Friday, August 27, 2010

Too Hot

CPU Temps on Squirrel



My new obession seems to be temperature and heat. More specifically
how how my cpu and hard drives are running. I noticed a few days ago
when Squirrel ( Q8400 w/ stock cooler) was encoding some video in a
very hot apartment, the temperatures hit 86C. That's crazy. I let it
finish the encode, but vowed not to let the temps get that high
again. This is especially worrysome because the chip isn't even
overclocked ( unlike my Athlon64 @2.3Ghz, stock 1.8Ghz).

I think the culpurit is the stock Intel cooler. Its just not up to the
challenge. As far as I know the Q8400 isn't known for being
particularly warm. It runs at 2.66Ghz with 4MB of cache. The only part
in the rig that could be producing crazy amount of heat is the ATI
4870 ( which itself has a massive cooler that exhausts to the outside
of the case). I'm thinking I want to replace the stock cooler. For $20
- $50 or so I can get a really good cooler that will keep the machine
nice and frosty. I haven't even tried to overclock ( mainly cause its
fast enough for what I need and the temps were a bit high). With a
better cooler the temps might be low enough that overclocking would be
nice. Plus it would boost my folding and transcoding a bit.

At first I'm only planning on replacing the cooler on Squirrel. Dug
doesn't get used near enough to warrant a new part. It's kind of a
shame really. But I can't really blame Fiance for not using her
Quad. There's so much stuff stacked all over her desk, that just
getting to her computer would take a while. I keep mine relatively
cleared off just because I want to be able to use my machine.

HDD Temps on Frisket



Also recently I found a linux utility, hddtemp, that reads out the
temperature of the hard drives. On a whim I checked the temps on
Downy. Those are running at about 40-45C, considering there's 5 HDs in
that case I would say thats pretty good. The Antec300 case seems to
really help with keep the temperatures down. Makes sense considering
there's 2x120MM fans blowing straight onto the drives, a 120MM
exhausting hot air out the back and a monster 140MM fan exhausting air
out of the top. With that kind of airflow, the drives should be ok.

I checked the temps on Frisket, which only has 3 HDs total and those
temps were in the 55-59C range. Much higher. I think this is
attributed to the fact that that machine is still on my old desktop
case. The case itself was ok back in the day, but if I'm planning on
turning it into a true server class machine, I need a better
case. With that in mind I ordered another Antec300 case for the
server. This time its the "Illusion" version. which just means it
comes with front led fans, so I don't have to buy them seperately.

Wednesday, August 25, 2010

Subie again...

Why I hate living in an apartment.



Went out to Subie this morning, on my way to work. Saw a shiny mark,
about the size of silver dollar. I thought it was bird poop, like
normal. Closer look it was a scratch. Not just a small normal one, it
was pretty deep and it looked like it went through the paint into the
actual shell.

This isn't the first time Subie has been accosted in this parking
lot. The side is littered with little dings and scratches, mostly from
incosiderate fuckers that can't understand that maybe other people
actually give a shit about their cars.

One particular incident comes to mind. Fiance and I were walking to
her car to go on a jog ( back when we did such things). On the way
there I see 4 mexicans hanging around the car. Worst, one of them was
SITTING on the hood. Maybe more like leaning, but there was butt to
hood contact. Me being the chicken shit I was ( I'd like to think was,
but possibly still am) didn't say anything. I'm actually trying hard
to be better at this. I've gone out of my way to face confrontation,
instead of scurrying away. I even went and got a manager because a guy
was being unruly during a movie.

This is a perfect example of people thinking they can do whatever they
like. They have no concept of personal property. They don't care if
they sit on their car so why should anyone else care? People wonder
why the "rich" like to segregate themselves away in gated communities,
this is one of those reasons. Logic follows that if you're in that
situation then hopefully you're of the same mindset, ie: I won't fuck
with your shit if you don't fuck with mine.

