices below (~$500-600) are what I'm looking
for--got any specific tips on disk boxes? I can't find any
decent ones in stores over here, and don't really know what
to look for online. Thanks! -John
\_ You might get an old "K2" raid box off ebay or something
like that. External hw raid boxes might be out of your
price range if you've only got $600 for one, but a used
one might go for that. An alternative would be to get
a 4 or 6 disk 3u case with hot swap support for ide and
then just build your unix box from that. It'll be less
expensive and probably still get you what you want. I
think you can get a case *and* disks for under $1000.
\_ Why not just buy a pair of 250GB EIDE disks and mirror them?
$258 for a 250GB hard disk....
\_ The best price/storage ratio is currently around 120G, for $100
a piece. $300 for a 240G RAID 5 solution across 3 disks.
Add in $300 for a 3ware escalade 7500-4LP ATA RAID controller if
you don't want to do RAID in software.
\_ nononononono! do *not* buy 3ware!!!! ever!!! my company has
lost multiple terabytes to 3ware's crappy cards and drivers.
Do Not Buy 3Ware! --3ware multi-terabitten victim
\_ 3Ware cards worked fine for me. we blew a bunch
of money on a raidzone, we had horrendously bad
luck, blew hours and hours of my life, i would
like to talk tons of crap about raidzone! - danh
\_ I've got a dozen 3ware based boxes. I'm in the middle
of a multi month project to move all this data to
reliable hosts. After that the 3ware boxes are going
to ebay or the trash or Hell. --3ware victim
\_ What would you suggest for similar price/functionality?
\_ see my comment above to John about K2 boxes and 3u
hot swap ide cases.
\_ 1 TB IDE-to-SCSI hardware RAID is < $5000 . Uses 6 200 GB
disks. I am sure there are smaller versions for less. --dim
\_ Where can I find one of these?
\_ I thought FreeBSD's SCSI support was much better than IDE.
If you're willing to pay for RAID you'd do as well to go
straight SCSI.
\_ because scsi drives cost several times more per meg and
most people don't need scsi? it just has to work.
\_ The interface *is* SCSI. The disks are not. It connects
to a SCSI card and uses a SCSI driver, hence IDE-> SCSI. I
got mine at Western Scientific. --dim
\_ I believe the person meant "scsi->scsi" when they said
"straight scsi". IE: not IDE drives.
\_ No shit, but he also said "FreeBSD's SCSI support".
It *does* use the freaking SCSI driver, genius!
\_ hey dim, back to reading comp 1A for you. you're
the only one here who didn't know what everyone was
talking about.
\_ I think that would be you. Take your own advice.
\_ Actually, I was questioning the 1TB IDE-to-SCSI
part. I guess he meant IDE disks, SCSI interface,
which I would call SCSI-to-IDE. Using IDE to
access SCSI disks is the worst of both worlds,
which I think everyone agrees on. |
| 2003/6/1 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:28598 Activity:very high 50%like:28593 |
5/31 I had another hard drive failure recently, making this 2 drives over
\_ ALL hard drives fail eventually. back up your data.
\_ ALL backups fail eventually. back up your backups.
\_ the return of the fucking motd comedian! all
hail. fuck off.
\_ actually, it's true. if your data is important you'll
have more than 1 backup of it, at least 1 of which is
offsite, but you obviously knew this from your uber
genius reply to the other person above. what your tiny
little mind sees as a bad joke is often the reality
other people work in because unlike you they have data
that has real value.
2 years that have failed in under a year. (And they weren't even IBM
deathstars) Is there any independent website logging failures
to keep manufacturers honest about their MTBFs?
\_ Could be your environment. Have you checked your powersupply
lately?
\_ SARS?
\_ You using a battery backup? I think that helps make your power
better too. I've had two hd crashes / slow death before, but not
circumstances. Don't ask if you can't contribute.
in the 5 years since I started using battery backups.
\_ I have UPS on one of the computers with the dead disk,
if that's what you mean
\_ what brand do you use?
\_ could be the heat, get extra fans to blow on them.
\_ what drives are they?
\_ Segate Baracuda IV (most recently) and some sort of Maxtor
\_ consider a RAID?
\_ Definitely, but if drives fail that often I'll be
switching disks every few months.
\_ which is better than losing data every few months.
\_ There is such a site but I won't tell you until you tell us what
make and model of drives you've had go bad and under what
circumstaNces. Don't ask if you can't contribute.
\_ Drive failures have a saddle curve; disks more commonly fail within
the first 6 months, then failures tail off until the 3-4 year
point, where they start to gradually rise again. MTBF of 500K
hours doesn't mean you can expect 500K hours from your disk. -tom
\_ and you know all this... because? |
| 2003/5/31 [Science/Battery, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:28593 Activity:high 50%like:28598 |
5/31 I had another hard drive failure recently, making this 2 drives over
2 years that have failed in under a year. (And they weren't even IBM
deathstars) Is there any independent website logging failures
to keep manufacturers honest about their MTBFs?
\_ Could be your environment. Have you checked your powersupply lately?_
\_ Could be your environment. Have you checked your powersupply
lately?
\_ SARS?
\_ You using a battery backup? I think that helps make your power
better too. I've had two hd crashes / slow death before, but not
in the 5 years since I started using battery backups.
\_ what brand do you use?
\_ could be the heat, get extra fans to blow on them.
\_ what drives are they? |
| 2003/5/15 [Computer/SW/OS/OsX, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:28441 Activity:high |
5/14 Any ideas as to how to fix a firewire drive that won't mount?
It's a friend's mac, and I couldn't help him, so I'm just wondering if
it's a common problem.
\_ show it a few videos, and try turning the lights down. maybe
if the mac dresses up like a PC?
\_ I thought this was pretty funny, but you're still a jackass. -op
\_ I can live with that. -Jackass
\_ are you properly reading the instructions? There is a certain
order you connect things the first time around...
\_ apparently it's an existing drive that has worked for awhile
\_ Try kicking it, that sometimes works. Do you really expect
to solve your hardware problem on the motd? Hire a
technician.
\_ Is it by Maxtor?
\_ One known problem is that sometimes fw hd's that are put to
sleep aren't sent the awake command. Only way to fix this is
to shutdown the computer, unplug the drive, replug the drive
and then reboot.
In some cases, there are problems with bus powered drives
because the computer can't provide sufficient power over the
cable or there are too many devices plugged into the bus.
If the hd is bus powered, try switching to a standalone ps.
Also is the drive detected on the fw bus? You can check this with
Apple System Profiler by clicking on the Devices and Volumes
tab. In MacOSX ASP is /Applications/Utilites/Apple System Profiler.
In OS9 it should be in <Boot Hd>/Utilites/Apple System Profiler
or <Boot Hd>/Applications (Mac OS 9)/Utilites/Apple System Profiler.
If the drive isn't detected, turn it off, wait a few seconds,
turn it on and type CMD-R in the ASP window. If the drive is
detected at this point and it still won't mount, you will need
to use Disk Utility (OS X) or Disk First Aid and/or Drive Setup
(OS 9) to see if there are any problems with the fs on the drive.
If there are problems that Disk Utility or Disk First Aid can't
fix, you probably will need to get a copy of something like
Disk Warrior from Alsoft to fix the problems. |
| 2003/5/6-7 [Computer/SW/Unix, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:28351 Activity:moderate |
5/6 I was looking at a csua user homepage a few months ago and someone
had worked on a project involving something about making disk
backups to physically seperate locations, arguing that a flood or
fire would destroy any local backups just as easily as it would your
normal disk. anyone know the name of this project or user?
\_ The project you describe is the Distributed Internet Backup
System (DIBS) developed by Emin Martinian and available at
http://www.csua.berkeley.edu/~emin/source_code/dibs/index.html -emin
\_ thanks
\- how are you determining what to incrementally backup?
are you looking at file timestamps? is the unit of change
a file or a block of data? i.e. if 1 byte is appended
to a 100meg file, does a 100mb get xferred? does this use
rsync under the hood? ok tnx. --psb
\_ if you're interested in that sort of stuff, try
http://oceanstore.cs.berkeley.edu
\_ Emin, were you a part of Kubi's group?
\_ OceanStore is a great project but it has different
goals. DIBS is designed to provide a way for people
to exchange files for backups in a secure, robust
way without requiring a central authority. -emin
\_ DIBS stores an MD5 hash for each file and does a full
backup of any file which changes. Rsync is not used
because DIBS uses encryption and erasure correction
coding and that is difficult to combine with rsync.
Also, DIBS is peer-to-peer while rsync requires you
to have accounts on both ends. -emin
\- yeah i have some limited familiarity with oceanstor
but again for something lightweight i am curious
about this dibs thing. we hacked up something we
call the "storagelocker" with ssh keys and some
other access control technology and a big perl
script ... it works ok as a palce to write and
recover a bitstream but it would be nice to have
some smarts to reduce the traffic volume.
BTW, does anyone know if the hummingbird fs
was ever released and what performance stats
look like? --psb
\_ Although I'm tooting my own horn, I think DIBS
is what you are looking for. The way I use DIBS
is to put links to everything I want backed up in
a special directory and DIBS automatically and
incrementally makes backups to other machines. -emin
\- ok i will analyze it and let you know
if i incorporate it into a front end
to the StorageLocker(tm) ok tnx --psb
\_ Emin, were you a part of Kubi's group?
\_ No. I was in Zakhor's group at Berkeley and I'm in the
DSP group at MIT. I work on DIBS because I think it's
cool; the stuff I do for "research" is much different. -emin
\_ Haven't companies been storing backup tapes or disks at separate
physical locations for years? He's not the first to realize that
a flood or fire would destroy any local backups, is he? |
| 2003/4/29 [Computer/SW/OS/Linux, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:28259 Activity:high 50%like:28255 |
4/28 I just bought a 120GB WDC hard drive backing up stuff from multiple
computers onto my Linux box. Any reason to make more than one
full-sized partition?
\_ Probably not. Others might say something about fsck times or
backup schedules and stuff but no, not really. Use a journaled
filesystem for shorter fscks and I know you're not going to tape
so "shrug".
\_ I always prefered a good long slow fsck...
\_ tell yermom.
\_ already showed yermom.
\_ already showed mymom.
\_ how much did she charge you? |
| 2003/4/29 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:28255 Activity:nil 50%like:28259 |
4/28 I just bought a 120GB WDC hard drive for my Linux box for the
purpuse of backing up multiple computers onto it. I'm trying
to figure out if making more than one partition will diminish
the probability of data loss if something goes wrong on the disk.
Any suggestions? |
| 2003/4/21 [Reference/RealEstate, Finance/Banking, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:28177 Activity:high |
4/20 I just got a "buy 4 CDs or else we bill you" notice from
Columbia House. (I signed up in '96). I'm tempted to respond
saying they'd never expressed a time limit anywhere in the
membership agreement (moreover, the ad I used to sign up
mentions a "No-Time-Limit Membership"), but I have this
paranoid suspicion that these letters are some columbia house
manager's clever scheme to grift some immediate cash, and
might save both me and customer support time if I continue to
ignore their mailings. Can they really cash me in now?
I imagine almost everyone has had some experience w/
shady CD club.
\_ Yes, as part of the the Patriot Act. Regime Change at Home,
End Racism.
\_ Hey that was a useful reply. Not only did you complete ignore
a decent question and turn it into some idiotic political screed
but your rant was poorly executed and mindless.
\_ Are you saying you expect better in the motd?
\_ Are you saying only white people can ride fast
motorcycles? |
| 2003/4/2 [Computer/Domains, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:27953 Activity:nil |
4/1 Looking for a good DVD->VCD converter, where can I find 1?
\_ http://vcdhelp.org, http://doom9.org |
| 2003/3/24 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:27827 Activity:high |
3/24 I dd's an entire windows disk (it had 4 partitions) to a file, and
now I'd like to mount some of the partitions in the image. I used
losetup, so "sfdisk -l /dev/loop0" shows this:
Disk /dev/loop0: cannot get geometry
Disk /dev/loop0: 0 cylinders, 0 heads, 0 sectors/track
Warning: The first partition looks like it was made
for C/H/S=*/255/63 (instead of 0/0/0).
For this listing I'll assume that geometry.
Units = cylinders of 8225280 bytes, blocks of 1024 bytes,
counting from 0
Device Boot Start End #cyls #blocks Id System
/dev/loop0p1 * 0+ 260 261- 2096451 6 FAT16
/dev/loop0p2 261 1022 762 6120765 5 Extended
/dev/loop0p3 0 - 0 0 0 Empty
/dev/loop0p4 0 - 0 0 0 Empty
/dev/loop0p5 261+ 521 261- 2096451 6 FAT16
/dev/loop0p6 522+ 782 261- 2096451 6 FAT16
/dev/loop0p7 783+ 1022 240- 1927768+ 6 FAT16
Do I have to make a device called "/dev/loop0p1"? 'cause that device
doesn't exist yet. Or is there a different way to mount the
partitions contained in the image? Thanks. |
| 2003/3/24 [Computer/SW/OS/Windows, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:27822 Activity:high |
3/24 I dd's an entire windows disk (it had 4 partitions) to a file, and
now I'd like to mount the image. What's the best way? |
| 2003/3/18 [Recreation/Dating, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:27736 Activity:nil |
3/18 There's something refreshing about deleting most of the porn off my
harddrive
\_ Curious, why didn't you delete all of your porn?
\_ 'Cause the kiddie stuff is too tought to find?
\_ It's hard to quit cold-turkey. The rest will be gone soon...
(yeah right!) |
| 2003/3/15 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:27704 Activity:nil |
3/15 I have an aic7xxx scsi card for my scanner and an ide cd burner that
is using ide-scsi emulation in linux. unfortunately, both of these
devices attach themselves to scsi host 0. Whichever one I use fist
works at the expense of the other. I can not find out a way to
specify host0 for one and host1 for the other. Any suggestions for
a way to specify which scsi host#? Also, I don't load the aic7xxx
module at bootup, because I don't use it everyday. (I'd prefer the
aic7xxx host to be scsi1). Thanks. |
| 2003/3/9-10 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:27637 Activity:very high |
3/9 What's a good linux program to use to image a hard disk?
I don't want to buy Ghost.
\_ dd
\_ I bought ghost (norton systemworks, actually) for cheaps
on craigslist ($20).
\_ I downloaded a free *nix installed from the net, booted from a
floppy, installed for free, and got dd for free and I don't have
to waste an entire box on windows either.
\- how do image an HD w/ dd?
\_ Something like: dd if=/dev/hda of=/tmp/hda.img
You might need the conv=osync or conv=notrunc
option along with the bs=<block size> option
since the default block size on linux is 1024b
while I think athat POSIX dd stipulates 512b.
