Diary of a Wolfeman

Okay, maybe not completely kills, but definitely puts a kink in the works for water cooling.

I was reading the latest issue of MaximumPC magazine yesterday, and they have the new Dream Machine out. Under the hood: Intel’s latest Extreme Edition proc, a Conroe Core 2. The thing kicks some serious ass, and now holds 5 of 6 possible benchmark records – the one it didn’t get is held by an outrageously overclocked quad-video-card monstrosity.

Most interesting though, is what they did to test the new thermal dissipation ratings. In an effort to see just how well the fact meets the hype about the power usage, they tried to overheat the processor. They went so far as to unplug the CPU fan and transcode a full DVD!

The proc temp went up about 3 degrees C.

That’s it.

As for the standard, they pretty much pounded the nails into the coffin for the BTX formfactor. Conceived during the Mad MegaHertz Race when both AMD and Intel procs could heat your entire home, the BTX standard re-arranges the case and plants a massive cooler on the proc, and moves all other heat-generating components as far away as possible.

About the time it launched, however, AMD released a new slew of Cool ‘n Quiet chips that worked just fine with air cooling in the ATX formfactor. Manufacturers of AMD-spec motherboards saw no need to switch, so they stuck with ATX. This left the Intel-only houses dealing with a huge thermal payload, so they grudgingly re-tooled to the new formfactor.

Now, just when Dell, Gateway and others are rolling out BTX, Intel goes and builds a thermally efficient chip. The Intel reps are still touting BTX as the wave of the future, but I’m guessing there will be some pretty pissed-off folks in the case houses.

Don’t know why this memory resurfaced today, but it’s a fun story.

Way back when I was living in ‘Vegas, former roomies and still good friends of ours the Barbarian and the Fraggle decided to get hitched. In grand ‘Vegas tradition, we pistol-whipped the groom-to-be, threw him in the trunk of the car and dragged him kicking and screaming to one of the better strip clubs as soon as the Fraggle wasn’t looking, lest she bollux the whole plan.

Okay, that’s bullshit – the man was in the front seat trying to get the car to drive faster, and Fraggle was more like “here honey, make sure you take some fives with those singles. Don’t be stingy! You sure I can’t come with?”

Anyway, among the celebrants of the evening were myself, B:tNG, Jason, Jordie and a few others who have slipped my mind. We’re at the club having a good time and B decides it’s his turn to buy the groom a lap dance. Barbarian picks out a likely candidate, and there is some discussion as to her suitability among the rest of us lads. It makes perfect sense now, but a couple of us thought she was a bit on the trashy side and were suggesting another lass instead. The Barbarian had made his choice, however, so she was waved over to the table.

In a flash of insight, B pops up with “you’ll have to excuse me, but I’m buying the lad here his dance, and I need to know the quality. The lads here can’t decide on a candidate, and I want to make sure he’s getting the best.” The insight comes from the fact that B was still blind at the time, and wearing his darkest shades and prominently holding his cane. So what does the dancer do? She says “Here – check for yourself!” grabs both his hands and plants them on her tits.

B, without missing a beat, gives ’em a quick squeeze and says “Nice parity!”

We all bust up laughing, and the Barbarian gets his dance. The whole time, though, Jason and Jordie were wondering how quickly they could lay hands on shades and a cane.

I was reading this when it made me think of how glad I am that I chose my current profession.

It seems almost axiomatic that a person wouldn’t want to deal with anything resembling work once they got home. Mechanics don’t want to work on their own cars, plumbers don’t want to look at the leaky faucet, and the groundskeeper’s own yard looks like crap. I really like dealing with computers, but even then, sometimes I let things slide probably longer than I should.

They say that to find happiness, you should find a way to make a living doing something you love to do, but you have to be careful with that so you don’t get burned out on it. Seeing the same thing day in and day out can wear on a person no matter how much they love what they do.

So like the mechanic, the plumber and the groundskeeper, I use my skills to do the routine maintenance in hopes of preventing a failure, even though I may skimp on the major service tasks. I keep things generally running smooth.

But boy-oh-boy am I glad I didn’t become a gynecologist.

If you’re like me and have ever had a problem where your Symantec Corporate Edition clients have either ceased speaking to the server or you’ve had to migrate servers, have no fear – I have a solution to your woes.

