Al's WebLog

Category: Computers

  • Home Server Room Power Monitoring

    So with the new ESXI box came another upgrade to the “server room”. This upgrade comes about for a couple of reasons. Firstly I wanted to know how much power things were actually using when they were doing things (part of the reason for ESXI on a Xeon-D is to do more with less power).…

  • ESXI Home Server – OS Install

    In my last blog I explained how and why I ended up with the hardware I have. Here’s how I made it work. So ESXI is nice and simple to install onto a USB drive, especially when you have Supermicro’s iKVM with remote media mounting. Stick the USB stick into the mobo, log into the…

  • ESXI Home Server – Part Selection

    I’ve had various bits of hardware running as servers in my house for many a year. Latterly I have an Asus Terminator T3-P5G965 running Linux as my main dev and pissing about box, an HP Microserver N36L running FreeNAS as my storage (it runs a Plex server too) and sat alongside a pfSense box I…

  • Upgrades

    An evening of little updates is quite rewarding. Things like sorting the cert on my IMAP server so it’s not expired and now works properly on my iPhone, plus moving this here blog to WP 2.7(.1). You’d think as a techie type I’d keep my own box up to date..

  • Wind-alike update

    The little Advent 4211 is chugging along nicely. Its never going to be a day-to-day usable machine, but for a small, light, portable thingie its fine. I chucked another gigabyte of RAM in it ‘cos it was 8quid, can’t say I have noticed any difference to be honest. Maybe I will if I Hackintosh it,…

  • Advent 4211 (MSI Wind clone)

    I’d been thinking about getting a “netbook” since the original Asus 701 was released, but having tried that there was no way my fat fingers were going to manage using it. The whole market has expanded recently and I tried the Merida thingie (another MSI Wind clone)  in Sainsburys the other day and it seemed…

  • Apple ripping off the UK again

    So, in the US an AppleTV got its price cut from 299USD to 229USD. With your new AppleTV you can, in the US, rent movies and such. Here in the UK though we don’t get movie rentals and nor do we get a price cut, an AppleTV still costs 199GBP. Rip-off. Thanks Apple.

  • Dell R200 power consumption

    I had not seen any real world power consumption figures for the new Dell R200 1U servers, so as I have a paid sat behind me I thought I’d stick a power meter on and see what they draw. Turned off, 0.11Amps. Booting, peak at 0.69Amps. Turned on and sat pretty much idle, 0.49Amps. Power…

  • Desktop USB switching

    ATM I have two keyboards and mice on my desk. One pair for the G4 and one pair for the Macbook. The monitor allows me to switch between two inputs, so thats easy, but I had thought I’d be stuck with two sets of input devices. However, whilst looking at USB hubs in Maplin on…

  • Leopard, part 2.

    Through the joy of blog comments (see here) the Junipers Network connect VPN client is now working for me on Leopard. This is good, as I can now switch my MacBook over to Leopard. Sadly that is not as easy as I had hoped, because Apple’s Migration Assistant can’t copy my user’s data again to…