11th of January 2013

My first post for 2013.


Farm news
Not much happening on the farm due to the weather. Well thats not true, there isn't much crunching happening. There is however some reorganisation going on.

We had a really hot day during this week where the temperature got up to 42 degrees. That caused a lot of bush fires, some of which are still burning. More hot weather is forecast for next week.

I picked up a 2nd hand KVM just before the new year. I got a bunch of network cables as I didn't have enough long ones and all the short ones were in use. Some are colored so I can tell which cables are running the switches. I also got some more of the chrome wire shelving units to put machines on.

The idea is to have the GPU-less machines over on one side of the room on shelves with their own KVM. The GPU ones will be on the opposite side of the room (they already have shelves) along with their own KVM. They take up more space because the cases are much larger, being designed for high airflow.

This reorg has forced me to get rid of a lot of old boxes and useless clutter to make room. I am still doing this, having filled up the garbage bin for a few weeks running and still have more stuff to dispose of. There is a nice pile sitting in the middle of the lounge room floor.


KFSN4
Remember the KFSN4 motherboard that I couldn't get to work? Well I gave it to one of the guys at work and he has managed to get it going. He thinks I had the memory in the wrong slots. I had it working at one point but when I went to put it back into its case it refused to work.


Raspberry Pi
The 1st Pi that I ordered finally turned up. I only ordered it in August 2012. Its a B model, revision 2 and seems to work. It also seems to boot up a bit quicker than the old one, probably because it doesn't have to swap things out of memory.

I will now try and get the broken one replaced under warranty. Fortunately it was purchased in Australia so it has a 12 month warranty.

I still haven't got any BOINC apps on it yet as I was trying to work out why the 256Mb one wasn't working. I thought it might have been the SD card image or that I had stuffed up the Raspbian OS. I have proven that wrong by running the newer one using the SD card from the old Pi.