Dave’s Ramblings

While at the car dealer getting Angel’s Durango fixed up (recall to re-route a battery cable so it wouldn’t catch fire), I was surfing around and stumbled upon a cool little project.

Looking for something to do for a slow evening? Here is a project worthy of some reading and construction time, Stripe Snoop. Ever wonder what is actually written in that magnetic stripe on the back of you credit or other cards? This little project will allow you to actually read all the data and what’s really there. Complete instructions for assemby and parts sources, looks likely that anyone could build this in under an hour. Then of course t e real fun will begin as you scour the house looking for different cards to scan. LOL

Curiosity may have killed a cat, but only because he hadn’t built one of these to play with.

I gave up, after fighting with RedHat to install and actually boot from the RAID1 array for over 6 hours, out of pure frustration I just gave up, plopped Slackware 10.1 in, install took 8 mins for both cd’s and it boots first time, raidd running as a background daemon running for mirroring only burning about 4% of the CPU during a heavy install and running IBM’s Websphere server. Way overboard on the RAM with Slack, kernel functions, raidd, ftpd, httpd and sendmail daemons, and the KDE Xwindows desktop and it’s only burning <95M RAM churning a paisley 10% of the CPU.

RH once I got it to boot (minus the array) was cranking up to over 50% resources burned. Piss on it, I’ve been running Slack since ‘96 or so, way back when it took 110 1.4M floppies to install…and have tried dozen of other distros, and not a one holds a candle to Slackware.

Only thing I was disappointed with v10.1 is it still defaults to a 2.4.x kernel, easy enough to fix, I’ll pull down the newest 2.6.x kernel tommorrow and recompile it up to get a bit more performance. I love kernel hacking. best record so far was a kernel that weighed in at <187K for a 486DX webserver with only 4M RAM, believe it or not it’s still running managing my MRTG stats and such.

BTW who the hell still runs WebSphere? I thought IBM folded that one up years ago…. guess I was wrong, but my client wants it, so he’s got it. Nicest treat was the build was written for RH8, but I was able to get her to fire right up under Slack with no cussing or fighting…go figger.

Well the job is finished for the night, and will be ready to deploy tommorrow evening after work.

Now I can use the RH cd’s for pistol targets or something when the damn snow melts and goes away. Think we got another 4-5″ today…. come one guys it’s the end of Feb, we should be done with that white crap by now. Hope it melts away soon. Time for bed.

It’s a good thing I don’t have a lot of hairs left on my head…. trying to install RedHat Linux 10.0 on a new mainboard is driving me out of my mind. Linux isn’t the problem, once it’s up and running it’ll work forever, but getting the damn box to actually boot from the array controller is for the birds. I’m on the 4th complete install now and think MAYBE I’ve got it figured. Seems RH has the SATA drivers built in as “Software RAID”, of course dumbass had already created the array with the “hardware” array config built into the bios. Which of course we all know really isn’t a hardware controller, it needs special drivers to function, none the less I had to go in and blow away the array so i’d quit throwing up the error that the drives were replicated. I should have stayed with Slackware, that would have cut 1/2 of a day off this project, maybe shortening up the learning curve a bit while waiting for the install. Slack’s install is so much faster and cleaner, you’d think RH was windoze for the amount of time required to actually install, from 4 CD’s! Even M$ has given up their propriatary bloatware install, Server2003 is pretty slick, especially given it’s a Microsoft product. I think RH has taken up where M$ stopped. A “FULL” install of Slackware 10.1 took under 10 minutes for both CD’s. Compared to almost an hour for RH, makes it look a bit paultry, silly GUI install, why run the install through Xwindows…just plop the files into memory untar them write them out and move on with life. Geez.

I guess in the end it doesn’t matter, at least I’ve had time to type this up while waiting for the first CD to run. The box really rocks, an AMD 2900+ with 512M 400mhz DDR RAM, of course once it’ll actually boot from the hard drives, the 133mhz bus of the dual 160G SATA drives should be able to kick in and show it’s stuff. A little overkill on everything for just an FTP/Web server, but she’ll make for a great server.

Woohoo disk #2 is finished…. time to plop in #3 and head back upstairs to thaw out for a bit….it’s freezing down here in the server room in the basement, the machines like it, but it’s a killer on the old fingers. Now I ‘member why I seldom play games or do any serious work from down here in the winter