15th of June

Farm news
The UPS on the file server died. It hasn't been holding its charge as you can see it regularly dropping to 94% battery and then quickly recharging. Then it started beeping and complaining "Battery failure". So I ordered another one (both Vanguard VGD1000) on Friday. I plugged the old one in on the weekend so I could get the error message and when I turned it on bang! and the smell of ozone. Well that is the end of it, probably could have changed the battery before, but not now. Oh well the new one is in and running, hopefully I will get more than 2 and a half years out of it.

I am still waiting for the RAID card and cable so I can get the drives in the file server set up. At the moment I am using a single drive.

On the crunching front the ANZ climate models ran out. I finished off the last one this morning. As the various machines finished theirs off I switched them over to Asteroids work, so now all the Intel GPU machines are running it. I gave the 6 core/12 thread machines a run at Seti work when they finished their climate models but they are currently off.


Windows 10
I updated the 6 core/12 thread machines with all the latest windows updates so they now have the icon to get Windows 10. I'd rather not download 10 copies of Win10 when it comes out so I will have to see if I can purchase a DVD. I would also prefer to clean-install them but will wait and see how the release goes, no doubt there will be some teething problems when it gets released at the end of July.

On that vein I am also trying to keep the graphics drivers up to date. Nvidia comes out with new drivers about once a month but they are usually just profiles for the latest games. Intel also comes out with new graphics drivers every couple of months, however theirs usually don't work well for number crunching so we tend to run older drivers which might not work with Win10.


Network infrastructure
I am also looking at the network setup with a view to making it a bit more secure and centralised. It will probably entail a new machine to replace the old file server which is doing other duties at the moment. There will probably also be some software changes and maybe a managed switch to allow network card teaming. Now all I need is my own networking consultant.