Tag Archives: RAID

Barely finished… but almost

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Normally, when I work on a PC and build it from the ground up, it takes like two hours to nearly half a day. Since I’ve started with rebuilding, cleaning, repairing and upgrading my gaming rig, six days have passed. The intention actually is to make it as good as possible. I don’t want no hidden rubbish areas in my chassis and most importantly no dust. Old builds of my PC always included weird cable constellations and packed cable  trees in narrow corner. I tried to avoid things like this in this very build.

It takes a lot – and I mean a looot of time – to get all things arranged as one can possibly can. The mainboard alone was put around 6 – 8 times in the chassis. Main problem with the board was the backplate that was using too much space and could cause short-circuits. I finally found a good solution using less space and definitely not responsible for eventually upcoming short-circuits.

Another point is, well, it’s this kind of fetish of mine. I always use to put as much components in my PCs as possible. My working rig is somehow different, but mostly every PC I own is always packed. And by saying packed, I mean packed.

As you may know, the PC uses water cooling. Until now you can only find a water block on the CPU and a couple of tubes wandering through the chassis. The water pump is already installed, too. This time I decided to put the pump a little differently inside to gain a little bit more space inside. Additionally did I put some foam around the pump to minimize vibrations going on to the frame of the chassis causing noises. I also have plenty of room to do some quick maintenances in the case of an incident.

My new graphics card is going to be delivered this day’s afternoon and I’ll probably go to finish this PC by today’s evening. I was very lucky to get a 64GB SSD pretty cheap that I’m able to use ISRT immediately. I hope that it’s going to work with an previously set up RAID0, the storage solution that I always use for my system- and games partitions.

Anyhow, I’m pretty excited and nervous today and hopefully everything is getting well. I haven’t been working on a PC for such a long time before I finally started it and hopefully it’s going to be a good harbringer.

Back to the core

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Because of various problems with my Fedora machine I finally decided to give another distribution a chance and my first two targets were Ubuntu and Linux Mint. Linux Mint wasn’t an option because of the lack of an alternate installer routine that allows me to create and manage software RAIDs and LVM. I always use to run my /home on a mirrored RAID system. What was left was the latest Ubuntu 10.04 LTS with alternate installer routine. Well, actually I chosed  Kubuntu instead of the Gnome variant and, well… yes, it’s working and there’s a lot of one-click routines and the system itself does a lot more “automated” than Fedora does BUT it left an unfinished fell on me. A lot of options in customization in KDE were missing even though I post-installed a lot of KDE stuff and even the praised Gnome desktop looks like a ghost town to me.

Another thing I can’t get comfortable with was the sudo feature and curiously the apt tool. I was using Debian a few years ago as a “hacking machine” and I loved apt because before that I was only using SuSE and never felt homish with yast and RPMs and stuff. Though Fedora is using RPMs as well and the yum package manager isn’t mostly something entirely different than apt, zypper, yast and merge, the yum system is for me personally the best. Maybe it’s only because I finally got used to it after nearly one year and a half of using Fedora. Anyhow, Kubuntu was easy to setup but I personally missed some customization and some, you know, nerdiness in the system. What finally happens, I took a closer look on my hardware settings, did some error detection, fixed that and reinstalled my Fedora again. The only thing that’s left to do is to fix the PulseAudio vs. Creative SoundBlaster X-Fi configuration, which was handled perfectly well under (K)Ubuntu, but I fixed this once and I can surely do this twice.

Why can’t it all explode?

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Today’s like one of the most miserable days since a very long time. Actually I’m not pretty sure why, but I should have stood in bed and kept on sleeping the whole day. Last weekend wasn’t as exciting as I expected it to be because  if you’ve just visited a city like Paris a city like Dresden comes by like a small village in the middle of nowhere. Another horrible thing was that I devastated my media center and it wasn’t running the whole weekend. For some reasons the system was not bootable after I switched over to a single boot system and deleted Linux Mint. I had to install Windows 7 from ground on and on the other hand I had to re-initialise the RAID system where the OS was installed and my bunch of HD movies was stored, so the movies are lost.

Terrible thing today too is the fucked up weather outside. Dark, grey, pale and cloudy and no god damn summer in sight. I wanted to start off with gym today but I only made it to the bathroom where I picked up my toothbrush put it back and wandered back to bed. Though I am motivated to go to gym I am able to make it to the gym. I feel like I am stuck in a vicious circle and I can’t the portal which I have to break to get out of it. Seriously, I want to make some sport but I can’t get it done. Once again, tomorrow will be another try because I am pretty, pretty sure that I will not find the willpower in the evening today to grab my bag and go to the gym.