PS: Does them being Mexican have anything to do with them being
dumbasses? I don't know, they were Mexican so I'm describing them as
such. If they were black I would have said "4 black guys", if they
were filipino I would have said "4 bastards". ;-)

Monday, August 16, 2010

Back in on the Crack

Yesterday I reactivated my World of Warcraft account. Why? Mainly cause I needed some stress relief from the house and paddling. Paddling itself is winding down, and I can feel my body just needs more rest than it used to. I think some time playing games will really help me deflate after this season.

Minutes after reactivating my account I hopped into a Halls of Reflection PUG. I was healing, and it did not go well. Partly I'm sure was my forgetting where all my keybindings were and how everything is. I was even experiencing some lag at certain points... which was strange.

I hopped into a Sunken Temple run with Onaara also. That went better. I slowly had to remember how to play a resto-shaman. It went well enough that I dinged 49. Did some questing and got to within 700xp of level 50. Went to bed, then finished it off early this morning. I'm now at level 50.

Friday, August 13, 2010

New Server

Low Power Server?



Was talking to a fellow mdadm/server/RAID5/packrat about what he has
planned for his current and next server. His significant-other is
starting a new endeavor that requires she have a redudant,
fault-tolerant system to keep all her documents on. He of course
though that a Ubuntu based RAID with automated backup would be perfect
for this.



Reuse


He decided that based on her storage needs, his current server would
be more than adequete for her needs ( with some minor reshuffling
towards data backup than maximum capacity). He will take his RAID5,
composed of 5x500GB drives, and turn it into a RAID1, with hot
spare. 500GB is more than enough space for her needs, and the other
two drives can be used for cycled backups. He would have a nightly
backup of the RAID onto another 500GB, and this would be cycled on
some schedule. I'm going to suggest he create something like
rsnapshot, which would enable him to have versioning as well as
backup.

With this repurposing, it enables him to think about what he will do
for his next, bigger, badder RAID server.

... Less? Power


He apparently has been thinking of building DOWN his server. He's
noticed that he doesn't use much of the server's processing power on a
day to day basis. With the amount of electricity a dual-core (not to
mention the quad-core I was planning on getting) uses up even at idle,
a more efficient system could lead to significant savings.

I originally was planning on upgrading the "new" server to a quad
core, probably an AthlonII X4 630 or similar. Its a cheap chip, with
decent performance for the money. Yes some dual core intels are
faster, but I like knowing I have 4 real cores. The reasoning behind
this upgrade was Air Video, the fact that it does take up some power
for live-conversion almost necessiates a powerful machine. Plus I'd
like to be able to run Bittorrent and possibly other services on the
machine.

With a lower power machine I would save quite a bit of energy. With
the possibility of moving into a house, saving electricity will be
even more important. But at the same time, I'll lose the ability to
have a power server. It can probably still do the software NAS
functions, samba sharing, as well as bittorrenting. Air Video
live-conversions would be too taxing for the little processor. This
could be possibly remedied by farming out the conversion duties to my
quad desktop ( much like how its done now ). It wouldn't be too bad,
since I don't think I'd really get in the habit of turning the quad
off.

Prices



The prices for Atom based boards are about comparable to a decent sale
at Fry's for the quad-core Athlon. I've seen the Athlon II X4 630 +
motherboard on sale at Fry's for as little as $70. The Atom based
boards on newegg are closer to $100 for processor and
motherboard. Another potential savings would be on the power
supply. With such an efficient processor, more of the PSU's power
would go towards the drives, meaning I would be able to use less
powerful (400-430W) PSU's instead of the big ones I use now ( 500W+).

Either way, first things first. I need a case for that
server. Regardless of the processor, those drives aren't being
properly cooled.

Thursday, August 12, 2010

Contract Signed

Contact Signed


Got an email yesterday from the realtor. He has the signed contract and is forwarding it to our loan guy. Fiance dropped off all but 1 of the documents loan guy needed to get to the underwriter. She was missing her W-2 from an old old job. That came in the mail yesterday also, but not until after she'd already made the trip to drop off the other docs. Guess she's making another trip to drop it off.

Open Escrow?


