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Posts in Hardware
An amazing hot swap drive tray
I'm constantly playing around with Operating Systems and applications, and in the vast majority of cases I can use VirtualBox, KVM or VMWare to accomplish my testing. But in some cases I need to use physical hardware, which used to require me to shuffle drives and cables around in my custom built rack mount servers. Well, no more. I picked up a couple of SNT hot swap drive trays and now I can easily swap drives in and out of my rack mount servers…
$ read more →Displaying CPU temperatures on Linux hosts
Intel and AMD keep coming out with bigger and faster CPUs. Each time I upgrade (I'm currently eyeing one of these) to a newer CPU it seems like the heat sinks and cooling fans have tripled in size (I ran across this first hand when I purchased a Zalman CPU cooler last year). If you use Linux and a relatively recent motherboard, there should be a set of sensors on the motherboard that you can retrieve the current temperatures from. To access these sensors you will first need to install the lm_sensors package: Once the software is installed and configured for your hardware you can run the sensors tool to display the current temperatures: This is useful information, especially if you are encountering unexplained reboots…
$ read more →The easiest way to test the memory in your Intel-based PC!
Most admins have a series of tools they use to check for faulty hardware. This toolkit most likely includes the ultimate boot disk, a network accessible memtest and preclear_disk.sh on a USB stick. I was always curious why Linux disitrubtions didn't integrate these items into their install / live CDs, since it would make debugging flakey hardware a whole lot easier. Well, I was pleasantly surprised this week when I booted the Fedora 14 installation DVD and saw the following screen: Once I selected the memory test option I was thrown directly into memtest: This is solid, since one CD can now be used to test the memory in a server and repair things that go south…
$ read more →ARM vs. Intel Atom comparison
Van Smith wrote an awesome articlecomparing current ARM processors and their lower power consuming x86 friends such as the Intel Atom. Here's the conclusion of his performance benchmark tests: "The ARM Cortex-A8 achieves surprisingly competitive performance >across many integer-based benchmarks while consuming power at levels far >below the most energy miserly x86 CPU, the Intel Atom. In fact, the ARM >Cortex-A8 matched or even beat the Intel Atom N450 across a significant >number of our integer-based tests, especially when compensating for the >Atom’s 25 percent clock speed advantage." > > However, the ARM Cortex-A8 sample that we tested in the form of the >Freescale i.MX515 lived in an ecosystem that was not competitive with >the x86 rivals in this comparison. The video subsystem is very limited…
$ read more →Server hardware is dirt cheap!
I just built a quad core AMD-based server that I plan to use as a storage host in my lab. The machine has the following configuration: Now that the machine has been up and working for a few days, all I can say is WOW! This machine is blazing fast, and the rack mount case I purchased is absolutely amazing. It is extremely well constructed, and has TONS of space for future expansion…
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