\_ at least crank you bs to something large or
else your dd will take FOREVER
\_ Perhaps this is what you need: http://www.partimage.org
\_ nonononono, he needs 'dd'. That's it. It's free and it runs
on all *nix platforms. |
| 2003/2/25-26 [Computer/HW/Laptop, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:27526 Activity:low |
2/25 My laptop died. So I took out its 2.5" hard drive and tried to hook it
to the 40 pin cable in my computer and discovered that the hard drive
< (Toshiba) has 44 pins and is not compatible. Aren't these things
supposed to be standardized and compatible with each other? What
should I do?
\_ Get a 2.5" to 3.5" converter. The extra pins are for power (I
believe). First google search resulted in this :
http://www.cable4pc.com/hard301.htm
\_ I ordered two of these from here and they work fine:
http://66.216.68.88
\_ You pick one up at Fry's for under $10. They are kind of flimsy
Watch where pin 1 is, sometimes it's not facing power (meaning
you'll have ot turn it upside) |
| 2003/2/10-11 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:27361 Activity:very high |
2/8 I want to assemble a Firewire hard disk that is reasonably quiet (to
be used at home). Which case (if it matters) and drive are good?\
\_ Why do you want Firewire external disk?
\_ cuz I only have a laptop with 1394.
\_ Another question, is an ata/133 drive backward compatiable with
an enclosure that supports upto ata/100?
\_ yes
\_ Drive, I personally prefer the IBM/Hitachi 180GXP, but others like
Western Digital Special Editions with big cache. Watch out
for how many GB the enclosure can support. The IBM/Hitachi 40GNX
line are good 2.5" drives.
\_ Seagate is known for having the quietest drives in the industry;
that might be a good place to start. --sowings |
| 2003/2/9-10 [Finance/Banking, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:27353 Activity:insanely high |
2/8 Poll: How old are you and what kind of music do you listen to
nowadays?
\_ 22. You guys bitching
\_ 26, '80s punk and metal
\_ 29. SHAKIRA.
\_ 29 - Back street boys
\_ 22 Nirvana (RIP), Nas, Neil Young, Weezer
\_ 32. Conservative talk radio because I don't have time to worry
about music anymore. I see 2 of you are *soooo* close to joining
me.
\_ the next guy on a skateboard to spit on your windshield
could well be me.
\_ Unlikely. I don't drive in the slums.
\_ Slums, you mean the Berkeley Hills?
\_ who, the Shakira and BSB boys?
\_ No, the ones listening to 80s music.
\_ 24. Gypsy Gings, Alabina, Classic Rock, Latin Rock.
\_ 31. Rush, Van Halen, Tool, various 80's bands
\_ 33. NPR, TripleJ (Aussie radio), 80s and 90s punk. 32, you'll
probably be joining me in a little while.
\_ 35. Most recently purchased CDs: Alice charity CD,
last two Hives albums, Strokes CD album and EP,
and a couple Ventures CDs. Might get weezer and/or sum41 next,
but I'm looking to convert my LPs and cassettes to MP3 on
and a couple Ventures CDs. Might get weezer eminem and/or sum41
60s/70s/80s albums that I need to listen to.
next, but I'm looking to convert my LPs and cassettes to MP3 on
this PowerBook G4. Got lots of Fleetwood Mac/Bob Dylan and other
60s/70s/80s albums that I need to convert and listen to.
I still listen to Bad Religion and old MoTown hits.
\_ 30. Jazz and Rock (mostly older stuff) |
| 2003/2/9-10 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:27352 Activity:high |
2/8 What is a good deal for external firewire (IEEE 1394) hard disk
right now?
\_ http://www.pricewatch.com is the answer to all computer questions of the
form "what is a good deal for X computer thing right now."
\_ $50 external enclosure from compgeeks or newegg or wherever, and
then use whatever IDE drive you want.
\_ You know you still have to plug in the external drive into
the wall, not to mention lug around the AC adapter.
\_ no, many can get power off the firewire bus. -tom
\_ fyi, most notebooks have the small firewire port, which
doesn't deliver power
\_ not for 2.5" HDDs. there are some 3.5" HDD enclosures that
can run everything off bus-power, but they're much less common.
Even if you do need an adapter or a power cord, a drive
enclosure is still more portable than carrying around a PC...
\_ I believe you can get usb->ac dongles
\_ not quite. there are, hoewver, USB->DC and PS/2 DC dongles.
\_ Can you carry a hard disk alone onto a plane? Don't they
sometimes require you to show it can work as a hard disk?
\_ I tried that and they made me go into a little room with
no windows where a 6 foot tall federal agent named Hilga
forced me to strip.
\_ So, what's a good 2.5" HDD brand that runs powered off firewire?
I keep seeing these no-name enclosures. I know the Iogear runs
powered off USB 2.0, though I haven't tried it.
\_ 2.5" HDD brand or 2.5" enclosure brand? Most enclosures are
about the same; just make sure you get one with an Oxford 911
chipset. |
| 2003/2/8-11 [Recreation/Computer/Games, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:27348 Activity:moderate |
2/8 I'm going on a digital photography jaunt soon and I need a simple
way to store a large amount of images from my compact flash cards.
Is there some sort of device (say 10G of space) that would allow
me to transfer files from the CF cards? I don't want to purchase
a laptop for this purpose alone, and I also don't want to buy
several gigs worth of CF.
\_ you need a CF->CD Burner. lemme know if you find out that this
exists
\_ uh, no, he needs CF->HD. There are a number of such devices.
\_ http://www.interactivemediacorp.com/mediaxchange.html
http://www.mindsatwork.net
\_ http://www.dpreview.com Look at Storage and Media forum. You
are looking for something called Digital Wallet. Cheapest
price without HD is about $80.
\- are you going to be near electrical power on your "jaunt"?
if not, what are you going to do to juice up non-disposable
battery powered stuff? does anyone have experience with a
solar charger? i am thinking about one for 2003 Sola Khumbu
Expedition. --psb
\- i gave this some more thought. i dont know where you are
going [what kinds of conditions you will be facing] or
how long you will be gone or how many pix you expect to
take, but i think a not unreasonable idea is to beg/borrow/
steal as many compact flash/micro drives as you can from
your friends. keep in mind some drives may not work at
altitude, and i'd be a little nervous about carrying all
on one potentially fragile digital wallet ... especially
under harsh conditions ... altitude, dusty, crossing
streams etc. are you sure you will need 10gigs? i think
jpegs shot at 2-3megs are pretty decent quality and that is
300+ shots on a 1gb microdrive. if you were an associate of
and you had reasonable liquidity and not a history of being
ass, i would probably loan you my digital media in return
for lunch or even a good postcard. if we are talking about
a 3month trip, of course that is a different matter.--psb
\_ A microdrive is more fragile than a Digital Wallet. Even
if the Wallet fails, the hard disk inside will likely still
be usable. -tom
\_ it'd be cool to be able to use an iPod to this end.
\_ or an XBox!
\_ well... I made the iPod remark in light of psb's
"what about electricity" comment. ok tnx.
\_ Yeah, but with an XBox it's a sleek looking digital
entertainment center, and you'd also be able store
your photos on it for just $200 and you'd be socking
it to Microsoft. Modchips rule.
\_ how is buying products from Microsoft "socking it
to Microsoft"?
\_ supposedly Xboxes are sold at a loss.
\_ of course if you buy one microsoft gets to add
1 to the numbers of xboes sold column which
is a big deal. The fact that the xbox is
outselling the gamecube is killing the cube.
Also it is giving the xbox incredible amounts of
credibility.
\_ try the archos jukebox multimedia with optional card
reader. 20gb. http://www.archos.com |
| 2003/2/7-8 [Computer/SW/OS/Windows, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:27346 Activity:moderate |
2/7 What was the outcome of the "can a Dell XP CD be installed on
another machine if the first was never booted?" thread?
\_ someone was saying it was not possible with 2000. so they were
guessing it wouldn't be possible with XP. I will probaby
try it this weekend anyway, otherwise suck it up and buy xp.
\_ I don't want to buy XP. I want to SELL it. Any takers?
-mjm
\_ are you selling a dell version or a normal version? and
how much do you want?
\_ I have two Dell versions. Neither computer was ever
booted into XP. $80 each? mail me your best offer
-mjm
\_ You have to wonder whether those copies are
transferrable, install on non-Dell systems,
and/or haven't been "Dell-branded" in other ways.
And, isn't the Certificate of Authenticity usually
glued to the Dell system itself?
\_ The stickers come off. I put them on the CDROM
package. It should be transferable, given tha
I've never booted. You should be able to call
MS and demand a transfer if you've got the
certificate of authenticity.
I've never booted nor agreed to any licensing
issues. If it doesn't work for you, and MS
won't transfer the license, I'll tear up the
check.
\_ Sell it on amazon for about $130. Heck, if you're reading this,
mail mjm, buy it for $80, and make a quick $50...
\_ I'm not sure about amazon but Microsoft is known for making trouble
for people who try to resell their software. People who try to
do this on eBay get their auctions stopped.
\_ true, which is why i recommended amazon. ebay/half.com pledge
allegiance to microsoft and france. |
| 2003/2/5-6 [Computer/SW/OS/Windows, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:27312 Activity:high |
2/5 I'm trying to make a 16GB partition on an 80GB IDE disc for win98
via windows fdisk. I did this a month ago on the same hardware.
Now, it seems to either take over all 80GB of the disk or be
limited to 10GB, with no option in between. Any ideas how I could
have done this last month? The only thing that is different is
the addition of a non-bootable PCI scsi card for my scanner.
\_ Could be a bad setting in BIOS. Look at how it describes the
disk, and whether it's using LBA or some such, or not.
\_ I just answered my own question: use 20% to specify the size
instead of 16000MB. Gosh, ain't M$ software smart.
\_ hey, what's the best way to partition a 160GB hard drive?
\_ How do you plan to use it?
\_ windows xp home machine. applications, games, data
storage, maybe some music/video editing.
\_ I don't know, maybe 4 x 40GB partitions?
\_ i guess my real question is, how bad is it
to have 1 huge partition and why?
\_ 1 huge partition is often the way to go
on client machines. The only drawback is
that if you have to reinstall Windows, it's
easier if you have the Windows crap on
its own partition. I would advise against
partitioning unless there's something
specific you're trying to accomplish. -tom
\_ Don't you mean "when" you have to
reinstall windows.
\_ 5 GB windows, 35 GB apps/games, 120 GB porn. |
| 2003/1/31-2/1 [Computer/SW/Languages/Java, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:27264 Activity:high |
1/31 Soda hosted web site on slashdot:
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/01/31/1436205&mode=flat&tid=12
\- the dumbass got an A- in 7A. |
| 2003/1/24-25 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:27188 Activity:nil |
1/24 Is there a cheap (free?) way to convert avi and wmv to VCD format?
\_ http://www.vcdhelp.com |
| 2003/1/15-16 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:27101 Activity:kinda low |
1/15 A few months back there was a really useful thread about brands of
CD recordable media. I have had problems recording music CD's with
Apple iTunes on a Powerbook (any tips?) - they can be seen in my home
CD player and my computer, but not in a Thinkpad, several other PC's,
or my car CD player. The recommendation a few months ago was
Mitsui Gold-on-Gold, but I can't find them cheaper than about $1/disc.
I am looking for a solid middle ground for a CD-R brand since most
discs end up selling for about $0.10 each (on sale) in spindles of
50 or so. Suggestions?
\_ I'm using fry's gq (great quality) brand cd-rs and they work
fine in my mac, athlon, cd player (sony) and my dvd player.
Since gq spindles are so damn cheap you might want to give
them a shot.
\_ Check out this forum every now and then:
http://forums.anandtech.com/categories.cfm?catid=40
Whenever there's a blank cd deal, someone always chimes in on
which manufacturing plant made the CD. So stock up when a good
one is on sale. |
| 2003/1/15 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:27100 Activity:high |
1/15 any basis to this:
http://www.musiccdsettlement.com/english/default.htm
You can get money back if you bought a CD in teh last 5 years?
\- well look at the cluase that triggers if too many people
file. i.e. another case of class action suits only benefitting
the lawyers --psb |
| 2003/1/11-13 [Computer/SW/OS/FreeBSD, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:27071 Activity:high |
1/11 A power outage caused my LINUX computer to crash and fsck can't fix
the disk because of a bad superblock. I tried everything in
the fsck and e2fsck and nothing fixes the bad superblock. Any
suggestions for fixing things or partially recovering data?
\_ superblock is repeated every 5000 blocks or something like that.
you can use some tool (something like mkfs... ask MOTD for detail)
to get a list of it. Chances are, you will have a working
superblock. Then, you use fsck manually specify the superblock
you just found. I personally has gone though this many times, and
felt that Linux is a lot more fragile than I would like because
of this reason.
\_ Ok, not trying to start another FreeBSD vs Linux flame war but
somebody has to ask. Did Linux people wrote they own filesystem
or did they borrowed heavily from *BSD?
\_ sometimes, mke2fs creates backup superblocks? did it?
also, I think the ext3 file system is more durable (next time)
\_ fsck -b 32 (see man pages) Or use a journalled file system
\_ Sometimes you can mount bad filesystems read-only and extract
data. I was able to do this on a FreeBSD partition with hard
errors and extract a fair amount of data before the disk
stopped responding altogether. YMMV.
\_ Just wondering, were you using ext3 or any of other journaling
file systems at the moment?
\_ Oh dear, another person learns the hard way that linux isn't
production quality. Eventually you kids will figure it out and
move on to real OS's with real file systems or you'll stop putting
useful data on bad OS's, at least. No one ever think it'll happen
to them.... Ext2 is a POS. Ext3 is a POS+bad journaling. Do not
trust any valuable data on these filesystems. Valuable means
you wouldn't /bin/rm it yourself. My cheap ass employer puts many
many terabytes of very valuable data on ext2 with no backups. We
lose data all the time on those systems but not on the real ones.
\_ My brother-in-law started a new job, sort of night-watchman
for their computer systems. A power-outage caused
crashes (UPS wasn't regularly tested) Only later did they
find data had been corrupted. Something to do with the
type of cheap linux disk and cache flushing or something.
\_ is there a semi-formal discussion of this anywhere?
something you can point the money/management people in
company to?
\_ Please give some examples of better filesystems.
\_ These people sound like FreeBSD bigots. I bet they have
UFS in mind. Still, not even UFS will save you from a disk
crash.
