Late Night PC

Just in case anyone's wondering about the outcome from the parts I ordered the other day, I just installed my Ruby Orb fan on my Asus M2NPV-VM. It was a little scary, for one thing that heatsink & fan is really huge. I mean really. It's a 120mm fan, stock CPU fans are about 65mm if I remember right. The Ruby Orb is so big I don't think I could take the RAM out of the computer without removing the CPU heatsink. I will say it's very quiet for the amount of air that it moves. Still my computer overall seems about as loud as it was with just the one case fan. Of course now it's got two case fans running and with the old case fans I had the noise would've been unbearable. I've also got five hard drives in there now (just installed the 500GB Seagate Barracuda SATA drive).

I started out talking about SMART and drive temperatures the other day but got all geeked out about hardware and forgot where I was going. I meant to also talk about how I tried to just spin down my older Western Digital ATA hard drives to give them a chance to cool off.

I looked at the hdparm, I saw some comments on forums saying it could be used to set a time delay to spin-down a hard drive.

One thing I've noticed since upgrading my system to OpenSuse 10.3 is that my 3 older Western Digital 160GB drives (specifically 2 WDC WD1600JB-00D and a WDC WD1600JB-00F) run really hot. Like 120 degrees Celsius hot. I get this information from smartd or smartctl. It leaves scary log messages like Oct 24 19:43:18 copper smartd[4479]: Device: /dev/sda, SMART Usage Attribute: 194 Temperature_Celsius changed from 120 to 116 The drives do get hot to the touch but 120°C sounds really hot. It is possible that the sensors aren't accurate. It's also possible they've been reporting high temperatures ever since I installed them around five years ago. See, until I installed OpenSuse 10.3 I never saw the SMART data. I could also guess that the information just isn't accurate for my system. So to test these ideas out I ran smartctl to see what it had to say about all my drives. Three are the WD drives I mentioned and the fourth is a Seagate SATA drive.

It took a lot of digging to figure out how I should approach choosing a good LDAP directory layout for my house but Michael Donnelly seems to have an answer I like. I created Organizational Units to hold all the people and all the computers. I want to have a few canonical OUs that hold the base records for each of these things then have other OUs that reference them and group by access. I don't know that I have it all figured out right just yet, but phpLDAPadmin makes it simple to move things around. Just make sure to hit the "Purge caches" link if you move stuff on one computer then view it on another.

Background

I'm trying to move forward with the plan I outlined the other day. In short I want to use LDAP to simplify my home network of five computers and six users. I haven't got as far as setting up a login yet but I have got the LDAP server running on one of the computers (named copper) that's running OpenSuse 10.2. Today I just want to talk about the steps I've taken to experiment at getting something going. I'm learning this as I go and these are just notes to help remember how I got to where I am. If they help you too then that's great.

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A lot's been going on at home lately, Candace and her brood are coming to live with me and my daughter. We're doing piles of construction in the basement to get bedrooms built. We're all excited and working hard to get stuff done this summer. More importantly though, it is now normal for there to be five computers in my living room (none of which are really meant for my use any more, but that's beside the point). Any of six residents can be in the house at any given time. There are also cases where we might log in remotely: for email, SSH access or a couple other web applications that I run on one of the machines like a wiki and calendar. Then there's Asterisk, which I haven't had up lately but desperately want to get back online.

Background - Many to Many Too Many

Obviously we need to have some common file storage locations and control for access to those locations. So I've decided to look more seriously into setting up LDAP. Currently one of the machines dual boots Windows XP and OpenSuse 10.2. Another one (that I use for a Myth TV front end) runs OpenSuse 10.1. My desktop is full-time OpenSuse 10.2 for now, though I might be pressed to also install Windows Vista soon (resisting with all my might). Let's see... that leaves the two laptops. They run Windows XP. Oh, I almost forgot about the old DOS box I put in the garage to run the CNC. I'll not worry about it for the moment.