The Symantec website has almost all of this information, but they don’t give you an easy example of how this can be done, they merely hint at it. The cure is to copy the Grc.dat file and the xxx.x.servergroupca.cer file to the client, in two different locations. The next time the client goes to check in, it will redirect itself and you’re home free. Simple, but damned annoying if you have say, 30-some-odd clients that need these files. The trick is to use a login script (assuming you have a domain running these clients.) Here’s how I did it.

Read the rest of this entry »

I took some time off from work today to see if my old swag-gathering skills were still up to par – OSCON’s Exhibit Hall being free and all. Turns out that swag is getting better – I scored 4 T-shirts this time :)

I also ran into an old friend of mine from high school. Ben was the stereotypical computer nerd back then – skinny, with coke-bottle glasses up until our senior year and about 98#s sopping wet. After graduating, though, he went off to college in Berkely and went native – when I came back to Portland, he was sporting the baggy shorts/poncho/chin scruff style of a SoCal hippie.

As of not too long ago though, the scruff, shorts and poncho are gone and he’s looking much more the standard sysadmin. When I ran into him today, he was also holding a definitive open-source icon – free beer. Allow me to explain:

In the open-source world, there is more than one definition of “free”: free as in speech and free as in beer. Speech here in America is pretty free, but you do have to watch your P’s and Q’s so as to not get yourself sued for slander or other such crap. Nice in theory, but can be tricky in practice. Free beer, however, is usually just that – the person that gave it to you doesn’t really want it back.

Well, one of the exhibitors decided to embrace this idea, and trotted out a keg of MacTarnahan’s. This got them quite a bit of attention, of course. It’s a shame I don’t like beer.

The rest of the show was much as you would expect from a geek convention: every power outlet I saw had laptops plugged into it, every table I saw had at least one latop on it, and there was about a 20:1 male/female ratio. There weren’t any cell phones there though – everyone I saw had a Treo instead.

Or nearly so, anyway. No, this is not a remark about the weather – today I did a cabling walk-through for a Baptist Church that’s expanding.

Not your everyday experience. Full-on rebuilding of the whole church with over a hundred new voice and data drops. If I’m lucky, they won’t take our cabling bid but will hire us for the new computers they need.

Once again, I hate HP printers. Different client this time, but the software for these things is just so stupid. Not only do they load half-a-dozen things in the background at boot, they make it impossible to add features later – you have to uninstall all, then go back and do a full install with ALL of the additional crap to get the one added feature you wanted beyond the print drivers. I remember the grand old days when printers did their own work instead of foisting it off on the PC.

And then there’s Symantec – when it works, it’s great. When it screws up, it takes everything with it. Another client had an install of System Works go south on him, and the only way to get it out is to run the SymNRT removal tool – which must remove EVERY Symantec product in the computer, not just the one you want to get rid of. And even then, it likely won’t work, and I’ll have to rebuild this guy’s server from scratch.

Oh, I found out what happened to the new property manager Saturday – he went to the wrong house. In his defense, the house he went to is occupied by a man with a similar first name as mine, but he didn’t think to carry my cell number with him, so he still loses points. So far, he’s just breaking even – willing to come to us to talk about the new agreement, but can’t find the house he’s managing.

Woof.

A special note to all you young, aspiring, perspiring avid gamers out there who want to build that killer gaming rig that will allow you to spin circles of Doom and Destruction around your enemies: Read The Warranty Very Carefully.

Some 16-yr-old kid managed to squeeze a buttload of cash out of his gramma to build himself a rockin’ system. AMD Athlon64 FX-55, Gigs of RAM, SLI video, the works – including a Koolance water cooling kit. Give the kid points for his hardware selection, he did the research there – which probably amounted to reading the “Best of the Best” column of MaximumPC Magazine.

Unfortunately, that’s where the reading stopped. There were problems with his assembly that led to him smoking the processor and motherboard. We assissted them with an RMA and got his kit working again, after we re-assembled everything correctly and did all the little things…Like bleeding the water system of air bubbles. (This is probably what smoked it.)

Even more unfortunately, he somehow managed to smoke the processor again, we’re not sure how. This time, his mom handled the RMA herself and accidentally told the AMD rep that the rig was water-cooled. Well, if you read the Bold print on the warranty page, it tells you right out that using anything other than the cooling solution that came with the unit voids the warranty. This includes thermal paste!

So now this poor kid has about $2500 worth of hardware that is going to sit around for the next 7-10 months while he takes out alot of garbage and mows square miles worth of lawns, because Mommy sure as hell isn’t going to shell out $800 for another processor.