\_ No, but ext2fs at least is by default mounted async b/c
of the slow metadata updates (rm -r/tar x taking forever)
Async + power outage = major fs problems. If you mount
sync, your performance goes to shit. Ext3 and FFS +
soft updates both solve this problem.
\_ No. I wrote the "Oh dear" comment. I don't have *any*
Freebsd systems. You sound like a linux zealot defending
your beloved POS at all costs with no sense. Ext3 is a
huge joke. When you take a POS ext2 system which will
lose data on an idle system and "bolt on" a crappy wannabe
\_ Please give examples of better filesystems
pseudo-journaling system like Ext3 you don't get a JFS,
you get a crappy ext2 FS with crappy bolted on journaling.
His disk was probably bad *before* the disk crash and he
didn't know because he hadn't power cycled in months. He
likely didn't have a disk crash from the power outage. He
probably had an ext2 barf all over his disk earlier and
it didn't show until he needed to get that super block.
\_ Ok, I'll bite. What makes ext3 a "pseudo journaling"
file system and why its journaling is considered as
"crappy bolted on journaling"?
\_ Please give examples of filesystems better than etx3
\_ reiser?
\_ vxfs. wafl. xfs (real xfs)
\_ if you're talking about Linux file systems, ext3
is the safest choice and it is "blessed" by the
leading kernel developers. I disagree with the rants
about ext2/ext3 here. We used ext2 at work. We had
power outages. Did we have to wait for hours for
fsck to complete? Yes. Did we lose any data? No.
Ok, maybe we were lucky. Now we're using ext3. We
had no problems with it whatsoever. We never had
to fsck a file system, never lost any data. And
by the way, vxfs is available on Linux too,
as a part of Veritas foundation suite, if you'd
like to use a "real" file system..
\_ Thanks, I like your practical viewpoint.
\_ If your data is important to you, you will use RAID. Disk failures
happen under any O/S and there is nothing you can do about it
but use redundancy. Anyone who tells you otherwise is full of crap.
\_ I wouldn't stop at RAID. You need to backup your RAID too.
A single RAID box could be taken out by a power surge. |
| 2003/1/9 [Computer/SW/Apps/Media, Computer/HW/Display, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:27038 Activity:nil |
1/8 http://www.spodesabode.com/content/article/highheels |
| 2003/1/5-6 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:26995 Activity:moderate |
1/5 Why aren't newsgroups working?
\_ because the news server is off/not-accessible.
\_ power is off in Evans this weekend, maybe the
news server happens to be in Evans
>agate.berkeley.edu, aka <DEAD>news.berkeley.edu<DEAD>, the USENET news server,
>suffered a major disk failure this afternoon. My current best guess
>for ETR is Saturday afternoon, given the time for hardware replacement
>and restore. Many apologies for the inconvenience.
> |
| 2003/1/4-5 [Computer/SW/Apps/Media, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:26990 Activity:high |
1/4 Is there a reason why a card reader (compact flash or smartmedia)
would be limited to 1.5Mbps? Is it a function of the media or
something to do with the USB connection? How does an iPod get
around this limit?
\_ maximum speed of USB 1.1 is 1.5 Mbps. Firewire card readers exist.
As for iPods: 1. they use Firewire, not USB. 2. they use HDDs, not
flash. What the heck are you talking about?
\_ Maximum speed of USB 1.1 is 12 Mbps >> 1.5 Mbps. I know
that iPods use firewire; I asked because the hardware I'm
talking about is a Microdrive (type II CF), which probably
isn't dissimilar to a normal harddrive. I'm basically
wondering if I can achieve a higher throughput with a
different cardreader (eg, with firewire), or if it will be
the same because of a limitation in the compact flash spec.
\_ iPod drives are generally faster than Microdrives but the
limiting factor is the limitation of USB. iPod's Firewire
connection runs at up to 400Mb/s while USB 1.1 only runs
at 12Mb/s (whole order of magnitude diff).
\_ I've seen some USB2.0 card readers, and the fastest
is 6MBps, which falls well short of the possible max
USB2.0 speed of 60MBps, so there's got to be an issue
with the card specification as well.
\_ sorry, I misread (and meant) MBps, not Mbps. Firewire CF
readers are faster, yes. |
| 2002/12/31 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:26947 Activity:high |
12/30 What's the best way in linux to delete or wipe the Master Boot
Record of a hard disk. I want to send it somewhere with nothing
on it. essentially the way a HDD comes from the factory.
\_ cat </dev/zero >/dev/hda (or /dev/hdb, or whatever) will wipe
\_ Is there a Linux equivalent?
the entire disk, including the MBR. Be careful.
\_ run FDISK /MBR
\_ What happens if i run "lilo -u" and I had no MBR backup? |
| 2002/12/30-31 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:26944 Activity:nil |
12/30 What should I use to copy DVD to VCD?
\_ You can find out details on this and other related issues at
http://www.fbi.com
\_ you mean http://www.fbi.gov genius? and to answer the OP's question,
see http://www.doom9.org |
| 2002/12/30 [Computer/SW/Apps/Media, Computer/HW/Memory, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:26942 Activity:nil |
12/28 wanted, dongle that speaks USB and firewire for the purpose of reading
and writing to the following media: CF-1, CF-2, MicroDrive, SmartMedia,
SD/MMC, and Memory Stick.
\_ Why do men want what they can't have?
\_ Because he's too stupid to realize he can't have it.
\_ I want world peace. |
| 2002/12/28-30 [Computer/SW/OS/Linux, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:26925 Activity:high |
12/27 Anyone know of a four port IDE controller card that's well supported
under linux? Yes, I've already STFW. -dans
\_ promise, though i can't stand them
\_ I can't stand Promise easier. In fact, I'm having major
grief with a Promise card as we speak. I looked on their
site, and they don't appear to list any four channel cards
(except for a serial ATA card, but the drives I've got are
plain vanilla ATA drives). I see a number of two channel
cards (total of four disks). Did I miss something? -dans
\_ Their raid controllers. I've used a couple without much
mishap, but their plain ATA controllers, I've had die very
frequently. --scotsman
\_ Yeah, I've googled a bit more and found the SX4000, which
it seems promise has purged from its site. There is the
considerablly more expensive SX6000, which has two ports
I don't need. Also seems questionable as to whether the
SX4000 is supported under linux. -dans
\_ Check that, the SX4000 is not supported under Linux in
any way that I could consider remotely accepatable.
any way that I could consider remotely acceptable. -dans
\_ Acard.
\_ According to Acard's site, they support Redhat, Suse, and
TurboLinux. Do you know of anyone that has gotten their four
channel RAID card working with a stock Linux kernel? -dans
\_ They have a rpm with the source for the kernel
module. Just grab that and compile for your distro.
\_ 3ware has cards that support up to 8 disks, raid & jbod.
\_ Yup, 3ware's cards kick butt. Alas, they are pricey. Was
wondering if there was anyone else in the market. But they
have an honest to hoyle open source driver, and that may
convince me to give them my money. -dans
\_ "honest to hoyle"
\_ beware older 3ware cards. Do *not* save yourself a buck
buying an older card. I've lost hundreds of gigs of data to
older 3ware cards. No problems yet on the newer ones. Yet.
\_ Define 'older' please. I was looking at an Escalade
7500-4. The only thing I'm aware of that is newer are
the 8500 series which are serial ATA -dans
\_ I asked before, but looks like it got nuked, are the 7500
series cards sufficiently new? The only other 3ware cards
I see are the 8xxx cards, which are serial ATA. -dans
\_ I don't get the "hoyle" reference. pls explain.
\_ honest to hoyle, same as honest to goodness or honest to god.
In this case, an honest to hoyle OS driver as opposed to a
braindead binary-only driver. -dans
\_ rock on, geek god. |
| 2002/12/23 [Computer/HW/Drives, Computer/SW] UID:26894 Activity:nil |
12/23 It seems that my "virtual" colo doesn't have an fstab or an mtab.
(not surprising i guess, since i don't really have my own physical
hard drive). Anyone know of a way for me to install "quota"
functionality without being able to change my fstab? Do you think
I would break shit if i removed mtab (currently a link to /proc/mounts)
and replaced it with a plain text file exactly the same but with a
txt file containing the same info except with the quota tag too? |
| 2002/12/23-24 [Finance/Banking, Transportation/Car, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:26893 Activity:insanely high |
12/23 What's the best way to destroy CDRs? The best practical way?
\_ Sissors.
\_ Toss it out the window while driving along on the freeway.
There's no way any one will look there.
\_ The feds can and will stop traffic to recover
the cds. Best way is the next post if you are
currently being watched. If not go for either
the commerical grinders or scissors. BTW, the
best soln. to the problem of destroying cdrs
is to encrypt the cdrs and keep the private
key on easy to destroy magnetic media (or
equivalent). If the feds come for you just
trash the private key (make sure its suitably
long that they can't brute force it within
what most judges would consider required for
\_ Depends on how small the pieces are and whether
all of the pieces that contain the info you want
are available. A good practice is to cut the cds
into several (8 or so) pieces and to stick some
a "speedy trial"). This way, they will never
be able to recover the data, and without the
data there can be no conviction.
\_ Steel trash can, well-ventilated area, lighter fluid.
\_ the coating with the data is some kind of polymer. find the
right solvent, and dissolve it.
\_ HCl ought to do the trick
\_ these two solutions almsot certainly have environmental
and health consequences. -tom
\_ kill the elves! - sarumon
\_ bah! environment, health... you liberal treehugger!
\_ Last time I checked, the polymer contains Cyanide, not something
you really want to dissolve and allow the fluid go anywhere, no
do you really want to burn it and inhale the gas.
\_ Scissors. [spelling corrected --motd spelling nazi]
\_ you can still extract data from cut CDs right?
\_ Depends on how small the pieces are and the number
of the pieces that are required to reassemble
incriminating info. A good practice is to cut the
cds into several (8 or so) pieces and to stick some
of the pieces in the trash, then in recycle and
then ditch some at work and others at the mall.
This makes it really hard for anyone to get at
the data while making it pretty easy for you to
dispose of it. Note that this strategy isn't
going to work against the feds.
\_ why? because they search all those places
or something?
\_ the OP could be under suveillance *right*
*now* with the feds pouncing on every ounce
of waste he produces, whether at work, at
home, mid-car drive, or anywhere else.
\_ Sander.
\_ Microwave.
\_ Note this can option can have adverse health
consequences.
\_ place upside down on parking lot, pirouette.
\_ paint the cover with AOL logo.
\_ There are commercial grinders available that will batch-destroy
a large set of CDs reliably.
\- is this is same person involved in the post-browse cleanup?
are you involved in child p0rn or something? --psb
\_ completely new OP |
| 2002/12/21-22 [Computer/HW/Display, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:26879 Activity:moderate |
12/20 My iPod<->PC rate is about 2megs/second. That is a lot less than the
400mbps/second for a typical firewire. Is there a reason why?
\_ Possibly inefficient implementation of PCI.
\_ you're writing to a disk
\_ UpdateallyourdriversP |
| 2002/12/20 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:26871 Activity:kinda low |
12/19 I downloaded Easy CD-DA extractor to rip an audio CD. This is the CD
with one 40 minute track that I'm trying to break it up. After
reaching the end, it chokes and dies, and says something about
corrupted track. And erases the entire .wav file. I know there're
problems with the track near the end. Is there another ripper that
will let you choose how many minutes of the audio to rip? Or one
that's smarter about just not reading the corrupted part? Thanks.
\_ Undelete the .wav and go on with life.
\_ the deleted file doesn't show up in the recycle bin.
If I understand correctly, only files deleted by an user
shows up there. I'll try Exact Audio. Thanks.
\_ that's not what undelete is. seek clue.
\_ Amazing how the mass availability of windows crap has so
utterly destroyed clue scores. STFW for "undelete FAT32"
and let us know how it went.
\_ I already told when you posted before: Exact Audio Copy.
http://www.exactaudiocopy.de |
| 2002/12/12-13 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:26798 Activity:nil |
12/12 I'm looking for a site like http://vcdtraders.com that sells vintage american (70s, 80s) XXX movies in VCD format. I can find plenty that sells them in VHS tapes. That's useless for me. I want them in VCD format. I know that it's bootleg and violate copyright laws. This is a serious request. I've done extensive searching and can't find any. \_ Sounds like a good way to make some cash on the side. Seriously, ever consider contacting the publishers of the tapes and offering a VCD burning service? If you don't mind being a miserable child-molesting PORN PEDDLER, that is -John |
| 2002/12/9 [Computer/HW/Laptop, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:26756 Activity:high |
12/8 I'm building a Quiet PC. Anybody have opinions about the
Seagate Barracuda IV? It's supposedly the quietest drive
on the market. I'm also considering putting a 5400 RPM
Western Digital drive in a SilentDrive enclosure. But
the performance won't be as fast.
\_ Performance is loud. If you want performance you don't get
quiet. Let's be honest here, you don't need performance.
\_ i have a silent pc with a barracuda iv. works fine by me.
it is a little eerie when the computer makes no noise.
\_ Wimp. If it doesn't scream like a banshee it isn't a computer.
If you want quiet get a Palm Pilot.
\_ Hmm, ever used a laptop before?
\_ My laptop sometimes seems louder than my desktop. I *asked*
for a cool and efficient celeron, I *got* a monster that
sucks power and makes noise.
\_ Next time, tell Santa the exact model numbers to get. |
| 2002/12/6-9 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:26737 Activity:low |
12/6 Looking for recommendations for an encryption tool to protect files
and disks. Prefer something open source, that has been subject to
public scrutiny. Ideally, freeware. Must be Windows XP compatible.
\_ use a one time pad, and put the key on a floppy disk up your ass.
\_ most asses other than yours are not large enough to accommodate
a sufficient number of floppy disks to encrypt a hard drive with
an OTP, and repeating an OTP is quite insecure.
\_ one of those USB hard drive keychain things would fit
up an ass.
\_ PGP |
| 2002/11/29-30 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:26665 Activity:nil |
11/28 can dvd burners burn store bought DVDs w/ standard software or do you
need elite pirated software?
\_ doesn't elite pirated software just mean a pirated copy of
standard software? anyway, you can't directly copy store bought
DVD movies; you'd have to get some tools to decrypt the DVD if
it's encrypted, yank out the audio/video streams you need,
make sure the stuff you want fits onto a DVDR, and then burn it.
not sure about the Xbox/PS2 DVD burning...
\_ http://www.doom9.org . the documents there have a blind-men-feeling-
up-an-elephant quality, but if you can do cs at berkeley, you
should be able to puzzle things out.
\_ burn store-bought DVDs? What are you asking? Yes, you can burn
to store-bought DVD[+-]RW? media. Where else would you buy it?
