Thoughts On Hardware and Email

Just thinking over things about the UFies.org situation. One thing when talking to Fred and Neil this evening about was how to get the box back up. Neil was willing to donate an athlon motherboard and CPU to me. My problem was that gentoo is compiled for your hardware, and to really get the benefit of the OS, I’d have to re-compile for Pentium3 when we got the dual P3 box back up and running. I could compile for generic x86, but that again doesn’t give you the benefit of compiling for the hardware.


So I was looking at spending a couple of days setting up a new system on the athlon, and then when the new MB or whatever came in setting up that same system again on the new hardware (or re-compiling everything from scratch, which could potentially cause problems if something broke halfway through.


Then I realized that I was a smart boy and backed up the entire system before starting the re-install, so I have an 80G drive with UFies.org on it as of 9:30am this morning. If/when I get the athlon motherboard in as a stopgap I just re-image data from the drive back to the original hard drives and voila! system back to normal. When the MB is replaced then the full gentoo install can go as it was intended to. Sometimes it’s good to think ahead 🙂


Now if you’ll excuse me I’m off to mirror the 80G drive somewhere safe, just to be sure!


Oh, and if you want to reach me the next couple of days email me at abailward (- at -( premieragendas dawt com

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6 Comments on “Thoughts On Hardware and Email”

  2. As long as I have a bit of time to play around with it, and maybe do a small scale test install to see if I can make things work better. Like I said, mandrake and knoppix were fine. I can pass it to neil on monday or something though, as we want to get the real box back in (and neil his system back) asap. Not that neil would mind a dual 1.13 box as a replacement 🙂

  5. Fred, Neil – no DMA problems when booting off of a mandrakemove or knoppix CD. I don’t think what we saw was a result of a bad burn CD as it wasn’t data errors showing up but hardware errors. Very interesting though. I haven’t had a chance to test the HDs on a different box but I’m going to guess that they’re fine. I’m going to reburn gentoo and see if the hardware issues continue, and go from there. If they don’t I’ll do an install and see how it goes, if not I’ll throw neil’s mb/cpu in and bring the box back up to how it was before and throw it back saturday morning sometime, as a lot of people depend on the system 🙂

  6. I’m waiting to get prices back on both a new system and just a MB. I’ll email you guys when it comes in. Also the place I’m getting this for has offered to test the MB for us if we want. If you do go with the Athalon, I’ll take the MB from you and get it tested next week. Could it be a drivers issues with the MB? With some of the mysql performance issues I’ve been having lately, I’m tempted to move the upgrade planned in my books from spring 2005 to spring 2004.