Scored a HP EVA SAN rack. Now all I need to do is get it into the shed. The roller door is too low.

Easter long weekend was good. I made some wood bits and pieces and cleaned up a little in the house. Saturday I went and saw Mum and Dad for tea. Sunday I went and saw Brad - we sat around with some other geeks and talked computers/messed about with computers. Monday was for vegetation.

Had a great weekend. Mowed and cleaned up a bit on Saturday and went to Mum and Dads on Sunday for a BBQ where the kids tore up the veggie patch with tonka toys.

You may notice this site is now DAMN FAST... This is because it is nolonger hosted on ADSL. It's now camping out on a dedicated dual CPU box in a data centre in Sydney.

It's a nice warm day today. The kids are out terrorising each other in the yard. I cut some pine earlier for another project and Liam is riding around on his bike (his truck) with the pine and a selection of tools in the back. I'm in the shed resurrecting an old 1U server for my fermentation controller project.

I've chosen this old dual P3 server because it pulls under 100 Watts - but still has enterprise server goodies, SCSI hot-swap, ECC RAM (because you need that in a fridge controller). The other reason I chose this server (an NEC 8500 120ra-1) is because it has serial and parallel facilities. The parallel was actually a nice find - I was going to use a USB converter, but I found an entry in the BIOS for parallel configuration. So I took a closer look and found a weird header on the mainboard - I plugged in a DB-25 ribbon cable and tested it with a live CD. Good news! The parallel header-ribbon to DB-25 actually came as surplus electronics in my electronics class in highschool! I was lucky that I still had it.

I replaced the CD with a DVD drive and attempted to install CentOS 5.2. Unfortunately the DVD drive is bad, so I downloaded the net install cd image for Centos 5.3 and re-installed the original CD-ROM drive. Looks like the net install is going to take a few hours.