Now, if you're asking if you can *copy* commercial DVDs, then no
not exactly. Commercial DVDs are typically pressed dual-layer
discs; consumer hardware can burn only a single layer, so you
either need to recompress or split the movie into parts. And
elite pirated software? That would imply that there's commercial
software to do such things. |
| 2002/11/28-30 [Politics/Domestic/Gay, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:26663 Activity:high |
11/28 This is pretty gross:
http://csua.org/u/628 - danh
\_ Not to excuse him, but he sounds like a damn good teacher.
\_ Why do you mention this? Do you not understand that the type
mostly likely to be molesting kids is the type who is going to
go out of their way to spend time with kids? It's kind of a
"well, duh" thing. None of that shit makes him a good teacher
anyway. Weirdo.
\_ a guy who teaches 1/2/3 grades and went to Mills is
either gay or trouble or both.
\_ "a guy who ... went to Mills" is all we needed to know.
I wonder how many years he was surrounded by man hating
dykes fingering each other all day while he got nothing?
\_ does that make one gay, or just a misogynist?
\_ neither. it obviously makes one a child molester.
\_ people with normal IQ do not become teachers unless they
are turned on by kids. Almost all good teachers are pedophile.
\_ Does this just apply to men, or women as well?
\_ just men. women have sub-par IQs and teaching is a
traditional woman's job anyway so it's ok to be a stupid
woman teacher. it's expected.
\_ "He helped out with the school's clown troupe"... c'mon, everyone
should have seen this coming a mile away.
\_ Did he play the Kiddy Lovin' Clown? C'mere and sit on Kinko's
lap! |
| 2002/11/28 [Finance/Banking, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:26661 Activity:nil |
11/28 Does anyone use http://BMGMusicService.com for music? I've noticed more than once that they advertise a deal (e.g., "Buy 1, Get 3 free") but when I actually put the 3rd free CD in my cart it comes up as a charged item. Is this simple incompetence or something more devious? \_ Because the RIAA is so techie smart this must be a devious plot! |
| 2002/11/27 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:26648 Activity:high |
11/26 Related to below... Does the A1000 support hardware RAID? I've got one
sitting around in the office that I haven't bothered to plug in yet...
\_ No, but Veritas Volume Manager works great.
\_ You are wrong. A1000 DOES support hardware RAID. It's build
into it.
\_ Yes and No are the two answers I've heard so far...
\_ The difference between the A1000 and the D1000 is that
the A1000 supports hardware RAID. -tom
\_ but both are buggy POS devices.
\_ A1000 firmware and software is indeed fairly buggy
and requires lots of careful patching. However, I am
not sure how your comment appies to D1000 which is a
dumb JBOD. It doesn't contain any intelligence or
require any software to work by definition.
\_ the D1000 is a jbod then they plugged a RAID
controller in the thing and called it the A1000.
they expected anyone who bought the jbod version
to use disksuite or veritas VM. -guy from sun
\_ Maybe it was just me but after 2 RMAs and an
electric shock I'm not going near any more A/D1000
units. Both were crap. I like the 5200s though.
\_ I have one that's worked flawlessly for a few
years now. Performance is not super and there
are better products for the price, but I haven't
had any issues with it. --dim |
| 2002/11/27-28 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:26645 Activity:high |
11/26 More on raid: My company currently has about 50 TB of raw storage
and needs about 8-10 more TB over the next year. IDE is ok as long
as it hot swaps and can be mirrored or raid5. Performance is *not*
an issue. I'm looking for prebuilt systems with vendor support. I'm
already the only sysadmin for 100+ servers, 3 locations, and 50TB. I
don't want to build my own boxes and I don't want to ever have to do
anything more than set an IP, (maybe config and) export a FS, and
walk away. Cost is an issue. Maintainability (is that a word?) is an
issue. Performance is not an issue. Reliability is an issue. I can
get a Netapp for $20k/TB. Know of anything in the $10k-14k/TB range
that fits my other needs? Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! I really
appreciate all the advice given in the other thread. --overworked SA
\_ Bluearc? Netexpress?
\_ If you want reliability and maintainability, go with NetApp.
Anything cheaper than that and you are going to pay for it
in maintenance time.
in maintenance time. You can get a good used 700 series netapp
for cheap. -ausman
for cheap: just look on ebay. -ausman
\_ maintainability is a word. ask vadim about netapp. |
| 2002/11/26-27 [Computer/HW/CPU, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:26639 Activity:very high |
11/26 A serious question about this: http://www.apple.com/xserve I have zero experience with recent apple hardware or software. My company needs rock solid NFS hosts at low cost. Performance isn't an issue. The clients will be Solaris 2.7 and Linux 2.4. Do any of you have any experience with this? Does it sound good/bad to you and why? Any info, urls, whatever is much appreciated. BTW, this isn't a religious issue. I just want something that will work and isn't going to cost me an arm and a leg like EMC, Hitachi, or IBM and I sure as hell don't want to start building my own. Thanks! \_ I'd be wary of any ATA array. IDE just isn't designed for large file service projects. Also, this sort of thing looks like super overkill for what you describe. I suggest finding a good supplier of prebuilt *nix boxes, preferably something running a BSD tcp stack for the sake of NFS. I found a fibre channel array from http://corpsys.com that runs $1700 per .5TB. Had no trouble with it yet under windows 2k, mandrake, and freebsd. Alternatively, you may want to look at the Sun A1000 line. --scotsman \_ I would not consider the XServe as a general-purpose server at this point. Apple just doesn't have a server pedigree (except a pedigree of abandoning their server products). -tom \_ apple's xserve is an incredible piece of hardware, but overkill for what you need. build a box from http://pixelusa.com. also, dell has $1k 1U servers with one year of on site support and two more years of by-mail support. \_ Solaris has a great NFS support and the most featureful NFS implementation. Why would you want to serve Solaris client with anything other than a Solaris server? \_ because Sun's low-end server hardware sucks. \_ In what respect? Do you really need 3GHz Athlon CPU on an NFS server? Take a look at Sun Fire V120, a very decent low-end server. \_ their hardware also is unreasonably expensive, as is support as well as people who know solaris. \_ A configuration with 1 GB RAM, 72 GB of disk, and a 650-mhz processor is $6000. You can get 3 much faster Intel boxes for that much. \_ What they gain in speed, they loose in software robustness and support. Specially, if you need an NFSserver, the question should be a no brainer. Also, who pays the list price for Sun hardware? Talk to a salesman. They'll slash the price by up to 50% depending on how deep your pockets are. \_ Mylex DAC960 controller. You can put together a real good x86 server for <<< $5k. Equivalent performance (and yes reliability) from Sun is gonna cost you three times as much, at least. And don't tell me Sun equipment is more reliable; some of my clients run thousands of high-load servers, and the Compaqs and Dells and other PC boxes of their world don't suffer any more outages. -John \_ I don't want to 'put together' 20+ new boxes. \_ ah. nweaver. \_ what software robustness and support do they lose? only if you screw together some parts from Fry's. \_ You get incomplete and unstable NFS support and funky RAID software. See the original poster's requirements. In addition to the IDE flakiness that someone mentioned, AFAIK, you can't mirror the boot disk on the xserve since it does not have an internal RAID controller and OS X probably does not support putting / on a software RAID device. Would you really like to take your server down for hours when the boot disk fails? If you're looking for a cost effective SCSI array consider the new Sun D2 (JBOD) or the 3310 series (hardware RAID). \_ Read the link above: OS X supports RAID devices. \_ But it doesn't support putting your root file system on software RAID. \- does apples weird file system with its weird case issues manifest themselves over nfs? this is a real annoyance for me when Makefile = makefile, configure = Configure etc. ok tnx. --psb \_ Forget software RAID anyway. Performance *is* an issue, although it may not be the determining issue. Buy yourself a hardware RAID card and stick it on a cheap PC with a gigabit NIC. --dim |
| 2002/11/20 [Science/Space, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:26584 Activity:nil |
11/18 Where is the best place to find quiet/silent power supplies,
CPU cooling fans, and HD enclosures?
\_ http://www.pcpowercooling.com
\_ Papst makes good fans, but they're a pain to get online.
http://www.papst.de -John
\_ http://csua.org/u/5af
[originally posted by ax - shorturld]
\_ Ya know I was starting to get into all this over clocking, super
cooling, quiet this and special case material that stuff when it
struck me that this whole concept is just 'wrong'. These are
consumer level devices. They shouldn't require special cooling
units, water pumps, super quiet extra expensive fans, etc. I've
decided the whole thing is a big scam and I'm not going to toss
away good money on the computer version of Rice Boy Rocketry. --!RBR
\_ the quiet fans from pcpowercooling are about the same price
as you'd pay for a loud, generic fan you'd find at compusa
\_ A while back our work had a power outage. It was amazing how
much quieter the office was without all those computers on.
Ever since I have been a believer in quiet computer case design.
\_ Lots of people find that even non-overclocked are still very
noisy, so this question is still relevant.
\_ That's the point I was trying to make. Why the hell are
computers so god damned loud and hot in the first place?
All the excess heat and noise implies a fundamental design
flaw. --!RBR
\_ Apple Cube
\_ Yeah but I want something that runs software.
\_ I think this is why the market for PCs sucks.
After complaining and receiving a suggestion
for something better, the complainer says,
"Oh, that won't work for _me_." My iMac runs
all the software I want. It's also really
quiet -- no fan.
\_ I was working on my laptop with its disk spun down and the fan
off. It was nice to not hear the incessant racket.
\_ I actually find our PVR/satellite receiver to be annoyingly loud.
Fan, hard drive, odd high-frequency blips...the older I get the
more sensitive I get to these things.
\_ aaron! where did you find your uber elite water cooled machine
that thing is RAD, it makes absolutely no noise.
\_ http://www.koolance.com maybe? -=Aubie
\_ I just hooked up the fan in my power supply to a pot, and used
that to control the speed of the fan. Cranked the fan speed as
high as I can and for it to stay inaudible. Ref
http://www.silentpcreview.com . |
| 2002/11/7-8 [Computer/HW/CPU, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:26459 Activity:high |
11/7 What kind of computer do they use to store financial data in
say Wall Street or in banks? Cray? SGI? Sun? INTEL???
\_ IBM.
\_ Store? Probably IBM. I think either the Nasdaq or NYSE runs trading
through an HP farm though.
\- does anyone know what kind of computer the FED MASTER COMPUTER is?
The one at the bottom of a mine in colpepper, virginia? This is
the computer that tracks the reserve requirements of all the
usa banks. --psb
\_ They don't use a 'computer' generally. They use SANS and high end
DAS and NAS devices from companies like EMC and Hitachi. When you
get into high end 100% uptime computing environments you stop seeing
computers and start seeing discrete components: some sort of app
server/farm connected via multiple high speed fiber links to SANs.
\_ Sorry, what do SANS, DAS and NAS stand for?
\_ http://www.google.com/search?q=nas+san+das
\_ SANs -> Storage Area Networks
\_ say your FC mesh
NAS -> Network Attached Storage (ie file servers)
\_ your storage appliance, like netapp.
Don't know what DAS stands for
\_ direct attached storage
\_ disk on your lameass POS linux box. |
| 2002/11/7-8 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:26452 Activity:high |
11/6 Solaris 2.7, E6500 with lots of disks. One disk up and died but
I didn't get the serial number dumped in the log like usually happens.
Is there some way to get the serial# for the dead disk? I know the
device path and it's entry in 'format' and a bunch of other stuff.
I'm remote so making lights flash won't help. All help appreciated!
\_ This is why you keep logs of this kind of thing around...
\_ luxadm ? why do you need the serial number? You mean WWN?
or part number? how about 3rd party tool sysinfo?
I dont understand. If you know the disk, maybe start accessing it
to make it generate another error in your "log"?
You also can often look at the format output for disk type
and match it in the FE handbook or sun system handbook
or the web to get the part#.
\_ OP: my fault, I wasn't clear. I need the serial # because that's
the only unique identifier on the outside of the disk. I'll be
sending someone else there to pull the drive out for replacement
and need a very clear and easy way to ID the drive the barely
technical person can deal with and not fuck up.
\_ make it blink for him. sure you're remote, but you could
certainly make it blink until disk is found. |
| 2002/11/5 [Computer, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:26410 Activity:nil |
11/4 Yet another reason to avoid helping your friends out with their home
computers: http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/55/27920.html |
| 2002/10/23-25 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:26297 Activity:high |
10/23 On modern disks, where should you place swap? At the beginning?
at the end (like on old ide disks)? Can we be assured that mfr's
think "end" is the edge of the platter? I wanted to know in general
and in the case of "20 Gig Maxtor drive". Also, I do infact
reliaze that it probably doesn't matter, but theoretically where
should it go? Thx.
\_ experiment -don't know either.
\_ no, just sick of people asking questions that they're
simply too lazy to take care of themselves. The
answer would be: "it depends, but probably doesn't
matter"
\_ i tend to place it next to partitions used for filesystems that
I might want to resize later on. easier to resize swap than to
resize another filesystem to rearrange space to make /var, for
exmaple, bigger. on some OS's you can even stop swapping on a
particular partition without rebooting (as on Solaris). --Jon
\_ I put it near the beginning, but these days when main memory
is 1 gb or greater and much much faster than disk, it doesn't
really matter that your placement will make vm a bit faster,
since the overhead is just so damn high.
\_ so it makes absolutly no performance boost to put swap at
"optimal" placement will be unnoticable.
the edge of the platter?
\_ if you're swapping, you've already lost. -tom
\_ Even on a budget system the disk runs at 7200 rpm and
has a 2 or 4 mb buffer. Whatever speedup you get by
"optimal" placement will be unnoticable with such a
disk. The thing to worry about these days is getting
the fastest ddr ram you can find and making sure that
it is interleaved properly.
source of latency anyway). Putting the swap near the center means
that you're more likely on average to swing the head less.
`\_ Even the slowest RAM is 8 orders of magnitude faster
than the fastest disk.
\_ Try 5 orders of magnitude. Your point is still
valid, however.
\_ huh, isn't the disk access going to be faster at the outer
parts of the platter? look at the math, i degree of turn on
the inner goes thru less distance than on the outer edge.
\_ Aren't hard disk tracks concentric and non-uniform density
(the inner tracks have the same storage capacity as the
outer ones)? If that's the case, it shouldn't impact
performance either way.
\_ once again tho, how can you make sure that what cfdisk thinks
is "end" is what the mfr thinks is "outer edge of platter"
is there a standard to these things?
\_ That doesn't account for moving the head (which is the larger
source of latency anyway). Putting the swap near the center
means that you're more likely on average to swing the head less.