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I have a GNet BB0060A DSL modem. It works pretty well but when I first got it years ago I screwed something up and couldn't get in to the web-based user interface any more. It also doesn't have a reset button on the back (though the manual claims it does). It does have an RJ-45 console connector on the back. RJ-45 connectors are the kind you find on normal ethernet cables - like a phone connector but wider. This isn't a network connector though. To connect to it you need an RS-232 null modem cable. RS-232 cables normally have a DB-9 connector on both ends (but are sometimes DB-25). I don't remember what I did to connect to it back then, but Steve at Teksavvy was helpful enough to tell me the connection settings I'd need with the null-modem and the command to recover my modem. Fast forward to today and Candace has a GNet BB0060B that she got from a friend. They were both on Teksavvy as well and so Candace could use the modem with the same settings. Trouble is, the way the modem was configured was such that the username and password for PPPoE were stored right there in the modem settings. And the web interface username & password don't match what the manual says they are. According to the manual you should be able to go to 192.168.7.1 in a web browser and log in with the username 'DSL' and password 'DSL' (case sensitive). Failing that, the username 'root' and password 'root' should work. You can also try the same username and password over telnet. None of these options worked for me. So my problem now was to figure out how to get in to the modem settings without a valid username or password and with no reset button available.

I mentioned the other day that I had a couple lockups with my new system (an AMD 64 X2 4200+ with the Asus M2NPV-VM motherboard). Since I didn't see the setting I thought might fix a problem that X reports with the video aperture size, I decided to try updating my BIOS. As it turns out, the version that shipped on the motherboard was quite a few versions behind, it reported as 0109. When I first looked at the Asus site and saw all the Windows and DOS-based Flash BIOS update tools, I was a little disheartened. I had seen a reference to EZ-FLASH in the BIOS settings and the manual, so I decided to investigate that method.

I don't generally put up with long-term stability issues with my computers. I fix them - that's how Late Night PC Service got started after all. Thinking back, my old desktop did have an issue when DDR2 RAM first came out (under Windows 98 back then) so my solution was to just put in twice as much DDR :) . Either I'm good at building systems and choosing the right parts or I just usually buy hardware that's old enough for the kinks to be worked out. Which ever one it is, I'm not afraid to upgrade my BIOS, I just don't want to unless I think there might be a benefit.

Disclaimer: I label this as a "how-to" and it should work as a guide if you're comfortable with computers. But bear in mind that I don't warrant that any of this is accurate, current or even anything more than a malicious lie. If you need to upgrade the BIOS on your computer then I hope this helps but I won't be held responsible for any use or misuse of what I write here. Now that all that's clear, let's proceed...

I've had a problem twice now with my new system. It's an AMD Athlon X2 4200+ with an Asus M2NPV-VM motherboard running OpenSuse 10.1 Linux. What happens from my point of view is that the display locks up, that is the image is frozen - doesn't move, and the mouse pointer won't move. It doesn't respond to keyboard input either. Once there was sound playing (from two sources) and it just looped one second of audio endlessly. I tried pinging it from another machine on my LAN and there was no response (after I rebooted I could ping it, so I know it's pingable). The first time I was surprised that some little game I was playing was able to lock up Linux. The second time the symptoms were identical but I was running mostly different applications.

I leave this computer on all the time so if this were happening often I'd expect to come home and find it locked up. That hasn't been the case - when I'm away from home I occasionally ssh in and have no issues whatsoever.

There's an option in fstab that I think is relatively new. It lets you mount devices by label. The label it uses corresponds to the label you can give a partition with the e2label command. In KDE the labels also show up in the "My Computer" view in Konqueror. The reason I mention this is that I think I've hit on a nice way to make your system more flexible. Normally when you install SuSE it defaults to creating a swap partition, a ReiserFS partition for the OS, and another ReiserFS partition for your /home folder. Or something like that. If you look at the advanced options, the installer plans to set up your fstab to mount devices by their names, like /dev/sda2. I leave the swap partition as is, but I change the others. First off, I use ext3 because it's more backwards compatible with ext2. Next I create a few partitions for OS installations. This time I made 3 so that I have one for OpenSuSE 10.1, another to try out a different OS if I feel like it and still one more for my next upgrade. Each OS partition is 20GB. When I say "OS" partition I really mean the space to install a Linux distro and all the apps that I use for that particular installation. It also includes the home folder for the root user - /root. Everything that's not on an OS partition is in /home. On my last install I also made partitions specifically for holding backups (of my web server) and other specific types of data. That worked out for that PC but this time I'm not sure what I'll need so I'll resize my partitions with parted when I figure it out. Now comes the clever part.