I went to the local Sunday Computer Market a few weeks back, and let myself give in to the temptation of buying an “upgrade kit” for my desktop.  I’d been starting to feel guilty about borrowing-back the computer I’d given to my in-laws, and the prices on the kits at the market seemed really good.

I subbed in a slightly more expensive motherboard, and when it came to the graphics card the one they offered had less RAM than I’d have liked (having had the black-window problem in Compiz/Beryl) but the next one up they had was nearly double the price.  I didn’t even think about the chipset while I was there.

In fact I didn’t even think about it until I got home, and sure enough found that the card was an ATI.  Nevertheless, I threw it all together, thinking “oh well, surely the driver support must have improved since I last used an ATI card…”

W R O N G.

The new kit went in underneath my existing Kubuntu Feisty install, which had Compiz running acceptably on a moderately-recent Nvidia card.  First thing I had trouble with was the right options to get Compiz going again: I went straight for the ATI binary driver, but then backed out to the Xorg Radeon driver because MythTV wouldn’t  work right (the ATI driver doesn’t support video overlays in acceleration mode, or something).  I ended up having to ditch Compiz altogether because it was just really really unstable.

So I’d lost my eye candy, but had TV.  Then, I wanted to look at FlightGear (the FOSS flight simulator)…  I was getting about 3spf (yes, that’s seconds per frame, not frames per second) in the game…  Grr.  The Xorg ATI driver has no 3D acceleration support!

By this time, I had blown about a week of whatever spare-time I might have had trying to get the ATI card working properly — and it still wasn’t.  Not only that, but it couldn’t: the configs needed to support the apps I want to run are mutually-exclusive.  So I spat the dummy, and went to the local PC-bits shop and bought an Nvidia card.

Threw it in there, chucked the Nvidia binary driver at it, and it Just Worked.  MythTV: perfect.  FlightGear: brilliant.

Compiz is a different story though, as it still is dodgy on the new Nvidia card[1].  Might be a bug that’s unrelated to the graphics driver — odd that it only showed up when I put the ATI card in though.

Anyway, I’ve got an ATI X550 based PCIe video card here, going cheap…  :)

[1] The first version of this blog post was lost to a Compiz-induced X crash…  While I was typing, I thought “hmm, now that I’ve got the Nvidia card working and things are stable, I should try Compiz again, so that I can blog it”.  Hint: when trying something that has killed X in the past, don’t do so with unsaved work in your desktop…

In what might be a new record for me, less than 24 hours have passed and I’m less than enamoured with the MyBook 1TB drive I bought.  Documentaion describes these drives as having a feature that spins down the drives after some inactivity, but this seems not to be happening on the Mac.  But that’s not the main problem — the problem is the noise!

The device has a cooling arrangement which seems to be comprised of a bunch of those incredibly annoying 1″ microfans (usually seen in low profile “pizza-box” style rackmount servers).  The unit makes a heck of a noise while the cooling is running — I can hear it from two rooms away, even over my tinnitus.  :(

I had seen a bunch of comments about noise from the network version of the 1TB device, but I mistakenly thought that the non-network device would be cooled differently.

Sigh.

I think the real problem comes from Mac OS X not allowing the drives to become inactive.  In Activity Monitor, there is a constant 3-4 disk writes per second which (if not activity caused by the monitor itself) might be keeping all the disks active.

Also, there’s something called “WDDrvSvc” that’s eating a few percent of CPU; I would think that’s just the service that keeps the pretty lights on the front up-to-date, but 3-5% of CPU is a bit much to pay…  Kill it, and it gets restarted immediately…  Sigh again…

I haven’t Googled anything about it yet, but if nothing turns up I can go back to my original plan of attaching the drive to the Slug and see if that doesn’t keep it busy.  It’s also possible that running it in RAID-1 mode instead of RAID-0 keeps everything busy.  I have verified that a single-drive MyBook does spin down when attached to the Slug.

Update: WD has a firmware update that changes the fan operation, but from the description in their knowledge-base of the changes it sounds like my unit already had the newest firmware.  There are also some hacks around; folks have replaced what seems to be the poor-performing fan WD used as original equipment (I was wrong about them using 1″ microfans) with a larger, quieter fan with greater airflow.  Others have flipped the fan around, because WD has the fan blowing air into the case from outside and it seems to be better swapping the fan to blow air out of the case.  Some wisehats have even decided that the case has little airflow provision, and have taken to it with their Dremel tool…

When I started at the railway in 1995, the fellow from the Operations area that took me on the tour of the data centre was proudly boasting of the new disk subsystem they had just installed for the mainframe.  ”This new subsystem gives us almost half a terabyte of DASD,” he beamed, to the delight and awe of his guide-ees.  I don’t recall how much it had cost, but for some reason $1/MB seems not too far off the mark.  It was a huge full-height frame, running on three-phase power and coming close to the floor loading limits for the room…

Tonight, I went into a store — not even a computer products store, mind, just a general office goods store — and purchased one terabyte of disk in a package that runs off an AC adaptor and I can fit on the palm of my hand.  And, the cost was considerably less than $1/GB.  The unit was on the shelf, with another of the same type — no special order or promotion, just normal store stock.

The madness doesn’t end there: for $50 more I could have gone across the road to a different store and got the network-attached version.  That store had four of those units on the shelf.

The unit I bought is the WD MyBook Premium Edition II.  I looked for a while at the network version, (MyBook World II) but although the embedded OS is Linux-based and a throwaway line in a Wikipedia entry mentions an Open firmware can be placed on it, I could find no evidence that this is the case.  The unit only provides Windows shares, and that’s not so useful to me.

I configured my device in RAID-1 mode, so the 1TB (I should say 1 trillion bytes, as usable base-2 capacity was about 932GB) becomes about 465GB.  I’m attaching it to the Power Mac using Firewire-800, which should make for a nice storage area for video editing and the like.

The install instructions for the Shepherd TV guide data grabber say that “Some grabbers work faster/better if they can operate using The Onion Router (tor)”.  Hmm.  Riiight.  I can think of an alternate wording, but as this is a public blog I’ll keep it to myself.  :)

I realised the other day, after restarting Samba on the main server for the umpteenth time to clear about 800 nmbd processes that were overrunning it, that I barely use Samba any more.  It dawned on me that I have an almost entirely Microsoft-free household, and that there’s no need for me to run Samba at all.  It was a very pleasant realisation!

My main machine that ran Windows on an almost-daily basis was the Sony laptop, and it’s running Kubuntu Feisty nowadays (except on rare occasions when I boot XP).  Susan’s laptop is the holdout (running XP Home because of a crappy wireless card that I can’t get working with ndiswrapper), but she does no file server access — she prints occasionally, but converting her printer connections to IPP will see that off.

Having said all that though, I just know I won’t remove Samba.  It’s just too…  I don’t know…  It’s like that shifting-spanner at the bottom of the toolbox — your dad always taught you not to use shifters because they burr the nuts, but there’ll always be that one Imperial bolt somewhere that your Metric ring-spanners won’t fit…  Or the overtightened nut that someone else already burred with their shifting spanner…  Or the days when you’re just too lazy to take all your separate spanners with you.

Probably as far as I’ll go will be to remove Samba from automatically starting on the server.  For times when I boot the laptop to Windows and need something I’ve kept on the server, I can start Samba manually.

A home network that’s free of SMB/CIFS…  Yay!