\_ this is pointless ... use the time and energy to buy more
memory or kill a unneeded application. if you are interested
in doing this to see if the difference is measureable well
then obviously you will have to measure for your hardware.
this might be an interesting way to see how good a
disk simulator is. --psb
\_ Actually, that was kind of my point. Making guesses this
deep without actually measuring the performance isn't
productive.
\_ WinXP automatically place it in the beginning 1/4-1/5 of your
partition. Not sure if that means anything. |
| 2002/9/8 [Computer/HW/CPU, Computer/HW/Display, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:25807 Activity:very high |
9/7 I'm building my own system. I've decided to get my CPU+MB from NewEgg.
What is a good place to get mem, HD, and my Geforce? As for the case,
I gotta go to Frys cuz I gotta see what the case looks like in person.
Thanks.
\_ Before ordering anything from anyone, go look at http://micropro.com.
Great prices and out of state so no taxes. I had them build 2
custom boxes which showed on time and to spec with decent parts
on the unspecified stuff.
\_ http://newegg.com seems cheaper, maybe YOU should check it out
\_ Taxes, son, taxes. I know newegg and others. Also,
newegg isn't building custom systems which micropro will
do for you. I've done the math. On some systems you
can save as much as 10 bucks if you carefully order parts
from all over the net and then you still have to build
the damned thing. "seems cheaper" is not cheaper. Just
trying to give someone some help which you're not.
\_ say I'm getting a MB with KT333 chipset. The FSB is rated 100/133,
so how much more will I gain from using DDR2700 over DDR2100? Is
DDR2700 good only when the FSB is 166? This info is not on
tomshardware by the way.
\_ 2700/CL2.0/333 >> 2100/CL2.0/266 by 0-25% depending on how
memory intensive your application (game) is. If you're building
a top end system then get the 2700/CL2.0. If you're going to go
light on the cpu, video, or some other speed related part, then
save your money across the whole system and get 2100/CL2.5. |
| 2002/9/4-5 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:25770 Activity:very high |
9/4 I've got an E450, Solaris 2.7, and a D1000. I've cabled up the scsi
the way the manual says. Shouldn't the disks show up with the format
command? Any idea what I'm missing? Thanks!
\_ boot -r # gots to look for the disks first...
\_ did 'reboot -- -r'. I don't have easy console access. I also
did 'drvconfig' followed by 'disks' which is supposed to do the
same thing they say.
\_ Sorry to hear about the console access, but my next move
would be probe-scsi and probe-scsi-all from the ok prompt.
\_ I'm trying to avoid that if possible since it requires
some travel....
\_ Won't help you much now, but you should really have
some sort of remote console access (terminal server
or serial cable) to non-local unix boxes. It's a
great help in situations like this. As it is,
unless I'm missing something, I think you're SOL,
unless there's a way to get the eeprom to recognize
new hardware on the fly. -John
\_ Not my box. Sometimes you gotta take what life
gives you and hope for the best.
\_ Make sure you're using an HVD SCSI card since D1000 is HVD SCSI
box.
\_ Hooked up to a single edged controller. The cabling exactly
matched another e450/d1000 pair I have that's working. I'm
thinking maybe the d1000 is just fucked. Running out of reasons
for this.
\_ HVD SCSI uses the same connectors as other SCSI
implementations. You could have plugged the D1000 into a
single-ended card. I'd double check the SCSI card chipset
and part number.
\_ I've got single edged scsi on addon cards which don't work
and tried the built in regular scsi. Nothing going on.
\_ The question is: Do you have a HVD SCSI card in
the system? Do you? --dim
\_ Yes. I'm desperate and trying things I'm sure won't
work bc I already tried everything I think should.
\_ HVD = High Voltage Differential as in NOT a normal Sun onboard SCSI
port. -ax
\_ Bent pin on the SCSI cable? SCSI Host ID's set to 0 or 7 on D1000?
Also, one bad disk can hang the whole SCSI bus and you will see
nothing. Finally, split the D1000 into 2 separate 6 disks pieces
using a terminator and no loop cable between the busses and see if
you can see either bus. -ax |
| 2002/8/26 [Computer/HW/Drives, Computer/SW/Unix] UID:25691 Activity:high |
8/26 How do I prevent a particular host or user from having write acess
to an NFS mounted disk? There is some rogue process tring to fill
up my disk, and I haven't been able to block it. I've tried
variations on
\_ what server os?
\_ you can prevent a certain host from writing to a volume but you
can't prevent a user from writing if the file system has been
exported in read-write mode to that host.
\- actually there is kind of a hairy way to do this with
some experimental work on nfs filter layers. the work
involves some extensions to the *_quash routines.
while it is experimental, the people doing it really know
what they are doing ... however this is probably one of
those cases where "if you have to ask, this 'solution' isnt
for you". if this is you really important you can talk to me.
ok tnx. |
| 2002/8/19 [Computer/SW/WWW/Browsers, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:25604 Activity:moderate |
8/18 anyone have a copy of the pc software "audiojacker" ?
it seems to have disappeared from the search engines
\_ what does it do? try <DEAD>highcriterion.com<DEAD> for TotalRecorder.
It might be do what you want...
\_ i get domain not found for <DEAD>highercriterion.com<DEAD>
\_ read more carefully. or just search google.
\_ it's http://highcriteria.com ... or just search google for
TotalRecorder. |
| 2002/8/5-6 [Computer/HW/Drives, Consumer/TV] UID:25494 Activity:kinda low |
8/4 Anyone used the computer projector as a movie projector (add a TV
tuner card, play DVD, etc)? How's the quality? Any recommendations?
\_ Check http://www.avsforum.com
\_ The above site is excellent. I have a Sony 1270
hooked up to a P3/800. It rocks for watching DVD's,
HDTV, playing games, etc. 120" diagonal screen. -ax
\_ i kick yerass anytime -workout phreak |
| 2002/8/4-6 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:25489 Activity:kinda low |
8/3 Are CD-RW as reliable as CD-R?
\_ In what sense? They can both get scratched, etc.
\_ in respect to tolerance to heat, humidity, etc
\_ It varies by manufacturer. You'd have to check the specs
online by maker for each product line. In general though I
suspect that under normal conditions they behave the same. |
| 2002/6/23-24 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:25175 Activity:high |
6/23 Why are the FreeBSD 4.6 .iso images less than 200 MB each?
Couldn't both of those fit on one disk?
\_ bad images?
\_ the mini iso is ~200 megs. The others are 600+ full cds.
\_ can I do a base install w/ the mini isos?
\_ no idea. I use the boot floppy method. |
| 2002/6/18 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:25135 Activity:high |
6/17 I heard that DVDs are 17Gig, but why are DVD-RW only 4 Gig?
\_ DVDs are only 6 Gigs. stfw.
\_ YOU search the fucking web. Double-sided, double-layer DVDs
can store up to 17GB.
http://www.dvdforum.org/tech-dvdprimer.htm
\_ Fuck off. I'm not the one asking the question that is asking
questions that are trivially answered by google.
\_ Well, maybe you should've just answered with "stfw"
instead of responding with a bogus answer.
\_ Well Mr. Smarty Pants, you sure showed me. This is a
lesson I won't soon forget.
1) DVD-5 - 1 Layer single side 4.7GB
2) DVD-9 - 2 Layer single side 8.5GB
3) DVD-10 - 1 Layer double side 9.4GB
4) DVD-17 - 2 Layer double side 17GB
Writers today are DVD-5 only. I'd wait till DVD-17 comes out |
| 2002/6/15 [Computer/HW, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:25104 Activity:nil |
6/14 Anyone know of any free/publicly available shoutcast/icecast servers.
(I'd run one myself but i don't have the bandwidth).
\_ yes. http://www.shoutcast.com has a list of servers
\_ I believe you are incorrect. (though i'd love for you to
prove me wrong...) |
| 2002/6/11 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:25061 Activity:kinda low |
6/10 What is "progressive scan" wrt DVD players?
\_ STFW. google "dvd faq progressive scan" +"I'm Feeling Lucky".
\_ Progressive scan de-interlaces the signal sent out of the
DVD player. However, most TVs cannot handle a progressive signal
anyway, and displays that can are often of high quality so they will
have their own de-interlacer and scaler. Progressive just means
displaying the lines of the picture on the screen one after the other
going down, instead of first displaying all the odd lines in the
picture, and then the even for every displayed frame. Try setting
your computer monitor to interlaced display (if possible) and you'll
see how crappy it looks.
http://www.hometheaterhifi.com/volume_7_4/dvd-benchmark-part-5-progressive-10-2000.html
\_ Using the digital TV's doubler entails an extra couple digital
2 analog conversions, and mitsu's doubler is not great anyhow.
And computer in interlaced is much worse than tv which uses source
material of 24 or 30 fps. |
| 2002/6/5 [Finance/Banking, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:24985 Activity:kinda low |
6/3 anyone know where to get a CD of old radio shows - like The Saint
Sgt. Preston, Dragnet, George && Gracie, that show where you hear a
gunshot and the narrator says, "That was the shot that killed <forgor
name>'s life, How do i know? because I'm ... <forgot name>"
\_ The last show you mentioned is "The Lives of Harry Lime,"
a radio follow-up to the movie "The Third Man" --- do a
Google search for CDs or MP3s. |
| 2002/5/22-23 [Computer/HW/Laptop, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:24915 Activity:very high |
05/22 Any recommendations for a utility to totally erase a PC laptop
disk's contents. I'm selling my laptop and want my files etc.
totally wiped.
\_ Destroy the disk and grind it up. Only way. For those who
don't have top secret stuff, merely reformatting and filling
with emac dists will do just fine.
\_ There may be something better but one of the tools included with
PGP for windows is a wiper. It writes seven layers of random
bits over every selected file, as I recall. -- ulysses
\_ Would this naive approach be secure enough: re-partition the whole
disk to several FAT partitions then fill up each partition with a
single file containing 0xFF until the partition is full?
\_ if you're really worried, supposedly you can scan for variations
in gauss levels of each bit and tell if it was recently changed.
There are some government protocols for disposing of harddrives.
If you're this worried, though, i've got a bomb shelter i'd like
to sell you.
\_ I remember reading somewhere that data can be read off hard
drive that's been wiped(written random bits on) up to six
times, which is probably why the "wiper" program mentioned
above wipes it seven times.
\_ a layer of 0xff, a layer of 0x00, a layer of 0xff, ...
until you feel comfortable about the gauss levels mentioned
above.
\_ The above 'naive' approach is more than enough for a simple sale to
a private individual. In theory the data can still be recovered by
a professional data recovery firm that will charm thousands of
dollars with no promises of recovery. I'm sure the FBI,etc can
recover it though as they have essentially infinite resources but
I don't think this is a serious concern.
\_ what's wrong with just repartitioning the drive?
\_ Data is still there. Only partition and file tables are wiped.
\_ If you're so worried, why don't just keep your existing disk
and replace it with a cheap ass disk you can get at Fry's.
\_ for starters the 2" disk in a laptop is very expensive. !op
\_ and the time wasted in discussing all this is probably even
more than that.
\_ A 2" disk could run $150+ for even a smaller drive. I
think the motd time spent on this is about zero. Actually
I was at work for most of this thread so I got paid for it. |
| 2002/5/21-22 [Computer/HW/Drives, Computer/SW] UID:24902 Activity:high |
5/21 ant question: I have a big heirarchy of ant files
I want to define something at the base (the grandparent) ant file
but I want to be able to run from a child ant file.
How do I do this? (in Make it was "include") -brain
\_ If you have too many ants I suggest RAID.
\_ okay losers- it's the "property" tag with the "file"
attribute set. This reads in the file. -brain [formatd]
\_ property is evil. open source forever! |
| 2002/4/26 [Reference/Tax, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:24595 Activity:high |
4/26 RIAA wants to use our tax $s against us:
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-891521.html?tag=fd_top
\_ reposting slashdot topics is lame.
\_ No, only against thieves. Stop stealing music.
\_ You can rest assured that it will NOT only be used
against thieves.
\_ Ok ConspiracyGuy, who will it be used against?
\_ Stopping theivery is one thing, but the RIAA's
primary concern isn't theivery, it is fair use.
They are unhappy that current law allows you to
make a copy of a cd so that you can listen to it
in your car or on your computer. They are even
unhappier that once you buy the cd you can listen
to it as many times as you want and you can even
sell it or give it to a friend without compensating
the RIAA. Same goes for movies.
The actions and measurse they are proposing
(ex. cdr tax, new justice dept. branches) are
far to extereme if the goal is just to stop
theivery. These measures are a modern sugar and
stamp act designed to provide the RIAA/MPAA with
a continuous revenue stream at the expense of
the consumer and fair use. They want the gov.
to enforce this act so that non-compliance will
be exteremely costly.
\_ Most of this stuff is already going on in
Canada and we all admire everything Canadian,
especially their medical system, so what's
the problem?
\_ You are being sarcastic right?
\_ Well yeah but it felt good.
\_ Who's money did you expect them to use? |
| 2002/4/24 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:24563 Activity:nil |
4/23 have a scsi plextor burner (4/2/20), looking to swap for a decent
ide model, or crappy model and old 10-20g hard drive. Also have
3dfx, 3dfx2 cards free to good homes. -jor
\_ Do you know if FreeBSD has hardware acceleration for the cards? |
| 2002/4/24 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:24559 Activity:very high |
4/23 Are there any decently priced backed up storage services out there?
Talking about 5 GB.
(sorry, I didn't mean to spark off a debate on IDSG earlier)
\_ buy a 80GB drive. copy/rsync/dump/etc
\_ No. Last time there was a power outage at school, I lost
my harddrive. I'm not stupid. When I say "backed up storage"
I mean...wait for it..... "backed up storage".
\_ dumbass, where was your UPS? --Jon
\_ Buy two drives, and don't connect them to the machine
during normal usage. When you want to perform back up,
connect one and copy the files, disconnect it, then
connect the other one and copy the files, and disconnect.
Then when there's a power outage, you toast one drive as
most. It's a bit of trouble, but it works.
\_ If you really care about your data, you cannot
store you backups on magnetic media, esp. hard
drives. CD, DVD or MO is the way to go.
\_ Well, that's true. What's MO? What did people do
before there were CDRW drives?
\_ MO is Magno-Optical. MO has been around
for years, so have CDs.
\_ 5GB is a pretty trivial amount these days. Is this 5GB of
data per day or a 5GB filesystem? 5GB will fit on a DVD.
incrementals from a 5GB filesystem will fit on cdroms, easily.
