Today I made a compact "gaming station" to get the kids off the main TV. They can play the Wii and the Playstation on this unit. It also contains all the games and crap that go along with the consoles. It is made from an old baby change table which I basically cut in half on the table saw. It uses a TV screen with AV in which a mate gave me. A quick win for not much work.

Triple Screen ASCIIquarium =)

Swich from eBay arrived today. Pretty good score - less than $100. 48 Port gigabit managed switch. HP 2848. Judging by the box it came it, it was ex-auction (grays online or something) and had never been used. The "refer to guide" sticker was still over the power inlet. W00t.

Just finished implementing a postgres backed powerdns system for internal dns including slony replication to a remote node which also has powerdns on it. I wrote some python which I hooked into the dhcpd commit, release and expire events that creates forward and reverse DNS entries for specific ranges of DHCP when leases are given and removes them when they expire or when they are released. The records are created with 60 second TTLs, so it seems to work pretty well. I got tired of editing bind files, now I can make DNS changes programatically or in a web GUI like poweradmin or something. There are also a bunch of new sub domains for lab, esx, vpn and proxmox hosts which are easier to manage now.

Setting up current version of yum Postgres on CentOS machines...

rpm -Uvh http://yum.pgrpms.org/9.3/redhat/rhel-6-x86_64/pgdg-centos93-9.3-1.noarch.rpm</p>
<p>yum install postgresql93-server --enablerepo=pgdg93

These boxes now have Debian installed and are ready to go to the Datacentre. They are going to be part of my logging project and will be hosting an Elasticsearch cluster. These are nice machines, they should do well. Massive IO with all these disks, heaps of RAM and 16 cores to index all the things =)

Looks like maybe heat was not the issue. Perhaps the mainboard is toast. During RAM testing with single sticks in combination with differing single slots I discovered that my RAM appears to be good, but for some unknown reason the board is trying to run DDR3 on the second slot at just 200MHz. The machine passes both sticks in the first slot and also does not exhibit any issues with just one stick of RAM in the first slot. Fun times =(

I was able to bandaid it while I wait to get a new board by underclocking the RAM substantially.

Today my random eBay shunt box arrived. I spotted this one on eBay and bought it straight away. $15. I stripped it during lunch at work and kept only the voltage and current meters and some switches. Pretty good salvage for $15, considering a 300V volt meter and 30A current meter with it's shunt is probavly worth over $50.

House server "brick" from atom with 1G to Xeon x3220 with 8G and a mobo that has SATA2. It now doesn't fall to it's knees when indexing things in elasticsearch or when you glance at it. I'm over my super low power phase, It needs to be able to get shit done...

Desktop to 8G RAM, it now plays BF4 much more reasonably.

Today I spent a bit of time stripping down the TV boards that I salaved. I was looking for the flybacks (mainly), but also saved some high voltage transistors and diodes from the TV boards.

Terrible problems with the PC at the moment, it looks like heat is the issue. I tore everything down and cleaned it.

Today I managed to get my Mazilli ZVS Oscillator running with a flyback out of a PC monitor which I scrapped. There are more photos in the gallery.

The new lab shelves are finished and the gear is all set up. They look great.

The sash clamps have arrived and work great. eBay specials of course. They were fun to walk home with - 12kgs. The picture shows one of the shelves with edge banding being glued up.

My Cisco 1231 access point arrived. This is going outside. Not bad for $30.

Runs off POE, does 802.11B and G, handles multiple SSIDs and VLANS. Fun =)

It will take a tiny bit of messing around because it doesn't have an autonomous IOS on it, the LWAP image will have to go.

Today I used a jig that I made aaages ago for trimming edge banding. The jig worked great, but the result wasn't that great. The banding was not being adequately clamped to the shelving - so there were gaps. I broke the edge banding off, sanded the glue off the shelf and the banding and I'm going to wait until I get some sash clamps.

The glue is now dry on the shelving supports and they are now bolted onto the desk. They look good so far.

Just finished installing two NetApp filers and 7 24 disk shelves at the data center. Approximately 300kg of gear. 150TB raw storage. It took us 3 car trips. Unfortunately I can't take photos at the DC. So here is a photo of the box =)

I started work today on a new set of shelves which will bolt to the back of my lab desk. I am using standard 70x35mm cheap construction pine with 18x90 finished pine for horizontals. The shelves themselves will be made from a big sheet of black melamine MDF that I salvaged from the store I used to work in.

Hot plugging RAM into a Debian VM (for shits and giggles). It actually works.

for a in `ls /sys/devices/system/memory/memory*/state`;
do
echo "online" > $a;
done 2>/dev/null;
grep offline /sys/devices/system/memory/memory*/state