I don't really know if this means we've opened Escrow and thus have moved into the "Contingency" portion of the process. We haven't given our deposit check ( is it even a check I don't know) so I'm guessing we're not. But we'll have to see.

Next up, we need inspections up the wazoo to make sure the house isn't hiding anything weird under the hood.

Wednesday, August 11, 2010

Even closer...?

Just got a call from our Realtor. He has the signed contract.

Tuesday, August 10, 2010

New House?

Fiance and I have been looking at houses for about 2 weeks now. We've been looking at places online, and if the pictures look good, we decide to drive by. We drive by to see the outside of the house, and the neighborhood on our own. That usually will narrow the field pretty quickly. After that we'll schedule an outing with our real estate agent to actually take a look at the inside.

We took a look at 2 houses we really liked last tuesday. The first one, we loved the outside and the area, but the inside turned out not so good. The rooms were small, and over customized. Disappointed we headed for the next house. This house I wasn't too excited about the outside. This was because the last time we saw it was at night. Seeing it in the daytime made quite a difference. Once we got inside it was great, the rooms were spacious and the layout was nice. The backyard was huge as well. We really liked it but wanted to be cautious.

After much deliberation we decided to take another look and then put in a bid. When in contact with our realtor, he informed us that a strong bid was placed on the house on FRIDAY. This house has been on the market 50 days. We decided we didn't want to try to fight for the house and gave up. As the day wore on, we talked about how much we like it. About 20 minutes later we decided to put in a full-price bid. We thought the house was worth full price, so might as well give it a shot.

Fast forward to yesterday. We get a call from the realtor that our bid was VERBALLY accepted. Meaning that there's a very good chance we got the house. Its not for sure that they've accepted it, but we're hoping.

I'm trying not to get too excited, especially since we don't have the contract signed yet. But its hard not to get excited! I'm already starting to think about how I want the server rack to be...

Friday, August 06, 2010

Air Video.. more like Air Awesome.

Shortly after getting my iPad I went searching for the "essential"
apps for it. I came accross a review for a program called Air
Video. In a nutshell, it is a Client/Server program that lets you
stream your videos wirelessly from your computer to your iPod
Touch/iPhone/iPad. It does this beautifully. With this application I
don't have to worry about pre-loading my devices with movies, as long
as I'm within my own network.

Internet Streaming!


Another, experimental, feature of Air Video is that it can also stream
outside of your network, over the internet. At first I didn't think
this would be THAT useful. When would I ever really want to be
watching movies on the go? Especially since my iPad is Wifi. It turns
out it is very useful. Having the ability to access and watch every
video on the server from my iPhone is amazing. Any time I'm sitting in
one place for potentially more than 10 minutes, I pull out the iPhone
and watch something.

Live-Conversion


This of course can all be done using DLNA server/client, much like
MediaTomb. The killer feature for this solution (other than the
aforementioned internet streaming) is the live-conversion its capable
of doing. It will stream any format the iPhone is capable of playing (
h.264, etc). It shines when it finds a video that the iPhone cannot
play, such as .wmv, .avi, etc. It uses ffmpeg.exe to on-the-fly
transcoding to the proper format. I can literally request to play any
video in my collection and Air Video Server will transcode it as I
watch.

Its even smart enough to figure out what device you're trying to watch
on and how the bandwidth is. This information is used to figure out
what resolution to output to the device. This means that theoretically
an iPad with great bandwidth would receive a high resolutoin image,
while an iPhone on a congested network (such as ATT's 3G) may receive
a lower quality one. It even does this on the fly, so if as the video
goes on, the bandwidth gets more congested, Air Video will
automatically downscale to a lower quality image so that there's no
interruption in the video. Depending on how drastic it needs to be,
there may be a momentary stop in the video to change streams.

Speed


The Air Video Server component is fast. It is multi-threaded so it
will use up every core my system has. I'm currently running it on
Squirrel, which is the Q8400 quad with 4GB of ram. It pegs all 4
processors at 100%. This is probably overkill for one live-conversion
thread. The faster the processor, the "farther-ahead" the converstion
can be, on top of real-time. For example, with this system, assume
that we start at the beginning of the video. If my machine can
transcode at 2 seconds of video per second, then at 30 seconds of
watching video, the NEXT 30 seconds is already done and waiting to be
sent over the wire. If somehow the load on the server goes up, it will
be 30 seconds before I even see any kind of stutter (because of the
buffered video).