You could even do snapshots to a large (cheap) disk as suggested
above. Why pay someone money to do something so trivial. I
could see it if you had 300GB of data for which you wanted
regular backups, but 5GB? --Jon
\_ 5gb? tapes are cheap for this size job. Then you'll have true
'backed up storage' just like you mean. I fail to see why this is
all so difficult for you for such a miniscule data set.
\_ Tape drives that wouldnt be total overkill for this (DLT or
AIT2 or VXA are overkill) such as say dds2, are pretty lame.
\_ Buy a DVD-R or DVD-RW drive. The A104 is ~ $400 , blanks DVDs
are ~ $3. For an outlay of $500 you will have reliable backups
that will last you years if not decades.
\_ Copy it onto soda, hahaha |
| 2002/4/24-25 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:24556 Activity:high |
4/24 Recommendations on a multi-region DVD player? I prefer to not mod
it.
\_ I prefer not to split infinitives
\_ i am going to annoeyingly post and to boldly go
whatever and werever i please(spelling errors added
for annoyance value.)
whatch now; as i misuse the semicolon. and forget
capitalization. i only reach for my shift key so
i can misuse punctuation.
\_ I speak English, not Latin, so I don't worry about it.
\_ My Aiwa is multiregion. The real thing you want to look for is a
player without Macrovision. Search Google.
\_ Most of what I found with respect to this are players modded
by small third-party companies. Are they reliable? And
what model is your Aiwa?
\_ I have a Toshiba I bought in asia which is multiregion but somehow
it still doesn't read all DVDs here. Any clue about this format
issue?
\_ REA. http://www.dvdcity.com/codefree/codefree-dvd-info.html
\_ Apex |
| 2002/4/18 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:24479 Activity:nil |
4/18 I want to burn a CD for someone that can be played as audio, but also
has some data on it. IS this the same as an "enhanced cd"? Do I
need a special burner to do this?
\_ well, I guess this answers my question:
http://www.cdpage.com/CD-ROM/enhancedcd.html |
| 2002/3/23-24 [Computer/SW/Editors/Emacs, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:24211 Activity:kinda low |
3/32 Does anyone know who to have emacs diff a buffer I'm editing and the
contents of the file as currently stored on disk?
\_ M-x diff-backup |
| 2002/3/20 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:24165 Activity:high |
3/19 don't buy from newegg, they sell dvd drives where there are no drivers
available for (from creative labs)
\_ wow, you people really need to learn English. Someone wanna make
an E190 crack for me?
\_ Uh, this seems like a Creative Labs problem. It's you're own
\_ Uh, this seems like a Creative Labs problem. It's your own
own fucking fault for not doing your homework.
\_ not really since newegg is knowingly pushing off stuff they know
doesn't work in the first place
\_ hm, maybe you should do your homework before purchasing a
product? tip: don't buy unsupported or discontinued products.
you might also want to avoid buying OEM/brown-box hardware.
doesn't newegg have a return policy anyway? |
| 2002/3/16-18 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:24129 Activity:moderate |
3/15 Why doesn't soda use a raid for its disks? It seems kind of
wasteful to mirror each drive (and only on a nightly basis).
\_ want to buy CSUA a reasonable raid card? --jon
\_ what about software RAID, are there reasons for not doing it?
\_ yes, they all suck for anything but striping/mirroring
well unless you pay for something real, like VERITAS
\_ striping and mirroring. Isn't this what soda needs to do
with the disks?
\_ the argument above was that mirroring was wasteful.
the common alternative is raid-5. but software
implementations of raid-5 in SW tend to suck --Jon
\_ right, but wouldn't it be better to use software
raid for mirroring the disks instead of nightly
rsync?
\_ Yes but this isn't a professionally administered
system. -disk management guy in real world
\_ what is a "reasonable" raid card? If its in the $200
price range I'd be willing to buy the card and donate
it to the csua. - alum
\_ megaraid,mylex,adaptec |
| 2002/3/7 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:24048 Activity:nil |
3/6 I have one sunblade that has a CD-ROM drive and one that doesn't. I
need to install SW on the one that doesn't have the CD drive. Both
machines share the same network. Is it possible to somehow read the
CD on one machine across the network and install the software? What's
the easiest way to solve this without removing CD drives or hard drives
and such? Thanks.
\_ NFS?
\_ use NFS. Start nfsd and mountd if they're not running and export
the file system on CDROM with "share" command. You can configure
vold to do this automatically every time a CD is inserted. |
| 2002/2/26 [Computer/HW/Drives, Computer/HW/Languages] UID:23977 Activity:high |
2/25 What happened to the "vis" program? The one that shows the output
of a program repeatedly?
\_ http://vlsi.colorado.edu/~vis/whatis.html
\_That's not the program I am talking about.
\_ That's not the program I am talking about. I want vis:
"a program that repeatedly executes a specified command
and refreshes the display of its output screen" from O'Reilly
\_ From what O'Reilley? They publish hundreds of titles.
\_ O'Reilly Unix Power Tools. 1st ed. This Program:
http://www.chemie.fu-berlin.de/cgi-bin/man?Vis
\_ Most of the power tools were on the included
CD, not necessarily part of any OS
\_ There's a similar program called "display"
http://www.ipsmart.com/src or misc/display in FreeBSD ports.
Be careful if you have ImageMagick installed; it also has a binary
in /usr/local/bin named "display" (which no one ever really uses,
so, well, don't worry about it)
--dbushong |
| 2002/2/6-7 [Computer/SW/Apps/Media, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:23795 Activity:high |
2/6 Where can one buy a region/code-free DVD player in the Bay Area?
Thanks. I do not want to order online.
\_ japan town in SF has some |
| 2002/1/20 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:23610 Activity:nil |
1/19 Let's say I'd like to run a Linux router using a 100Mhz Pentium 32Mg,
no HD, 1 3.5" floppy, 2 NIC cards. Can I fit the entire kernel and
other routing shit on puny 1.4meg drive?
\_ here's my linux 2.2.19 router:
/> foreach i (bin etc lib mnt var boot dev initrd sbin usr)
foreach? du -sh $i
foreach? end
2.0M bin
1.5M etc
13M lib
4.0k mnt
45M var
1.3M boot
64k dev
4.0k initrd
1.8M sbin
631M usr
(/usr has a bunch of stuff in /usr/src)
\_ I think NetBSD might do this fairly well; another option is picoBSD.
\_ http://www.linuxrouter.org is one attempt. (I haven't used it in
a while.)
\_ Hey, wasn't someone asking yesterday what to do with a spare 4G
hard drive?...
\_ a humming router? No thanks! (floppy is quieter)
\_ If you're going to stick a HD in it then you might as well make
it do something like dns, mail server, etc. If you don't need a
low end server then you should do the floppy-only thing. Why
make extra noise and heat and burn more power for nothing?
\_ how about getting a CompactFlash->IDE adapter?
\_ try PicoBSD
\_ http://leaf.sourceforge.net I've been using this for six+ months.
I have three NICs (outside, inside, DMZ). Of the distros included
in LEAF, I use Oxygen. P133, 16 MB, 1.68MB floppy. --jsjacob |
| 2002/1/18-19 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:23598 Activity:low |
1/18 I just bought 2 120GB HD for less than $200 each (they're so cheap!).
What's a good use for my old 2 4G HD (which I bought at $400 each
back in 1996).
\_ Some schools accept donations for computer equipment, but I don't
have any contact info now. -- yuen
\_ Where'd you buy your 120GB HD? What brand/model?
\_ Give them to me. My 1GB hard drive is running out of space.
\_ ooh, sorry... I got 80GB for $125... barely beating your GB/$
ratio... Mine is 7200 rpm from Western Digital. |
| 2002/1/16 [Computer/SW/Apps/Media, Consumer/Audio, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:23573 Activity:high |
1/15 As hard as it may be to believe, I liked "real jukebox." It was a good
interface, organized my music for me and generally did everything i
wanted it to do easily. Now I have a new computer and i see that real
(unsatisfied, i guess, without my COMPLETE loathing (their player has
always sucked)) has gone to some damn subscription product. Anyone know
of a similarly good mp3 player?
\_ you CAN get a free version, except, you'll get a prompt to buy
their product every once in a while. The new version is smaller
(binary size) and much faster than before. |
| 2002/1/12 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:23545 Activity:high |
1/11 Veritas Gurus: How do I free the last disk from a disk group? I have
disk group FOO and it won't let me pull the last disk from it. I want
the entire existence of FOO to cease and use all the disks in another
diskgroup on the same machine. This is v 3.x on Solaris 2.7. Thanks!
[Note, I don't have TFM].
\_ vxassist remove mirror for all but the last,
vxassist remove volume for the last.
\_ "vxdg destroy foo" did the trick. Thanks for pointing me in
the right dirction.
\_ useless trivia: "vxdg destroy" was implemented by someone
with a soda account. |
| 2002/1/2-3 [Computer/HW/Laptop, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:23432 Activity:high |
1/2 Anyone have any experience with USB 2.0 on Windows 2000? I'm
thinking of getting an external HD for my laptop and trying to
decide between USB 2.0 and Firewire. Thanks. - rory
\_ USB 2.0 comes included on some newer motherboards. Firewire does
not. Does your laptop already have FW support? USB2.0 support?
Do you plan to use this harddrive on any other machine?
\_ I have a Sony VAIO with one FW port and 2 USB ports. I
was under the understanding that USB 2.0 would use the same
plug. I thought the only hang-up might be software (driver)
support. I was hoping to use the HD on other machines, but this
isn't super important because I'm looking to buy a USB/FW case,
so will be using a standard IDE drive that I can always use
somewhere else. - rory
\_ It sounds like it doesn't matter. It was my understanding
that usb2.0 was hardware change but maybe a new bios flash
is good enough? I haven't researched it. It sounds like
you don't have a special need for either and should just
get the cheaper one. You should double check the usb2.0
thing.
\_ USB 2.0 requires a different chipset. I doubt you will be
able to upgrade your existing ports. I'd recommend you go the
firewire route, although I personally think firewire is the
better technology and that USB 2.0 is just a hack. You also
can look for enclosures that support both firewire and USB 2.0,
although that obviously will cost more. |
| 2001/12/31 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:23419 Activity:high |
12/30 I bought a few DVDs from HK and a few of them don't play on my
machine. WTF? How do I make them play on my machine?
\_ Ever heard of region encoding? Basically, it prevents what you're
trying to do.
\_ buy a region-free player, hack your player to be region-free, or buy
a region 3 DVD player. if you have a DVD-ROM drive, you may have
better luck playing it on your PC. You can also try ripping it to
disk and decrypting it...
\_ Some PC DVD players let you choose the region. One I used
before (forgot which) let you switch regions up to three times.
Then you had to reinstall to change it again. |
| 2001/12/29-31 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:23400 Activity:high |
12/29 I'd like to dip into the pool of motd wisdom. I'm going to buy a new
cd-rw. I don't have scsi so it should be ide. I want quality, speed
and the drive should be able to deal with any of the zillions of
standards. Price isn't too important but I don't want to take out
a second mortgage for it. What's the best ide cd-rw out there? Thanks!
(Please specify a model if you have one in mind or a product line)
\_ ? the most expensive CD-RW is about $200 these days. It's
a lot cheaper than you think. Any name brand drive will serve
you fine (and a lot of them are under $100)
\_ I think these suckers are almost a commodity now. HP is well
spoken of, but I've been satisfied with my Sony CDRW. It cost
about $100 when I got it. It does 8x CDR, I forget its other
speeds. I've gotten it to work under Linux with minimal trouble.
\_ LiteOn 24x10x40 has worked well for me and my friend. Paid $81 for
it. http://tomshardware.com has a recent review of IDE drives. In brief,
every drive is full featured except some Sonys.
\_ Apparently it's been a while since you purchased a CD-RW drive.
They're universally cheap. They're universally compatible. IDE
sucks much less than it used to. Probably the best drive
available on the market today is TDK's 24x velocd:
http://www.tdk.com/velocd-new/24index.html
Should cost between $150-$160 after tax/shipping if you shop
around. Comes with a solid software bundle (but you don't care
about that if it's going into a non-windows machine). They've got
a 32x burn model coming out if you're willing to wait, but it will
probably go for a premium for a few months after release. If you
are cheap, get the LiteOn, it's a damn good drive for the money.
If you want the fastest thing under the sun, get the TDK. It's
excellent, and still pretty cheap. -dans
\_ "...it's been a while since..." Actually I've never bought one.
I bought a retail 24/10/40 plextor for $148 - $30 rebate. It
looks pretty much the same as the TDK except has a 4mb buffer.
I don't know if that makes a difference but it's cheaper and
specs out the same otherwise. I can't wait for a 32x to come
out. I need it in the next week or so. Thanks to both of the
above for URLs and your helpful comments. Sometimes the motd
works.
\_ Plextor good. Plextors have been and continue to be the
Cadillac of CD-Rs... except in a good way. |
| 2001/12/18-19 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:23292 Activity:moderate |
12/17 What happened to http://www.japanvcd.com Thx. (Just when I wanted to buy my first VCD it went down.) \_ it's all about http://www.asianvids.com \_ http://www.vcd1.com \_ Is this and http://www.asianvids.com trustworthy? \_ Yes, but be forewarned: http://asianvids.com gives you CD-Rs, not the originals, hence why their prices are so low. |
| 2001/12/14-15 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:23240 Activity:high |
12/13 What do you use to backup your 80 gig HD?
\_ i took parts of the TDA home and am using that. Boy
given it's been so cold lately, I'm glad these drives run hot!
\_ TDA disks are less than 9GB each, so you need a disk array
with about 10 disks in it to backup your 80GB HD? How's your
PG&E bill?
\_ Wonderful. It's no surprise PG&E is bankrupt - they've
determined they owe me $150 for the power I've used for
the last six months that I paid nothing for. Must be
ultra-new math.
\_ After they figure it out you'll get billed plus
interest and penalties just like the IRS.
\_ AIT. Or another 80 GB hard disk. --dim
\_ This was on /. a few days ago. Look there for several answers.
\_ Backup?
\_ single sided single density 8 sector/track 5.25" floppy disks.
by the time I finish a complete backup I'm so exhausted I don't
have the energy to create new data so I know my data is safe until
I get out of the hospital.
\_ C'mon. 5.25" floppy disks are too small for the job. I use the
bigger 8" floppy disks.
\_ My cp/m machine doesn't boot anymore and the disk drives
aren't compatible with my current OS. I guess I could
write drivers for them when I get out of the hospital.
\_ I used to backup my porn on 3.5" floppies. That is, until I
discovered there was a lot of porn out there.
