Re: [Sheflug] Sheflug - Seems to Okay Now

[Lesley Binks <lesley.binks@xxxxxxxxx>]

John Southern wrote:
> On Tuesday 21 November 2006 16:31, Lesley Anne Binks wrote:
>> Anyhow : I have a slight disaster on my hands .. my main
>> workstation has gone down and I am left with a 700MHz
>> Pentium III laptop, a 500MHz Celeron and a 486.
>>

>>
>> I'd like recommendations on people or companies who are able
>> to supply/repair Linux/BSD compliant boxen that work at a
>> reasonable price without it flashing more blue neon than a
>> cop car and looking like it belongs in a 15 year old's
>> bedroom.
> 
> Most hardware these days is remarkable stable and self repair is usually going 
> to cost you only part of a full system. There is always the temptation to 
> want to buy all new, faster, brighter, glittery bits, but if you can resist, 
> then it is very cheap. Either the monitor has blown or you can reuse, either 
> the CPU is fried or you can reuse, etc.,
Well I went for a self build before because I got to pick the bits I
wanted and it lasted me four and half years so I am not complaining too
much about that.

I did a quick test with a spare PSU and got signs of life.  The A7V33
uses 230W so I plugged in a spare 250W PSU without IDEs attached and it
did boot up.

I made the 'mistake' in the original build of buying a nice purple I-Tee
case but that has a nonstandard power supply and has never been that
great at cooling.  The PSU sits at the front of the machine below the
HDD bay ... and we all know what heat does to magnetic materials don't
we now.  However I am sure a little bit of case modding will return that
case to some form of usage.

Sod's Law operated with remarkable efficiency - I made a mistake on the
delivery date and didn't realise my error til it was just too late to
change it and speed things up.  Got an Antec and a Seasonic 380W -
thinking I'd use my trusty A7V33 board and Athlon XP 2k in the new case.

Now this is the strange bit - while waiting for the new case I needed
some data off the IDE drives - and without anything else capable of
reading a 160GB drive - I booted the board and one IDE drive up and got
the data off it.

I fitted the board and CPU to the new case when it arrived - fired it up
and nothing - absolutely nothing.  Took a very careful look around and
spotted a plume of silver dust trailing from the CPU/heatsink out to the
memory bays.  I even checked again using the 250W PSU.

So that was that.

I re-checked prices of kit from some of my favourite on-line stores and
decided that I couldn't afford to go for new kit with the expense of
DDR2 RAM and a PCI-E grpahics card so hunted round on ebay and managed
to get myself an Asus A7N8X-Deluxe plus a Athlon XP 3200 for under £100
all told.  The RAM I have fits that board so I don't have to go to the
expense of more memory but I decided to invest in a Zalman AlCu Flower
from thecoolingshop.com.

I got Artic thermal paste and cleaner kit from ebay and rebuilt using
the new 2nd hand board and processor.

It's all up and running and I've installed SuSE 10.1 which seems fine.

> 
> It all depends on your need for speed. Speed in being able to get hold of 
> parts. A full build usually takes about 40 minutes for the hardware plus 
> installation time (Anything from 30 minutes once you have found the Debian CD 
> to a couple of months for an unhardened Gentoo compile ;-)    )
> As it is all like Lego these days, no one should ever consider buying a ready 
> built box unless they need the four hour on-site support.
I was running Debian unstable on my L400 and had a break away for a few
days.  Came back and it booted up ro so tried to  install Ubuntu only to
find the CDROM unit has packed up.  Will be trying to squeeze the
OpenBSD floopy install onto a floopy at some stage in the hope of being
able to resurrect the poor thing.  Haven't found a CDROM unit on the net
for it yet.
> 
> If someone has not built a box, then I am sure everyone on the list would be 
> willing to help. Once you have done one, you will always build your own as 
> that way you know it is done correctly.
Self building is OK if you have the time.  What with an error in the
delivery timings plus a holiday plus bidding on ebay then waiting fro
delivery, my main workstation was down for a month.  Not too bad because
I can get on with networky things and had the L400 for GUI stuff when I
needed to use it but still not a godd situation to be in.

Speed of recovery is important.

>From a learning point of view, self build is the only way to go and most
of it really is a matter of deciding what you want, what your budget is,
and then making sure you buy the right RAM and peripherals for the board
and processor you've chosen.

I could have built a good Intel Core 2 Duo but the PSU case RAM mobo and
processor would have come out about £500 and then I would have had to
buy a PCI-E graphics card on top and as I need one to run AutocAD that
would have been pricey.  The resulting system would have been a lot
cheaper that any offerings out there with the same capability, but I
would be in the same situ vis-a-vis speed of recovery from complete outage.

> 
> Software is a different problem anyway. Even a 'doze box will need 
> configuring, so it is just as easy to have a master disk and your backups.
> (Yes I know I need to do a backup, but I am just waiting until I have a spare 
> hour or two to do it properly....been saying that for a month now)
Yes indeed  ;-)  I am looking at the various components out there that
will do backups.

There's a lot to be said for doing regular backups and it's all too easy
to just leave that task but it should be done on a daily basis.  It's
all too easy to just not be bothered at the end of the day to do that
incremental back up or do the weekly full backup so I am looking at
various software alternatives to help automate the whole thing.


> 
> I tend to keep a DVD ready with distro of choice on, a piece of paper telling 
> me what I need to configure for a minimal system, a box of DVDs with backup 
> data from the last time I bothered to backup, for each system and location.
> I also have a VMware image ready and configured for real emergencies on 
> harddrive.
It's ok if you have more than one DVD drive.  I'd done my backups onto
DVD and didn't have another machine to run them on once the workstation
went down.
> 
> Hardware I tend to buy from whoever is the cheapest/closest depending on need, 
> so Scan is cheap, but I have heard disaster tales when trying to return 
> goods. For pricing I tend to compare something that everywhere will carry 
> such as a DVD-RW (Scan £17.80, Aria £25.20, Sheffieldcomputers £48, PCWorld 
> £33, eBay £25.90)
I've heard Scan is better than Dabs in respect of returns behaviour.  My
first port of call tends to be ebuyer.com but I don't think many have
very favourable returns policies.  Cheapest DVD RW on ebuyer is £15.99
excl VAT and deliv and that appears to support dual layer too.
> 
> For commercial clients I do use full hardware support, but at £3K upwards per 
> box, the client is always footing the bill.
Yes .. support isn't cheap so I am building up some redundancy for now.
 I have a spare A7N8X board that needs testing and I will invest in
another CPU for that.  The main thing being I can still use my IDE HDD's
on it and the 2G RAM I already have plus the NVidia Quadro4 900 board
should run in there too.

I also still have the A7V333 and spare Speeze Vulture heatsink - both
need cleaning up but if I can get all that silver dust off the board it
might be useable again.

FWIW Maplin's is selling anti-static mats @ half price.
> 
> If I know the client is happy to pay then I have used pre-built before now. 
> GND (before they went bust) in London or DNUK. Both excellent as they really 
> tested everything beforehand.
I've bookmarked their site for future ref and richer days.  Their prices
are quite good.

> 
> Beyond that, I guess I would ask on the list for help, either the loan of a 
> box, repair of smouldering ruins or any old parts people have lying around.
> 

I managed to borrow a laptop for a short period of time so I wasn't
completely without.  Lynx is a fine web browser but I have got used to a
WIMP/GUI environment over the years :).

Regards

L.

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