NetConnect - Update

The NetConnect utility I wrote in C# has gone through a number of updates since I started the project. At this point the software is installed on 4 machines in my house and all have simplified access to the file server as a result.

HW Eventually Fails-Believe It

During the last week of June my favorite desktop machine experienced it's final death rattle. About 2 weeks earlier I woke up on the morning I was scheduled to leave for Sacremento CA to coach my girls 18Gold softball team to discover the machine simply turned off. The other machines in the room were running with no evidence of trouble. I turned the machine back on and the disks ran through quite an extensive FSCK and rebuild, replaying large numbers of reiserfs transactions. I checked the various logs and didn't find anything too interesting. I simply assumed the power-off was due to a brown out, and that the power supply in this particular machine was more susceptible since the box had quite a large number of older hard disks.

Old Machine Summary ASUS-M2V-MX Motherboard AMD Athlon X2 64 bit CPU Antec Case w/380W supply 2GB (1Gx2) DDR2 800 Memory OpenSUSE 10.1 Linux OSX86_64

On July 1st, the machine crashed and seemed to reboot with no issues.  On July 2nd, the machine died and would not reboot.  Rebooting in text mode showed that there was some CPUFREQ failure.  I'm still not certain what was wrong.  You'd think, given what I do for a living, that I would have had the home directory on that machine backed up so rebuilding the machine would be no trouble.  Well, not true....no backup exists for the home directories and all of the personal account information I keep on it.  I adjusted the clock settings in the BIOS by reducing the maximum multiplier from 15X down to 12X and rebooted the machine into console mode again.  This seemed to work and told me the problem was either the motherboard or CPU.  I built a TAR ball for the home directory and FTP'ed it over to my other nearly identical machine.   What next?

I looked into 3 different updates to the machine.  All 3 included a new 450watt power supply.  The least expensive solution was a new motherboard and Intel Core 2 DUO 2.93 gHz processor.   The most expensive was an I5 2.66gHz processor and corresponding processor.  There was an AMD solution (quad core) in the middle.  After reviewing performance characteristics from what I had to the 3 choices, I chose the least expensive and went with the Intel Core 2 DUO 2.93 gHz CPU.

New  Machine Summary
ASUS P5G41-M LE/CSM Motherboard
Intel Core 2 DUO E7500 CPU (2.93GHz)
Antec Case w/450W supply
4GB (2Gx2) DDR2 800 Memory
Hitachi 750G SATA/300 Disk
OpenSuSE 11.2 Linux OS X86_64

Installing the updated version of OpenSuSE was really simple.  I used a DVD that I created from an ISO image I downloaded (www.opensuse.org).  This is the first time I have not used a store bought distribution of SuSE Linux.  I looked for a copy at my local Fry's electronics store where I have always bought my distributions in the past but they don't seem to carry the distribution anymore.  No matter, the home built boot DVD worked just fine.   After getting the installation up and running and updating the DHCP server in my house with the mac address of the new ethernet interface I restored my home directory from my file server and the new machine is ready to roll.

What's Better

1. The old machine used IDE drives for the linux installation and user directories.  Linux used tuning of IDE interfaces.  This was removed when SATA became the dominant drive type and the lower level interfaces were basically layered over the SCSI system.  Now that the new machine is entirely SATA based, it is much quicker.
2. Current Linux!
   Having a machine that is more up-to-date has allowed me to install a number of applications that I couldn't use before.   The most important is Google Chrome for Linux and the newer version of Thunderbird.
3. Faster!
   The entire machine seems faster than the old system.

What's Worse

1. The on-board video capability of the P5G41-M LE/CSM motherboard produces sharp and crisp video.  The performance, however, is not very good.  Screen updates for remote desktop displays is pretty slow.  I'm planning on reinstalling Nvideo 8400GS based AGP video board I have which I'm hoping will resolve this problem.