\_ tawei is that you? |
| 2001/11/5-6 [Computer/SW/Apps/Media, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:22937 Activity:high |
11/5 In terms of quality/price/etc, which is better, Digit8 or MiniDV?
Also is DV pure MPEG3 (e.g. you can load directly to the computer
without a converter) or some other weird format?
\_ http://www.adamwilt.com/DV.html
(DV != MPEG2 ... Is there such a thing as MPEG3?)
\_ As far as I know there's only MPEG2 Layer 3 (which of course
is MP3) and MPEG4
\_ mp3 is mpeg1-layer3
\_ There's also MPEG-7 and MPEG-21 |
| 2001/10/31-11/1 [Computer/SW/Languages/Functional, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:22885 Activity:high |
10/31 What's the best way to erase your CDR? I'm not talking about CDRW.
\_ Get a hammer or yermom.
\_ microwave oven.
\_ Put it in a parked car under the sun in a hot sunny day.
\_ You understand a CDR can't be erased? It's a write-once deal.
That's why the above people are giving that sort of advice.
\_ Circular sander. |
| 2001/10/28-29 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:22851 Activity:high |
10/27 Does Linux or BSD support CD to CD (I have a SCSI Plextor) burning?
\_ Not that I know of. I think you're best off reading the CD
and then burning it.
\_ Nothing prevents you from doing dd if=/dev/cdrom | cdrecord ....
or cat /dev/cdrom | cdrecord ....
\_ Have you actually tried this or are you just assuming this
should work?
\_ Dunno about BSD, but the Linux CD writing Howto claims that
this is not possible for audio CDs:
http://www.linuxdoc.org/HOWTO/CD-Writing-HOWTO-4.html#ss4.7
\_ The author of cdrecord suggests using readcd instead of dd .readcd is
part of the cdrecord distribution. dd can't handle some special
cases. It should be as simple is
readcd dev=0,5,0 f=- | cdrecord ..
which a correct dev option, though, I am not sure how reliable that
is ..
\_ readcd will fail if the CD is an audio disc. |
| 2001/10/22 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:22795 Activity:very high |
10/22 Any recommendations for a super quiet powersupply/case combo? I
just can't get to sleep at night with my current setup.
\_ Cases don't make noise. PS do.
\_ PSs don't make noise; the fans do. and HDDs. and CD/DVD drives.
and anything else mechanical. and then if the case is poorly
constructed, it can rattle ...
\_ [again] Your fan is integrated into your PS. Your CD/DVD,
HD and other mechanical things should be idle and thus not
making significant noise at night. Cases don't rattle if
there's no mechanical action to make them rattle and just
how the hell cheap is your case anyway? Read the original
question: this is for night time (idle time) noise reduction.
Thank you. --management
\_ http://www.koolance.com
http://www.pcpowerandcooling.com
\_ Thank you. |
| 2001/10/2 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:22624 Activity:nil |
10/1 (Can someone please re-post any response? I think I'll start running
my own motd auto-archive from now on.)
What's the minimum CPU requirement for Win98 (ignoring speed)? I have
a Pentium-something 133MHz machine that has been running Win95 fine.
But when I re-formatted the disk and tried to install Win98, it always
hangs at about the same point during the installation process when it's
copying lots of files from the CD. I'm guessing it's trying to execute
some instruction that's not supported by the processor.
\_ have you tried running the install files directly from the HD? I've
installed Win98 on Pentiums before with no problems.
\_ You mean copying the whole CD to the HD, then running
installation without the CD? No I haven't tried that. I don't
know if the HD has enough space to do this. But I can try. But
how do I copy all the files from the CD when I don't have
anything to boot from? And why does installing from the HD make
a difference anyway? |
| 2001/9/22 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:22591 Activity:high |
9/22 Please list your experiences with 60G hard disks:
How many, how long, does it work well? IDE
60G IBM:
60G Samsung:
60G Western Digital:
60G Seagate:
60G Maxtor: |
| 2001/9/15 [Computer/SW/Database, Computer/SW/OS/Windows, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:22458 Activity:very high |
9/14 I added a second IDE drive (slave) to the primary chain in my system
and the drive is only detected on cold start (ie power up) and its
never detected on warm start (ie reboot)? I've tried jumpering the
drive for cable select but that didn't work. Any ideas?
\_ get a new hard drive
\_ So this is a drive problem and not a controller/config
problem? Sigh. I really didn't want to wait in the return
line at fry's.
\_ what OS?
\_ Check the settings on your first drive. Some older drives have
different settings for Solo vs. Master. |
| 2001/8/14-15 [Computer/SW/Database, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:22110 Activity:high |
8/14 I want to take down (legally?) http://imatcher.org, a spamming site. What can be done? \_ DDoS it \_ Complain to their upstream provider. \_ not sure whether upstream provider == ISP, but they say they are an ISP so they can't be taken down. \_ Someone sold them bandwidth, unless they laid their own cable (highly unlikely). In this case it is AlterNet. \_ How did you find that out? \_ % whois -h http://whois.arin.net 208.253.173.31 UUNET Technologies, Inc. (NETBLK-UUNET1996B) UUNET1996B 208.192.0.0 - 208.255.255.255 iServices Inc. (NETBLK-UU-208-253-172) UU-208-253-172 208.253.172.0 - 208.253.175.255 These fuckers are under UUNET. You might as well give up now; UUNet is known for being a haven for spammers. |
| 2001/7/27-28 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:21963 Activity:moderate |
7/26 I want to buy an econo-DVD player that functions well. Doesn't need
to bypass region encoding. Recommendations? urlP. Thanks.
\_ I heard that cheap ones can't play CD's you burn yourself. It's
something about the format on those CDs being different from that
on CDs you buy in record stores. I don't know exactly.
\_ Oh brother. It has nothing to do with cheap vs. expensive.
Some DVD players have two lasers. The ones that don't usually
can't play CD-R. Of course, that's what CD players are for.
Most Sonys can't player CD-R. Pioneer can. YMMV.
Most Sonys can't play CD-R. Pioneer can. YMMV.
\_ Why does it need two lasters to play CD-R but only one to
play regular CD and DVD?
\_ Or one laser that can do dual wavelengths. Many players
use a laser that is a compromise between DVD and CD
wavelengths to read both. Factory pressed CDs are more
conducive to this laser (reflectivity), while CD-R is not.
\_ I see. What about CD-RWs? Do DVD players with only one
laser wavelength have the same problem with CD-RWs?
\_ How cheap do you want? You can find good Toshiba DVD players
all over for about $150. Why buy crap when you could have
something decent for $50 more?
\_ Or spring $300 and get a PS2 |
| 2001/7/24-25 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:21938 Activity:insanely high |
7/24 what's a good cd-rw drive for a laptop?
\_ Internal or External?
\_ external
\_ SCSI, USB, FireWire or Parallel?
\_ USB and Parallel CDRW are slow and often don't work reliably.
The SCSI drives are often pretty expensive, bulky but they
work very well.
\_ Make sure you get a SCSI PC Card supported by your OS.
Alternatively, if you have a swap-out CD-ROM drive,
your laptop manufacturer might have a CD-RW drive
module.
\_ Adaptec 1460 or 1480 are pretty much the only
reliable PCMCIA/Cardbus scsi cards currently
available. They are supported under every major
desktop os (win,lin,mac).
\_ get a PCMCIA firework card and firewire CD-RW drive (or
\_ get a PCMCIA firewire card and firewire CD-RW drive (or
in, though that can get a bulky)
get a firewire enclosure and put whatever drive you want
in, though that can get bulky)
\_ I would recommend just buying a QUE FW CDRW from
Fry's rather than building one yourself. A 8x8x32
external can be had for $169 (just the FW case will
set you back $125 - $150) |
| 2001/7/14 [Computer/HW/CPU, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:21797 Activity:nil |
7/13 Slashdot's starting to get pretty lame, is there anything else
like it?
\_ There are many things like it. This is, of course, the problem.
\_ I like http://arstechnica.com. Far fewer articles, but more interesting.
And the people who run the site are generally more intelligent and
make more informed comments, unlike CmdrTaco.
\_ More hardware oriented: http://www.anandtech.com
\_ http://www.theregister.co.uk
\_ The Register can be as witty as The Onion but it's all true.
\_ http://www.newsforge.com --Galen |
| 2001/7/13 [Computer/Networking, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:21790 Activity:high |
7/13 I have an offer from a company that does SCSI over fibre channel.
I'm curious about the viability of this market.
Who are the key players in this market?
What competing technologies are there, and what are the relative
advantages?
\_ http://www.byteandswitch.com is a good SAN info site. SCSI over
fibre channel is the FCP protocol; it's the dominant protocol for
connecting storage devices on SANs. iSCSI is an emerging competitor.
Brocade and EMC are big Fibre Channel players. Cisco and some
startups are moving into IP storage. There is a lot of activity in
the industry. Saying you "do" FCP is pretty vague. The downturn has
companies cutting back on IT spending but it's considered a growth
area.
area. Data explosion and all that. |
| 2001/7/8 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:21735 Activity:high |
07/07 What is a good and free program for Win98 for burning audio
CD's? I bought an HP external CD-RW drive but it didn't come
with any software. Thanks.
\_ brand? |
| 2001/6/30-7/1 [Computer/HW/CPU, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:21687 Activity:high |
6/30 what's your opinion on seagate hard drives? also,
athlon vs. duron, besides the caching issue, what
other differences are there in terms of performance
and quality? finally, do you know of any motherboards
that you'd recommend?
\_ I had bad luck with barracudas and cheethas, other
models seem okay. I don't know about the x86 stuff,
I generally avoid it. ----ranga
\_ If it's for a desktop machine, then the criteria I'd use to
select a hard drive is it's noise level. Seagate's new
Barracuda IV is the new champ (as soon as you can actually
*buy* one, that is) at 2.0 to 2.4 bels. If you can't wait,
then Samsung makes some that are in 3.0 to 3.1 range.
If you're into overclocking to improve your frame rate in
whatever first person shooter everyone is playing this
week, then you probably want to ignore me and get something
that spins at 14.4kRPM.
\_ Check Tom's hardware for information about motherboards.
The Asus A7M is pretty solid. It's based on AMD's 760
series chipset. Don't confuse it with their similar, albeit
inferior model based on the flaky AliMagick chipset.
Seagate disks aren't what they used to be. IBM disks tend
to be very reliable.
\_ Also look at the Abit KG7-RAID (ignore the RAID part), which
has the same "north" chipset (AMD 761), but can hold a whopping
(these days) 4 DDR DIMMs.
\_ Who now owns Seagate (as in the company Seagate?)
\_ a group of private investors
\_ I thought Veritas bought them?
\_ they only bought out one storage sw division from seagate. |
| 2001/6/25-26 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:21619 Activity:high |
6/25 After years of having "Godel, Escher, Bach" on my bookshelf,
I've finally picked it up to read. Unfortunately, I'm not much
Bach fan so I haven't heard the examples referred to in
the book. Given that it has been around for awhile, I'd think
that someone must've been geeky enough to put together a compilation
of the music? Does anyone know of a CD set or audio file collection
of the pieces in this book.
\_ Just go buy Art of Fugue. My favourite is still St. Matthew's
Passion, but I am not sure if it was mentioned in the book.
\_ pretty much everything from the book is from Art of Fugue or
The Musical Offering. You can get 2-CD sets with both.
(and they're worth having whether or not you're reading the
book). -tom
\_ [ Tom's comment deleted. He knows why. ]
\_ [ No, Tom, because you censor people. ]
\_ yes, I do know why...because anonymous cowards like you
insist on removing any actual information that manages
to make it into the MOTD. The comment was, almost all
of the Bach information in the book is from Art of Fugue
or The Musical Offering, which are available as a 2-CD
set, and which you should have whether or not you're
reading GEB. -tom
\_ Have you lost your Y chromosome? Jaysis, yer such a cunt.
\_ Perhaps one of the fabled sodan females posted this.
\_ nah, the sodan femmes have more bollicks than this wanker.
\_ I just looked up this book on Amazon. It doesn't seem
that fruity. Is it any more fruity than say, The Tao
of Physics?
\_ I read part of it and thought it was good, but that
was when it just came out (back when I was in high
school?). I don't know if I would still find it as
interesting today.
\_ bollocks.
\- GEB is insufferable. ok tnx. |
| 2001/6/21 [Computer/Theory, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:21587 Activity:high |
6/20 Robotech DVD's released. Bad ass. Box set available with extra
disc featuring the Robotech pilot.
\_ fuck that! I'm waiting for the Macross DVD set with the REAL
voice actors and non of this "flower of Life" Carl Macek
bullshit.
\_ Fuck that, I'm waiting for Space Kitteers dvd's and Gaiking.
Gaiking Space Dragon on DVD would rock.
\_ I am Cyborganizer.
\_ cheapURLP
\_ #t
\_ Robotech? Bad Ass? Surely you jest.
\_ Yeah, it only created the giant fighting transforming robot
genre. (See, Transformers, Evangelion, to name a few).
\_ my ass it did. Maybe you forgot Mazinger Z? Of which
Voltes V was the sequel, and then on to Starbirds, and then
on to Dynamos... talking 70s here.
\_ Create the fighting transforming robot genre? Hardly.
Voltron for example was out many years before Robotech.
As I recall the same is true with Transformers. If Robotech
inspired the creation of the hideously bad Evangelion,
well that just another reason that it sucks.
\_ man Gundam was out before any of them. Stop watching dubbed
anime, and watch the "real" stuff.
\_ Quibble over semantics if you must. Macross (later
rebroadcast and munged together with two other series
as Robotech in the U.S.) predates Voltron, Transformers,
and Gundam. Get over it.
\_ uh, Macross originally was intended to PARODY the giant-
robot genre. there was plenty of giant-robot anime
well before Macross (Danguard Ace, Grandizer, Gaiking,
etc.).
\_ Robotech, Harmony Gold, and it's progeny must be destroyed.
Makurosu, ai oboeteimasuka, forever. |
| 2001/6/16 [Computer/HW/Drives, Recreation/Computer/Games] UID:21541 Activity:nil |
6/15 So I only recently learned that the Gameboy Advance is already
emulated on the PC and every rom is easily available for http
download. Plus, there are flash carts for playing these roms on
the real thing, and all this stuff was available before the actual
hardware was released. Does anyone else find this kind of disturbing?
\_ You should be disturbed at your US-centrism. The hardware's
been out for ages in japan, and the specs for even longer.
\_ the gba was out March 21 2001 in Japan. Ages? The first emulator
came out in 9/2000.
Does consumer software protection these days come down to "make
the program friggin huge, cuz otherwise it winds up on every kiddie's
free web page, and even then it ends up in newsgroups weeks before
the retail launch"? It's enough to make me feel kind of funny about
my 300+ CD warez collection. Is there really no solution to it?