Of course, that one little tidbit of information isn’t posted anywhere I can find it on retail sites or the Koolance website, so it’s only AMD that tells you. Seems to me it would be a good idea to warn folks, but I guess they are afraid of scaring away sales.

Caveat emptor indeed.

While Pookie wa in the shower, I got an email reminding me about OSCON this year, so I signed up and figured I should probably request a half-day off so I could cruise the exhibit hall.

Hmmm…webmail no-workee. Server down? Nope, none of our IP addys are responding. Crappity. The T1 is down.

Which means that the server that monitors all of our client’s servers is disconnected. Oh Fuck.

ISP tech support must know about it, because the hotline dumped me to voicemail after a 3-minutes hold time. I’ll try again now…hey, I got through. Turns out they are just doing maintenance, but my line will be down for about another hour.

WTF!?! You can’t send me an email or call me to let me know that my most important server will be down for over an hour? Ok, those of you not in my line of work are probably thinking “Dude, it’s after 10, chill.” No. In over three years of running an ISP myself, the only times I dropped the network for more than ten minutes it was because something blew up, never for maintenance. And by “blew up” I mean “smoked so bad I had to drive across town to pick up the spare head end out of the warehouse”.

And it still only took me an hour-and-a-half. (Traffic was light and the Beastie jumps when you kick her.)

Nitwits.

There’s been some hubbub lately over how well ICANN is running things and other interests. I honestly can’t pick one side or the other for these topics, so I’m asking you – what do you think?

Should the United States give up control of the Internet, and if so, who should take over?

This is a tough one for me. Since an American agency invented and deployed the initial Internet system before openning it up to the world, I think we should retain control of the higher functions and further development. This was all taxpayer money, so it basically belongs to all Americans who pay taxes. (Yes, I know this is a rather grandiose viewpoint, bear with me.)

Mostly, I am afraid that any organization formed to control the internet on a global scale is going to become way too much like the U.N. – basically useless due to internecine politics. Any new governing body would have to be a-political – which can’t be done.

Net Neutrality
I go back and forth so much over this one it’s a tennis match. It seems logical that telcos should be able to charge extra to heavy bandwidth users. On the other end, it gets swampy quick.

Case in point: when I was running high-speed data downtown, we once lost service for a whole week. Seems that on a Saturday morning, some nitwit punched through a fiber trunk with a backhoe. Now, that line was owned by Company A, which leased access to Company B, which sub-let it to Company C, which sub-sub-let to Company D.The physical problem took only a day to fix, but it took another day for each of the Companies in turn to verify the work completed. In this example setup, which company gets to actually charge for the faster bandwidth? Do all 4 companies get to charge? How will this affect the end-user?

Anyone have any insight?

Anyone who knows me understands that I file “Reality TV Shows” under the heading “Trash of the Most Heinous Sort” – usually it is so terribly massaged toward false drama that it makes me sick.

I have to admit though, that I have been casually following ‘Rockstar: Supernova’ lately for two very important reasons: Storm Large and Jill Gioia.

Storm Large is a hometown girl from right here in the Rose City. She’s had a pair of standing gigs at Dante’s and on the Riverboat for some time now, and it’s great to see her up there belting ’em out. She got to open the first show with a rendition of The Who’s “Pinball Wizard” and I was impressed by how well she sang it – it takes guts to tackle such a classic. I’ll even cut her some slack on the jumbled line in the first verse of the chorus.

Her second performance, however, was a bad choice: Cheap Trick’s “Surrender”. One, her voice is too deep for it, and two, she was in full-on lounge singer mode. I hated it.

Jill Gioia has been touring with Trans-Siberian Orchestra for some time now, so I’m already pretty familiar with her work. She’s a tremendously talented singer, and I’d love to see her hit the big show – provided she still does the TSO tours too, of course :)

The first night, she went out and belted Janis Joplin’s “Piece of my Heart” and just nailed it to the wall. I need to find the video of that performance so I can load it into my MP3 player. She dropped to the bottom three, unfortunately, and had to make up some lost ground on the second show. To prove to the guys she can sing without the rasp she chose Evanescence’s “Fallen”, a song that had already been done (poorly) by another contestant. Damn – another trophy on the wall.

The third reason I’ve been watching is an unknown: Patrice Pike. The first night, she was absolutely channeling Grace Slick for her performance of the Jefferson Airplane classic “Somebody to Love”. Impressed the hell out of me.

Enough TV for now.