Friday, December 19, 2003

Mini-ITX Motherboards

Criteria: (2) ethernet ports, (2) PCI slots if possible

VIA EPIA CL6000 / CL10000 - (2) ethernet ports, but only (1) PCI slot, $123 at MWave

(only found one)

posted by Wuphon's Reach at 10:14 PM

Thursday, December 18, 2003

Disk Test Benchmark Results

Benchmarking a server before I upgrade the RAID controller and drop in larger hard drives.

The current RAID controller is built into the motherboard; Promise FastTrak100 Lite (ATA/100) and I have (2) 160Gb 5400rpm 2Mb cache 11ms drives hooked up. While testing with 4Gb worth of data, and averaging the transfer rate over 300 seconds, I get the following results:

18.500 Mb/sec sequential read
5.586 Mb/sec sequential write
4.212 Mb/sec random read
4.892 Mb/sec random write
(no data for mixture tests)

Sequential read scores are likely affected by the 1Gb of RAM installed in the system (which is why I used a 4Gb data set to try and counteract the effect of memory caching). I'm going to switch back to larger 7200rpm drives with 8Mb cache memory next week and see if I can't get better scores.

Sequential access is comprised of rolling through the data set in sequential order, with a 5% chance of randomly seeking to another area of the data set after each 128Kb chunk is read. Random testing is done with an 80% chance of randomly seeking to another part of the data set after each 128Kb chunk. As a result, sequential scores are not quite top-shelf throughput and random scores are not quite worst-case throughput values. Mixture tests are done by setting the system to have an 80% chance of reads vs writes after each chunk (combined with sequential or random settings). Goal of the mixture tests is to give a rough idea of how the system would perform in real-world conditions. Sequential mixture would be similar to a file server while random mixture would be more typical of DBMS access.

Some comparison values:

A 9 month old SCSI-based server (RAID1 drives) is as follows (odd that random write is larger then sequential write, but it does happen on multiple tests). A test of the (3) discs that were RAID5'd resulted in scores that are around 25-33% lower:

56.418 Mb/sec sequential read
9.590 Mb/sec sequential write
18.815 Mb/sec random read
11.345 Mb/sec random write
18.488 Mb/sec sequential mixture
15.045 Mb/sec random mixture

System with a Promise FastTrak66 (ATA/66) 512Mb of RAM and 7200 rpm IBM DeskStar drives 8Mb cache:

18.990 Mb/sec sequential read
9.547 Mb/sec sequential write
4.722 Mb/sec random read
8.013 Mb/sec random write
9.213 Mb/sec sequential mixture
5.913 Mb/sec random mixture

posted by Wuphon's Reach at 12:56 AM

Wednesday, December 17, 2003

Antec Sonata Case

Looking into the Antec Sonata ATX cases again (got paid this week). Found (2) more reviews, I'd really like to do something to quiet down the noisier of the 3 servers here in the office, and I think I can do that with the Sonata case. (It'll be a slightly tight fit and I'm wondering about hard drive temperatures.)

Reviews + Information:

ARS Technica

PC Abusers

Build Silent PC

Antec Inc (PDF manual)

Computing on Demand

Pimp Rig

Silent PC Reviews

posted by Wuphon's Reach at 9:13 PM

SPAM SPAM SPAMM

So I now have 9000 spam messages in my collection folder (where I keep confirmed spams in case I have to re-train my SpamBayes software). That's 3 months worth, so right around 100 spam messages per day. (Will see how much that changes over the next few months, it's been going up by leaps and bounds lately and the Jan 1st CAN-SPAM law is just going to make it worse.)

SMTP+SPF was mentioned on slashdot this week. It wasn't a front-page story (why? dunno) so it didn't get much attention/posts. Waiting to see if one of the big ISPs (Yahoo! or AOL) picks it up, implements it and then requires the rest of the domains to also implement it if they want to send e-mail to AOL/Yahoo! accounts.

That's most likely how SPF (or one of the other reverse-MX) proposals will end up gaining any significant traction. If everyone waits for the standards groups to stop piddling around, it'll be 2005 before we start to see any of the reverse MX proposals in use. AOL, Yahoo!, Hotmail, et. al. are big enough to say "we're going to use X while you finish putting the touches on Y".

Thunderbird 0.4 is out (e-mail client). Took me about 15 minutes to switch over from using Mozilla 1.4 and to get all of my e-mail account information migrated. Enigmail has a plug-in for 0.4 as well.

posted by Wuphon's Reach at 8:46 PM

Tuesday, December 16, 2003

New Web Comic (Robin)

Robin - one of the comics centers on a newbie's experience with EQ. (Original author seems to be Japanese.)

posted by Wuphon's Reach at 7:21 PM

Monday, December 15, 2003

MP3 CD Players

So I want something for the bedroom that plays MP3s on CD-R and has a remote so I don't have to get and futz with it. Pickings are slim... I don't want a slot load player unless it also takes the small 8cm CDs (multi-tray changers are probably also out). ID3 support is also a must.

Nothing over at Philips...

Panasonic SC-AK410S is a mini-system, 5 CD changer that does MP3 and ID3. Probably doesn't take 8cm mini-CDs since it has a CD-changer. Ugly bugger too.

Panasonic SC-PM28 is a micro system, 5 CD changer, looks a little nicer then the SC-AK410S but probably doesn't handle mini-CDs. Word is that the random feature doesn't work for MP3s... eww (wonder if the SC-AK410S has that problem?).

JVC has nada (or if they do then their website does a poor job of telling you anything useful).

RCA RCD148 (boom box), gets so-so reviews but might be a decent option if I can even find one for sale.

RCA RS2625 - shelf system, some limits like only 16 folders on the CD, cutting off the last few seconds of MP3 files.

Sony ZS-X3CP S2 boom box (white), no remote control, supposedly a bit picky about what MP3 files it will play properly.

posted by Wuphon's Reach at 1:37 PM