Integrity

[ehowton]

Meet the IA-64 Itanium processor. I'd tell you more about him, but I experienced yesterday what was probably catastrophic hardware failure. The box emitted what it calls an 'e-buzzer' troubleshooting code for issues which are too either too severe or occur too early to init the LED lights. It provides between one and seven 'beeps' a second, for you to time to determine where the issue is. As there were beeps evenly spaced throughout the time alloted without pause, I can only assume that one meant one thing: 'fux0red' which of course was not on HP's troublehshooting page. As it turns out, that unix creature of mythical proportions Ernest is going to provide me a second identical box for the purposes of getting this up and running. I've taken over my wife's sewing table in the interim, for the build-out and load.

The rx2600 can hold a maximum of 64GB of RAM, but it needs a minimum of 4x256 PC2100R (registered, ECC) to boot. Betwixt Ernest and I, we found exactly one set of matched pairs. Like the 712/80, this box does not require a proprietary keyboard, mouse or monitor. Unlike the 712/80 however, it can use USB for those devices, which is a nice addition. The 712/80 actually required those items to be present to boot, as it was a desktop rather than a server. Once I get this built, its going into my server rack, as I've already replaced the space previously occupied by belanna with an ubuntu 8.10 server. I put together three other x86 boxes yesterday from junk parts, and loaded two of them. drax0r ended up with a 2.8GHz 1GB RAM ubuntu desktop, and for myself I built a 2.6GHz 1GB RAM ubuntu server. I gave him my even older parts, and put together his old 1.6GHz box which was my linux server for a long time. The only thing it needs is a power supply.

And while I was thrilled to discover that I could now simply apt-get gallery2 (preventing me from re-compiling it everytime I update the linux-headers) my hopes were quickly dashed when I saw that just because you can apt-get a thing and all its dependencies simultaneously, doesn't mean it will *actually* work. I was up until 0100 trying to get PHP to play nice with MySQL. And that's another thing - before I decommissioned the old gallery, I'd made a database backup. And while it was easy enough to restore, the versions are different enough to cause my grief as well.





I have not yet received my soundtracks from La-La Land Records. I was hoping to have them before we leave for Wichita tomorrow. I'll be sitting on pins and needles until the mail arrives.

Tonight - hamburgers! Fresh sliced yellow onions, thick sliced hot house tomatoes, sandwich sliced dill, and jalapeno rings atop a quarter-pound grilled angus beef patty with your choice of provolone, chipotle, or horseradish cheese between a soft, whole wheat bun. Yeah, I'm excited. Better get that grill started...