As I said, a quad core is probably very overkill for
one live-conversion stream. But what about multiple streams? Air Video
can handle streaming video to multiple devices. Not only that, it can
stream different videos to different devices concurrently. The only
limit ( I've found) is how much resources the server has. My record
has been to stream 4 720p (source) videos, in .wmv format, to 4
devices. These devices include an iPod Touch 1G, an iPhone 3G (on
Wifi), an iPhone 3GS (on Wifi) and a 16GB Wifi iPad. Each stream was
clear, with no stuttering. I even did some high speed scrubbing on
each and saw no performance loss. *I'll be adding an iPhone 4 to this
soon, and will post a picture.

Ease of Use


This program is definetly designed for the mac, and mac
users. Everythign is as simple as possible. There are no configuration
files, everything is very straight forward. It even makes a valiant
attempt at configuring your router for internet streaming (through
UPNP). They even provide a server "PIN", which you can enter on your
mobile device to reference your server. I have a hunch that this pin
is merely some numerical transform based on your external IP and port
number. For advanced users, putting the IP and Port would probalby be
more straight forward and easier to debug. But for normal users this
PIN makes everything very simple and very intuitive. Those kinds of
little touches are all around the application. This is the kind of
thing that makes this otherwise good application into a great one.

Cons


The company that created Air Video (inmethod) is very much an iOS
design house. The software doesn't run on any other mobile
platforms. This is only really a con if you don't have an iPhone. Its
such a nice piece of software, it'd be great to have it on Android as
well. Though I will confess to having a bit of smugness knowing that
our Android friends don't have access to it ;-). I'm sure there's an
equivalent app for Android, but is it as polished and easy to use as
this? I dunno.

The server software only works on OSX and Windows. Again, only a con
if you need it in Linux. For me this was a bigger issue than not
working in Android ( since I don't have any android devices). Both of
my file servers ( downy and frisket) both run a flavor of Ubuntu. It
would be awesome if I could run the Air Video Server on one of these
machines, to keep everything self contained. Two issues prevent me
from doing this; the software not running in linux and the horsepower
needed for live-conversion. The older server ( downy ) is a 1.3Ghz
Athlon T-bird with 768MB of RAM. Handling the CRC and file i/o duties
of a software raid5 tend to keep it pretty busy. The newer server (
frisket ) is a 2.3Ghz Athlon64 with 3GB of ram. It is quite a bit more
powerful than downy and has plenty of ram. Unfortunately Air Video
states that it requires at least a Core2Duo class processor. I've seen
people run it on Pentium D's with no issue. So at least a dual-core
for live-conversion. Probably significantly less for straight
playback/streaming.

Conclusion


The price for all this functionality? $3. Amazing. Technically its
free if you get creative with your folder structure. But for 3 bucks
it was well worth it.

Tuesday, August 03, 2010

The Great Linux Grinding Noise

My linux box at work as been giving some issues lately. A weird sound was coming from it. I thought it was probably a fan. Because its a work machine, I decided against rooting around and fixing it myself.

Today it finally made enough noise that I couldn't stand it anymore. I put in an IT ticket and they came out to fix it. The guy turned it on, saw that it was the video card fan, and then just unplugged the power. This solution makes the perfect sense because:

1. Its linux, thus rarely run 3D applications.
2. Its quick and cheap ( 5 mins of his time, no material costs).
3. Fixing it "right" would have been at least 20 minutes of his time, and $10 for a new fan.
4. Its unlikely to overheat, given that its in an climate controlled office.

Would I have done the same in his place? If I was exactly in his place, with his job, yes I would have. If this was one of my home machine I would have RMA'd the card or bought a new fan. I'm just like that, I hate knowing that something isn't quite working.

Either way my linux box is up and running again. Silently.