\_ Good for us.
\_ The point of a Gameboy is (duh) to play on a handheld. If you have a
PC, there's little reason to play this thing.
\_ Dragon Warrior 3.
\_ well like I said, there are flash cart interfaces to the pc so
you can play on the actual gameboy. I have my doubts about
this anyway, people I've known with game boys seemed to just
play them like it was a regular console, so they could play
those zelda games and stuff. |
| 2001/6/4 [Computer/HW, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:21420 Activity:insanely high |
6/03 Calling all PC HW gurus: Anyone have an EPROM programmer? Last
night I flashed my motherboard's bios while at the same time
booting the machine with crap loaded into emm386. During the
flash, the machine hung, and is now totally toast. This would not
be such a big thing if it could boot up to the point where I can
try the flash again, but for all intensive purposes the machine is
\_ "intents and purposes"
a paperweight at the moment. So does anyone have a device that I
can load up a (hopefully) good bios image onto? Needless to say, I
only have a floppy disk with the image, not a chip that can be
copied... Or... Anyone have a summer EECS lab that can help out?
Never mind the fact that the motherboard goes for about $15 on
ebay nowadays- Even better would be if someone knew the magic
trick to resurrect a board with a nuked bios. The flash should
have written out a copy of the old version. I can see a file on my
floppy by the same name, but with a 0 length, I have some (foolish)
hope that the image is still there.. All thanks appreciated - joshk
\_ "all intents and purposes", sheeze
\_ I think you're looking for UCSEE, not soda.
\_ would it be that much trouble for motherboard manufacturers to add
some kind of backup mechanism to keep things like this from
happening?
\_ no, but is it profitable for them to do so?
\_ is it profitable for them to have improperly flashed
motherboards repaired? and if they refuse to repair them,
they've most likely lost a customer. I wouldn't mind
spending a few extra bucks for a secondary bios chip or
or something.
motherboards fixed? and if they refuse to fix them and force
you to buy a completely new motherboard, they've most likely
lost a customer. besides, I wouldn't mind spending a few extra
bucks for a backup bios chip or something.
\_ if the motherboard maker is still around you may be able to contact
them and beg them to send you a replacement bios. |
| 2001/5/29-30 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:21387 Activity:insanely high |
5/29 To followup on my previous thread on CD-Rs. I tried four different
machines: 1 sun u5, 2 laptops, and 1 PC and I still cannot read the
corrupted CD-R. I'm screwed. So are CD-RWs any better? They're
more expensive hence "better"?
\_ No, they are worse for archiving. --dim
\_ What brand was the CD-R? (Just curious.)
\_ I used TDK. Anybody recommend a brand that they've had
no problems with?
\_ Mitsui gold-on-gold. It's not the brand, but the dye
used. All dyes except phthalocyanine are unstable. So-called
"platinum" discs usually use phthalocyanine, as do many
gold discs. Do not use green (cyanine), blue (azu), or another
color (hybrid) no matter whose name is on it. --dim
\_ wow, that's one of the most useful pieces of technical
information i've seen on the motd in a while. cool.
\_ depends who you listen to. if you listen to mitsui,
who has a patent for phthalocyanine, they're going to
say phthalocyanine is the best. if you listen to verbatim,
who have a patent on metal azo, they'll say theirs is
the best. http://www.verbatim.com.au/Media/93707.html
the moral is to not do stupid things like leave cd's
in direct sunlight etc. no matter what kind it is.
\_ Gold costs more to manufacture and has a better
shelf life in spite of the fact that silver does
have higher reflectivity. Most unbiased sources of
information do in fact tout phthalocyanine dye as
the best. Personal experience with it is also very
good. If you read the claim on the URL you produced
you will see that they claim superiority based on
"lightfastness". That is an advantage, but not the
whole story. Dyes other than phthalocyanine "move"
during the burning process. In short, there are
advantages to each dye but for archival (stored in
the dark in a controlled environment) you want
phthalocyanine dye and a gold reflective layer. --dim
\_ hmm, I'd be quite interested in seeing one of these
unbiased sources for myself. in my travels such
things have been rare.
\_ Do a search on the web. --dim
\_ Do a search on the web. Sandia Labs did a
test. MIT Library decided to go with gold
phthalocyanine disks (Kodak). JPL is using
the Mitsui disks I mentioned earlier based on
experience. Here's another study which touts
phthalocyanine disks:
http://ikrweb.uni-muenster.de/aptdir/aktuelles/arc
hivmedien.html . Believe what you will. --dim
hivmedien.html says "After aging, two media
types were completely unreadable--Taiyo Yuden
and TDK. These manufacturers use a cyanine
dye, which is less stable tha[n] the
phthalocyanine dye used by other manufacturers."
Believe what you will. You know best. --dim
\_ Andy McFadden's CD-R FAQ has a section on media:
http://www.cdrfaq.org/faq07.html#S7 -tom
\_ Well, I've had no problems with anything except those "gold"
noname ones. One of those with my personal files on it
stopped being readable one day. But the weird thing was,
I kept it anyway, and months later tried it and it worked.
I've had good results with Imation and Kingston (phthalocy.)
but recently have been using Verbatim (blue azo) without
problems; azo is claimed to be as good as the gold/platinum
etc. but time will tell. Regardless, another possible issue
is: Did you write on the disc, and if so, using what?
\_ http://www.cdmediaworld.com/hardware/cdrom/cd_dye.shtml
the entire site has tons of info |
| 2001/5/28-29 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:21371 Activity:very high |
5/28 A year ago I backed up my home dir onto a CD-R. Afterwards I tried it
on a regular CD-ROM and all the files seems ok. Now when I try to
access it it complains about a corrupted directory structure? What
could cause this to happen? Bad CD writer or bad disk? And is there
a way to recover from this? Thanks.
\_ If you backed it up on a CD you must not have cared about it. I
suggest you ditch the coaster and move on with your life.
\_ CD-R's are fairly reliable, certainly more so than most tape
media. What do you do your backups on, troll? They are
susceptible to scratching, particularly if you write on the top
surface with a ball-point. They can also theoretically degrade
over time, but they still should be better than most tapes.
Have you tried it in different drives? Sometimes a particular
drive and a particular CD won't get along because of vibration
or other issues. -tom
\_ The other major problem with CDRs is that they are
exteremely sensitive to any sort of light. You can't
leave them lying around exposed to overhead light
or sunlight and then expect that they will work.
If you need reliable backups, I would suggest MO
or a external harddrive.
\_ hard drives are many orders of magnitude less
reliable than CD's, even CD-R's. -tom
\_ An unpowered external hardrive will last
years as compared to the life of the ave.
cdr which is less than a few months. MO
is the way to go if you *really* care about
your data.
\_ MO is good (and recordable DVD is a
successor to MO, not to CD-R). But CD-R
is pretty damn reliable; manufacturer
claims are for 75 years, and I've never
had a burned disk go bad on me. Burning
failure rates are fairly high, but that's
not a longevity issue. -tom
\_ I'll bet you burn your CDRs and then
put them in a cool dark place unlike
above poster.
\_ The back seat of my car in the
parking lot doesn't count?!?!
\_ Would you trust your data to one burn on a CD or the
typical 0/5/9 tape cycle where your data is likely to hit
tape multiple times and probably get a copy stored off
site? I'll keep my stuff on tape, thanks. It's easier to
manage, holds more, and less likely to result in a motd
post about "how do i get my stuff off this fucked up tape?"
Maybe you can explain why tapes are still in use if CDs
make superior backup media? Everyone else must just be
stupid, huh? In this case, he might get lucky and find out
it's just a CD device incompatibility issue, but then
again, maybe not. I prefer to avoid "luck" with my data.
\_ The issue of the reliability of the media is
completely irrelevant to whether there's more than one
copy--you can do 0/5/9 with CD, too. Are you really
doing multiple-level tape backups with off-site storage
for files on your home machine? Of course not, you're
just trolling. And I didn't say CD's make superior
backup media, I said they're more reliable than tape.
The limited size makes CD not useful as backup for
shared filesystems. -tom
\_ More than one copy *is* important. No one cares about
media reliability so much as they do about getting
their data back. If one media type is slightly more
reliable than another but I have 6 copies on the
lesser media type, my odds of getting my data back are
better with the 6 copies on lesser media. Tell me
you've got 3+ copies of each CDR?
\_ He didn't say it was a home machine. He said it was
a "home dir" which is an entirely different matter.
And yes, it's easier to do 0/5/9 with tape than CD.
No, I don't do any backups for home, per se. Files I
want to keep get tgz'd and copied to work where I do
incrementals/fulls/offsite. But, oh yes, I forgot,
anyone who disagree with tom is automatically a troll.
\_ Interesting... what media do you recommend for backup
of a home system? (FWIW, right now my main strategy
is rsync of what I care about to several computers.)
--Galen
\_ the vast majority of home users don't do backups at
all, so if you're doing anything you're ahead of
the game. I use CD's but if you have another
system that's probably fine too. I just think
the first response was horribly ignorant. -tom
\_ He never said it was a home system. Read it.
\_ Dude, guys, is all that porn really worth the backup?
\_ hell yeah. building up a good pr0n collection takes a
lot of time and effort.
\_ I'm with Tom on this one. -ausman
\_ Yup, that settles it. This from the guy who has
trouble reading a dictionary and projects this
reading problem on others. With friends like that..
\_ "To all the gossips and the liars, I will see
see you in the fires." -J. Cash |
| 2001/5/12 [Computer/HW/Drives] UID:21253 Activity:nil |
5/11 top shows a lot of "io wait" How do i find out which processes
are doing all the disk writing/reading? and is there a way to
"nice" a process with regards to disk io the way nice does for
cpu utilization. (if not, shouldn't there be?)
\_ Some versions of ps will do this with the right options. |
| 2001/4/18 [Computer/HW/Memory, Computer/HW/Drives] UID:21013 Activity:very high |
4/17 Now that those rat bastards at VALinux are getting out of the
desktop market who is a reasonable alternative as a supplier?
IBM? HP? Dell? Someone else? --dim
\_ what was good about VALinux? there's penguincomputing.
I don't know why you'd care, just install Linux on anything.
\_ Just say no. If you must
use PC hardware, at least
install FreeBSD. \
\_ and deal with freeBSD? fuck that.
\_ Deal with what? You're either
a troll, ignorant, or simply
deeply confused.
what's so bad about PC hardware? it's cheap and fast _)
hey, this is a good troll.
\_ BIOS, crappy memory bandwidth, floppy disks, IDE drives,
32bit PCI, ISA, bad power supplies, awful SMP performance.
I don't think that I need to go on.
\_ You do realize you can buy a PC with SCSI and PCI64,
right? SMP performance is partly a function of the OS.
Have you seen what kind of crap Sun is shipping these
day? Their low end boxes are IDE! --dim
\_ Sun is shipping this bottom-end server crap, the 280R:
redundant hot-swap power supplies with independent power
cords, hot-plug power subsystems, fibre-channel disk
drives, backplane has software-mirrored hot-plug boot
drives. 8MB cache. 8GB RAM. lights-out management card.
Free solaris. Now hook it up to the T3 external hardware
RAID array, GBIC cards, dual-ported 10K RPM FC-AL disk.
Max. multimode optical fiber length of 500 meters.
Two redundant loop cards per enclosure FC-AL circuitry
Two Power/cooling units per enclosure, Integrated
backup battery power, Redundant fans, Battery backup
for cache destage. Free Veritas. Yeah I agree its shitty
product. But your cheap PC will always be its bitch.
You can mass your million-man Red Army, but their few
precision jet bombers will blow you to bits.
So what if their products "suck", I'd like to take a poll:
if SUDDENLY TODAY, someone gave you choice of a FREE $1000
PC or a FREE $1000 SunBlade, which one would you take?
\_ VA Linux sales were good at calling over and over and over
like clock work. I always knew it was the first thursday
because that's when VA Linux sales would call.
\_ the SunBlade is a piece of shit. The 280R, configured
with 8GB of RAM and a T3 RAID array, costs $90K,
hardly "bottom-end". -tom
\_ You are nothing more than a shill for Sun. -ausman
\_ No, that's the top-end E280R configuration.
I just priced a $10,000 one on their site
(one CPU, one disk, etc..)
\_ A $1000 PC is a POS. A Sun Blade is not. I'd
take the SunBlade over even a $10K PC.
\_ The 280R *is* the bottom-end of the Sun server line.
It's a workgroup server. Max two CPUs only.
\_ are you stupid or just lying? The bottom-end
server is the Netra X1, which costs an order
of magnitude less than the 280R, and is a piece
of shit. -tom
\_ are you comparing PC servers to desktop machines? --jon
\_ Ultra 2, 2 300 MHz US2 Procs, 1GB Ram, Creator 3D
now that is a Desktop Machine (~ 2 - 3K now).
Or an Ultra 60.
I prefer real hardware to some cheap broken PC
crap.
\_ An Ultra 2 is a piece of shit these days. --dim
\_ Really? I guess that the 2 GB of RAM
it supports along with the 2 300 MHz
US2 procs are just no good compared
to your OC'ed Celli 933s. I'm so sorry
that your IO bandwidth and your memory
bus speed SUX, as does your SMP bus.
But I'll bet your GeForce2MX make up
for that in your "real world" applications.
\_ PowerMac G4 w/2x533 G4e's, 1 GB Ram, Ultra 160
drives, GEForce2 (or 3). Now that is a desktop
machine.
\_ P5-166, 96 megs RAM, 3 EIDE disks: 1.2 GB, 2.0 GB, 4.3 GB,
Matrox Mystique (the first one), OpenBSD, open air case,
300 watt PS, 1.44 diskette, 2 serial, 1 par, dual 10/100.
Rock solid! Top that, kids!
\_ SparcStation 10, 1 SM61 proc, 272 MB Ram,
2 Barracudas, QFE, no framebuffer (serial
console only), OpenBSD CURRENT.
\_ p5-166?
\_ Dell makes rather nice Linux boxen. Don't expect their
Linux (software) support to be anywhere as good as VA Linux
though.
\_ Are you joking? My research group ordered some computers
from Dell and they SUCK. We ordered the plane vanilla
machines with Linux pre-installed and Dell installed
unsupported video and network cards then dragged their
feet when we asked them to fix there mistake. I will
never again by Dell.
\_ VA has support? Surely you jest.
\_ VA Linux sales were good at calling over and over
and over like clock work. I always knew it was the
first thursday because that's when VA Linux sales
would call.
\_ I said support. |
| 11/23 |