Archive for the 'Computers' Category

PowerEdge 2900 iSCSI Performance Problems w/ FreeBSD

Friday, June 19th, 2009

Got a new storage server, it’s a PE2900 from Dell. Installed FreeBSD 7.2 on it, rebuilt the kernel with all the updates and included:
options iscsi_initiator
connected to the iSCSI target across the LAN, then I used:
dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/testiscsi/file.out bs=65536
to test the speeds after mounting it. I observed horrific speeds (in the range of 300-500KB/s).
To [...]

VLAN Trunking: Cisco vs. Dell

Sunday, April 26th, 2009

In a recent battle at work I put a Cisco 2960G up against a Dell PowerConnect 5424. The PowerConnects aren’t bad… They’re cheap, gigabit, and Layer-2. Anyway, I quickly found out that unless you use GVRP, the Dell cannot learn what VLANs are out there. You have to specify allowed VLANS [...]

F’ You Hard Drives!

Sunday, April 5th, 2009

So, I hate hard drives. I think everything about them is like a bad flashback to the 1980’s. They have something that constantly spins (stupid), which means they require lots of power (also stupid) and in turn generate lots of heat (ridiculous). All that aside, they’re by far the slowest part of [...]

Picasa sucks!

Tuesday, March 31st, 2009

Why don’t they let you download images with anything except picasa?! Isn’t that a feature that the world might like? Why do you have to install picasa to download a friend’s web album?
Google, you’re the worst company ever. You’re the queens of doing 85% of something.
EDIT: Thanks to Scabdates, I now [...]

Wiki or DIE

Tuesday, March 31st, 2009

Alright, I guess it’s impossible to do anything except blog or wiki. I was thinking it might be nice to have some good knowledge base software implemented for myself, but I’ve played with a few of them that I found (via Google) and they’re terrible!
Can someone write a not horrible, free KB tool that [...]

I’m not creative enough for this, and you can’t help me.