Posted on

Build a Usable Computer from Newegg for $375

Creating a system guide appears to be popular these days, with my favorite guides coming from Ars Technica, The Tech Report, and Anandtech. I thought I’d throw another guide on the net with the main focus being price, with usability and upgradability coming in a close second. Several notes about this guide, everything is from Newegg, because they have a great reputation and ship quickly. No refurbished/open box items are considered, and I have not actually build this machine, these are just parts which look like they would work well together.

  • Motherboard/Video/Sound/Network: ECS C51GM-M Socket AM2 NVIDIA GeForce 6100 Micro ATX AMD Motherboard – $60
  • Processor/Heatsink/Fan: AMD Sempron 64 2800+ Manila 1600MHz HT Socket AM2 Processor Model SDA2800CNBOX – Retail – $50
  • Memory: OCZ Value Series 1GB 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 667 (PC2 5400) Unbuffered System Memory Model OCZ26671024V – $69 (after $8 MIR)
  • Hard Drive: HITACHI Deskstar T7K250 HDT722516DLA380 160GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s 8 MB Cache Hard Drive (3 Year Warranty) – $54
  • Optical Drive: NEC 16X DVD±R DVD Burner Black IDE Model ND-3550A – Retail – $36 (same price as OEM w/shipping)
  • Case/Power Supply: Antec NSK 4400 Black/Silver 0.8mm cold-rolled steel construction ATX Mini Tower Computer Case 380W Power Supply – $72

Total: $349 + $26 Shipping = $375 ( -$8 mail in rebate)

(read more below the fold to see the reasoning behind my choices)

Continue reading “Build a Usable Computer from Newegg for $375”

Posted on

Backing Up

I finally ran a successful backup, which took 16 hours to grab ~750 GB of data. Future runs will be much shorter, as rsnapshot will only be grabbing changes. Scripts now run the backup when the machine is powered on, then email me the results and power the machine down. Next up, getting the machine to power up without me asking. I guess I need to invest in a WOL network card.

Posted on

Neverending Hardware Issues when Creating a Backup Server

My first attempt at creating a backup server left me with a dead motherboard. I replaced the motherboard with an old but reliable socket A EPoX board I had been using in my HTPC. After booting and changing eth0 to eth1 in my network config, the server was ready to go. I started the backup and everything looked good. It ran overnight and got about 500 GB off the server. I then started copying about 250 GB of data from the server to another computer. After a couple hours of this, my server went offline, and I was left sitting at work wondering why. I was hoping for a power outage, but when I arrived back at home, I discovered only the networking on the file server had gone out, leaving thousands of these lines in dmesg:

NETDEV WATCHDOG: eth0: transmit timed out
NETDEV WATCHDOG: eth0: transmit timed out
NETDEV WATCHDOG: eth0: transmit timed out

I’m not yet sure why my network card stopped working, Google or the Ubuntu forums should help, or I could just refer back to my pre-rma’d motherboard and remember that the Marvell skge network controller died on that motherboard completely, and move to other built in network card on the mobo, by NVIDIA. If all that fails, dropping some money on a quality Intel NIC will solve the problem. Unless the problem exists in my switch.

Update: Switching the the integrated NVIDIA network interface appears to have fixed this issue. Hooray for workarounds.

Posted on

Another Dead Motherboard

It appears that my 1 GHz Athlon mobo died in the middle of building a backup server. This happened at the end of the entire build, while I was performing my first backup, and is going to force me to tear apart 3 machines in order to have working HTPC and Backup computers without buying anything extra. Looks like I’ll have an extra Antec Overture case with 380w PS. I’ll sell if anyone wants to make me a reasonable offer.

Posted on

X2 Price Drops

Today AMD cut the prices of most all their consumer CPUs. The previous low-price leader went from $300 to $160 overnight, which is great for when I want a faster computer, but for now, I’m fine. My Opty 165 running @2.2 GHz is doing great, no stability or heat issues (actually ran the entire last month without the CPU fan because I forgot to plug it in), and it is still around the price I paid for it. If the quad cores come out before 2007 like the rumors say, that will be my next upgrade.

Posted on

How to Quickly move from Typo to WordPress

After what feels like forever without a stable release, I’ve decided to move back to WordPress. While there are some scripts out on the web to move everything over, I used the simple method, which appears to get everything except for comments and the splits in large posts. The procedure is quick:

  1. On Typo, go into the admin section, set rss feeds to 1000 or something high.
  2. On your computer, download your RSS feed to a text file (I used wget).
  3. On WordPress, go to import, choose RSS, and find the file you downloaded.

That’s it.

Posted on

Create the Perfect Rails Server in 15 Minutes

I recently noticed that the next release of Ubuntu Linux will be one nice Ruby on Rails platform. After their last update of Rails itself, which brought the version number up from 1.0 to 1.1.2, Ubuntu 6.06 LTS now has all the current Rails tech built in. There is no need to search the web for all the pieces and compile package after package until finding one that works. Here are the highlights:

  • Rails 1.1.2
  • Lighttpd 1.4.11
  • MySQL 5.0.21 or 4.1.15
  • Ruby 1.8.4
  • Ruby-FCGI 0.8.6
  • Ruby-MySQL 2.7

This means that after a 10 minute server install of Ubuntu, one can uncomment the universe repo in /etc/apt/sources.list and issue the following command to setup at capable and competent Rails server environment:

sudo apt-get install ruby1.8 mysql-server rails lighttpd libmysql-ruby1.8 libfcgi-ruby1.8

Then copy your Rails app over and configure it in Lightty you’re off. Now to find a hosting company which supports Ubuntu…

Update: Rubygems can be useful, but it isn’t in the standard repos. Instead, I downloaded and compiled rubygems-0.9.0.tgz.

Update2: I removed the Ubuntu-supplied rails and instead used rails from rubygems.

Posted on

HTPC Rebuild

I reinstalled the OS on my “HTPC” once again, this time moving from Knoppmyth to Ubuntu Dapper. I was quite surprised to see the tv-out on my video card worked on boot, and even all the way through starting X. After setting a default user to login, and x11vnc for controlling the screen, I was surprised at how little time it took to finish the project.

Now I can control my HTPC using VNC Viewer on my Nokia 770, any other computer, or a mouse/keyboard i have hidden under the television stand.

Posted on

Nick Joins the Dual Core Crowd

Received my Opteron 165 and Scythe Ninja heatsink last night. It didn’t take long before my system was torn apart and the new parts were installed. Installation was straigtforward, but damn, that heatsink should not be advertising that it has easy to use clips.

So is there an improvement moving from a single-core 2.0 GHz chip to a dual core 1.8? I definitely saw it. The entire system feels smoother, and I can continue to use my system while performing heavy tasks. I’m sure I’d see even more improvements if I were compiling stuff in Gentoo, but for now, the ability to continue working as normal while playing with 4 GB ISO images, running Qemu, and burning stuff, makes it a great upgrade.

Next up in the performance upgrade pipeline is some DDR500 memory. With some simple overclocking this CPU can run like an FX60!