12th of November

Farm news
The Intel-GPU part of the farm has been busy doing Asteroids and Einstein BRP4 work.

CPDN uploads have stopped for the moment as their server has run out of disk space. I still have 2 machines left to clear via the 56k dial-up.

I spent about 4 and a half hours on Saturday night swapping out the hard disks for larger ones. The process of physically removing the old ones and add new ones was easy enough. After realising one has to define the RAID to the BIOS and watching the boot up messages a few times to find out what the hotkey was, it was up and running. Then I found out I had a 2010 version of the Intel Rapid Storage Technology software that only supported a RAID with a total size of 2Tb. I go to the Intel site and download the up to date version. It didn't install properly. It was a bunch of INF files and a driver. After stuffing around for about 30 minutes I gave up with the Intel software and decide to partition the drives via Windows. I picked the wrong boot sector method as it defaults to MBR, which only supports 2Tb so I end up with 2 logical drives. Back into the BIOS delete the RAID, reallocate the RAID and then back into Windows and do it right this time. I then go back to the Intel site and find a setup program for the Rapid Storage Technology software and give that a go. That fixes the Intel software and I can now manage the RAID. After that I restore the backup which went through without issue, but by the time it was all done it was 2am.


BOINC testing
We got a 7.2.28 which was also released to the public this week. It was really just a change to the installer so no real change to the software. I recommend people upgrade to this one as it adds some new features since the last release (7.0.64/65) and fixes some bugs in the process.