25th of October

Farm news
More bad news this week. The KVM that I mentioned last week has been pronounced dead as a dodo. I have had to order a new one to replace it. In addition the stock they expected to get didn't come in so its been back ordered and is now expected in late November.

The power brick for the Drobo is dead as a dodo as well. The good thing about it is its under warranty and Drobo have already shipped a replacement out of Singapore. Its expected early next week. Hopefully the Drobo itself will be fine.

Last week I went to update the old file server only to find its LAN card had also died. It hasn't even been plugged in for 6 months. No problem I had an old 100Mbit one brand new in a box, so I swapped out the old one. Then the machine wouldn't boot and I had problems getting it to work. I removed the RAID controller and spent the rest of the day reinstalling Windows. In the end I put an 80Gb hard disk in it that I also had brand new still sealed in its anti-static bag. I reinstalled windows yet again and then left it to download the 170 updates which took all day to get and install.

The 56k dial-up is still waiting on the ISP to give me account details. I haven't been able to start using it until they can provide this information. My current thinking is to use the old file server as a proxy server with the 56k dial-up and then switch each machine to using it as needed.

My CPDN work is still failing to upload and scheduler requests are still failing. Its been about 3 weeks now.

I have to pickup a bunch of 2Tb hard disks from the shop tomorrow. These are destined to replace the 1Tb drives in the main file server. This is more a preventative maintenance thing as well as doubling the available space.


BOINC testing
we're up to 7.2.25 this week. It has a correction around Intel GPU exclusions and a change to the way VirtualBox memory limits are set. I haven't tried it yet but I do have one machine which has been running 7.2.23 for almost a week so I will update it.


Parallella update
They missed their October delivery deadline. One of their key staff left. As well as that one of their suppliers decided to end-of-life one of their components so they had to rework the board design. The good news is they have replaced the key staff member and rejigged the board. They also made the Epiphany III chip available for public sale (ie without the Parallella) after they have shipped the Parallella's to backers and pre-orders.