2 Bit Hacker

It’s been a fairly geeky weekend for me so far. Friday night I helped Jason get Hindenburg back on it’s feet after an OS upgrade, which allowed us to finally start using the two 250GB Serial ATA drives in it. So far we’re only using one, the idea being to mirror the drives for a bit of data redundancy. It seems to be mostly working again, though some people are having minor issues with various web things. It was a fairly major upgrade, so I guess this is to be expected.

Yesterday I ended up taking my gaming system apart, originally to just put another hard drive in it, but I ended up spending some time to get the cabling a little bit neater, and I think it looks a lot better now. The downside is that it doesn’t seem to have enough power to spin both hard drives when I start playing a 3D heavy game, so I think I’m going to need to throw a bigger power supply into it.

That got me thinking about all the other hardware I’ve got lying around here, and I started coming up with a plan to reallocate some stuff so everybody is happier. I figure I’ll take the guts of the HTPC and make a new computer for Delia, since it’s faster than both her current comps, then we can move her old Dell back to her office. I’ve got an older Shuttle box from work that I think I’ll put the PVR card in, and use that as an HTPC for a bit. Not sure what I’ll do with all the leftovers at that point. I’ve been meaning to build a home storage/print server, so maybe I’ll throw some stuff toward that. I should still have enough parts after that to build one more system, maybe I’ll build it and donate it to someplace for Christmas.

Still haven’t gotten the OpenBSD box in place as a router, and now that there’s a new version of OpenBSD out, I think I’ll redo the box from scratch again. It wasn’t that hard to get stuff installed on it. Just need to actually get it done, since I’m sick of the Netgear thing crashing all the time, and I’d like to be able to do some bandwidth management for the VoIP line and whatnot.

For some reason my Linksys WRT54G running the Sveasoft firmware died this morning. Originally I thought Comcast had gotten mad and killed my service, but when I checked on the router its little Power LED was blinking away, indicating that it had lost its poor little mind. Luckily we had Delia’s Netgear router from her old apartment on hand, and got back up and running pretty quickly, but I’m annoyed at the Linksys now. I think I’m either going to flash it back to the default Linksys firmware, or try for the OpenWRT stuff. Though I’m planning to stop using it as a router anyway, just using it as an AP.

Which brings me to my plans for the weekend. I’m taking Mage, my server from the office, home with me, going to trade it’s EPIA mainboard for one of the other boards around the apartment and build the EPIA into a home router. I plan to throw OpenBSD on it, which should allow for all sorts of fun. Hopefully I can setup some better packet queue management stuff to keep the VoIP line sounds good even when someone is downloading something. Should be a simple matter.

Hmm… I really haven’t been posting much, have I? Well, not that much has been going on really. Work has been going pretty slowly latety. It seems like I’ve been caught on the same stupid modem problems forever now. I wish we could just throw the whole voicemenu system idea out the window. It currently works such that we can either use the modem in our remote systems to do a voice menu system to access data via a normal phone, or we can get a data dial-in, but the modem at this point is refusing to switch over into data mode correctly. It’s a major pain. I hate modems.

Outside of work, things have been going fairly well. Delia and I went up to my mom’s place in Maine a few weeks ago. Delia ended up doing pretty much all of the driving on the trip, which surprised me, though she did get pulled over for speeding by a state trooper (“Ever been stopped for speeding in Maine before?” “Uh, not in Maine, no” I had a good time on the trip. Ralph was out of the hospital, and seemed to be doing okay. Delia seemed to like it up there, with the lake. I was hoping for a clear night to be able to see the stars so far away from the city lights, but the clouds were against me.

The weekend after that was Delia’s concert with the Merrimack Community Chorus. She attracted quite a group to go see it, including myself, Dan, Dan, Dave, and the one I’m not allowed to mention on LJ. I enjoyed the concert quite a bit, and look forward to getting a copy of the CD. Unfortunatly my leg was hurting quite a bit that night, which sucked. Hopefully it stops doing that soon. Delia looked extremely silly in her mismatched tights, skirt, orange shirt, and pimp hat. Unfortunately none of my pictures came out well.

I think that catches us up to Memorial Day weekend. I ended up spending most of the weekend at home working on computer stuff in the apartment. I swapped around a bunch of motherboards, upgrading Delia’s work computer, putting a DVD+/-RW drive into Vincent, dismantling Terra, getting a DVD-ROM into Shadow (which is now ready to go back into the entertainment center), and building a new Interceptor, this one running OpenBSD. It’ll replace the sparcstation 10 running NetBSD that I’m using as a router at home currently. I mainly just wanted to play around with using OpenBSD in a firewall/router situation, since I’d like to switch over the firewalls at work to it. We’ll see how it goes.

Saturday night I went with absinthexl and shiftless to see The Day After Tomorrow. I thought it was an okay film. The effects and CG were pretty, the whole thing looked nice, but the story was pretty flat and predictable. It was good to get out of the apartment though. We went to TGI Friday’s after the movie, and Ryan kept choosing the same things I was thinking of ordering. For some reason I have this thing where I can’t order the same thing as someone else at a restaurant. Seems like it takes all the fun out of it. But eventually I gave up, and we both had jalapeno burgers. It was tasty.

Sunday and Monday I accomplished approximately nothing, which I’m not exactly happy about. Ah well. Delia came back from the Realms event she was at on Monday morning, then had to work all day, and was dead tired by the end of the day. She had a great time, apparently, and is all excited about upcoming events. She keeps mentioning how she tried to get me to go. I probably should have, or at least gone to the Loft or something.

Now it’s Tuesday, and I’m back at work, and the modem is mocking me again… Where’s my hammer?

Amazingly, I actually did some of the stuff I was talking about in my last post. Shadow, the Home Theater PC, is now running Windows XP instead of Linux. I played around a bit with the SnapStream demo software, and I think I’m going to buy the card/remote/software bundle once I have some spare cash lying around. I also reformatted Vincent, my gaming box, and it’s been running Linux with the 2.6.6 kernel stably for about a week now. I’ve started playing Neverwinter Nights again, this time under Linux, and it seems to actually run better than when I was playing in Windows. I still need to get around to reinstalling WinXP on that box again, as there are some games that don’t want to run very well in Linux, even with the Transgaming version of Wine. Ah well.

I’ve also been thinking of the home router project. Rather than getting an EPIA CL board right away, I’ve been thinking of using my old K6-2 350 board and throwing OpenBSD on it. It’s mostly just to get used to using OpenBSD as a router/firewall, since I’d like to switch the firewalls at work to it. Maybe I’ll get to that in the next few nights. This will be replacing my Sparcstation 10 running NetBSD, which is doing a fine job as a home router, but the hard drive makes annoying noises.