Busy weekend
It has been quite a busy weekend, in terms of system management.
First, I asked the hardware shop on the behaviour of the graphics card – it even crashed when closing a window. According the technician, it’s a sign the card in at the end of it’s lifetime. It’s not designed to work in a 1400 x 1050 resolution, AND running a heavy application like Google Earth, AND be able to handle the extra features that the ATI software could set it to, of the nice features build in the Linux environment, AND do anything fancy like fast changes in the background.
So I purchased a more modern card – this time, Nvidia based. It means a bit higher noise volume but way lower than the older card without adjustment by software. I could have taken a card with no fan – just a heat sink, but that would limit the abilities that I foresee I’ll use.
To built it in, required preparing both Windows installations, push the card in and load the software (drivers and utilities) in both. That took a few hours. Next was the Ubuntu installation, it was signalled that there was another driver needed, I had to redo some of the settings (screen resolution, fanciness of the screen and so on, but it was rather painless in the end.
Next year’s licenses
Next job was to install the new licenses on Diana. The file was stored binary, copied that way to VMS, and I edited the file to make it more readable. That alone was a nasty job, but with the aid of the “learn” and “repeat” facilities of TPU it was done in less than 30 minutes. Then, all new licenses have been installed and loaded.
Software update and new installation
Last but not least, there was an update to Soymail – the web-base mail client – and a new program by Mark Daniel, that I can use as a template for my own ‘blogging’ program – and to redo the website homepage more easily. But there are still some things to discover. It doesn’t exactly do what I would expect. Biggest difficulty: how to get started…
Well, it’s still BETA 🙂
Apart from this software, I think to update WordPress to it’s latest version (2.7.1) no matter the problems with the PHP engine. Using Firefox on the Ubuntu desktop works fine, even with these issues. I think part of the access problems are actually caused by Internet Explorer; at least, it looks like it: where IE (both 7 and 8) have problems accessing the admin pages, there is hardly a problem using Firefox, where it concerns passing information to the application.
Also, there are a number of patches to be downloaded and installed, and I’ll take a look to newer versions of Python and MoinMoin – the Python based wiki. Now it’s just a matter of finding time to do it all.
22-Mar-2009
Video trouble
The ATI-based graphics card in Aphrodite – the workstation – has run into trouble. Fast changes in a window, or many changes within a short period, cause the card to break; the screen gets scrambled, and at times, the computer will hang, or, as I encountered today, reboot spontanously.
Even on ‘normal’ use, there will be some bits that are bad – like half-height double quotes. or at times, discoloured bars; window and button boundaries may be mirrored pixels off the real boundary. When that happens, the problem will soon occur…
It happens in all three environments (the original Windows environment, the alternate one, and under Ubuntu); it all started after I installed the alternate Windows environment – or was it after Ubuntu was installed? It looks like any of these caused trouble, but that seems to be weird.
Or is it the extra memory, or disk?
I probably need a new video card – and if so, I’ll take one without fan but a heat sink. Spaces enough in the box 😉
As a result of this behaviour, I cannot use Google Earth. The card will break on the starting page that zooms in onto the planet: Too many updates….
15-Mar-2009
Irene restored
I did run some checks (using Ubuntu LiveCD) on the memory of Irene – the family PC that broke down – and found quite a lot of errors, but I wasn’t sure of the truth of the outcome. It’s new (just a few weeks old) and had run perfectly for some time. So I returned the system to the shop to test it.
Indeed – the added 1Gb memory turned out to be bad. Had it removed and retry to boot – but it seems Windows is capable of making a mess of the disk due to memory errors: the same problem persisted: spontanuous reboot each time the system was booted.
The Ubuntu startup didn’t work either.
SO I had to do some repair: ChkDsk on both Windows disks (system and pagedisk), so at least Windows was bootable again.
The faulty memory was returned to the shop where I bought it, they ran some checks as well but found it defective indeed. So I got a new module, installed it and behold: as if nothing has happened. It seems nothing is lost.
Just Ubuntu needed to be re-installed, but that had nothing to do with failing disks. I think I made an error with assigning the disk priority (which is the “C:” disk can be set in BIOS) and finally I got it re-installed. Only to find that mouse and keyboard didn’t work. I installed an old keyboard and at that moment, it worked. Now to find a new keyboard 😉
WASD weirdness
I have 7 services defined – and I should have a list of 7 checking the services. But for some reason, in time it will be a multiple of 7: some way all 7 are duplicated and I didn’t find out why, yet. I seem to be the only one with the problem…
But to be true, that’s the only problem (apart from the known PHP engine stuff) I run into on Diana….
ATI card problems
For some time, the ATI-based card in Aphrodite – the workstation – fails, returning into a colorfull, stripy type of screen in the normal Windows mode, blacking out and sometimes restarting in the alternate setup, or blackout and power it off under Ubuntu. The only solution is to reset: Attempting to restart under Windows doesn’t work – and I cannot see why, and Ubuntu really hangs – the system is completely ‘dead’ – doesn’t react in any way. It might be set to SLEEP, eventually, but I doubt it – hitting the power butten does not resume but restarts – from BIOS, over GRUB into the selected system. It happens when I have watched movies – .AVI, .WMV, .MPEG, or, more particular, .MP4 – that’s where I first encountered the problem.
10-Mar-2009
VMSWiki actions
In the last few days, several new “accounts” have been created in the wiki – bogus names and bogus email-addresses. At least, the didn’t look like valid ones (though I won’t rule out they could be valid). But now I get an email if an account has been created, and that lessens the need to scan the webserver access-logfile for abuse of the wiki.
But still, access to the files I deleted earlier is still attempted – from several places wordlwide, including search engines. So I added a rule that any accessing “/vmswiki/AirTickets*” raises an error other than “ERROR 404 – The requested resource could not be found“. It now raises “ERROR 501 – The requested action is not implemented by this server“. Practically, this is what’s I did: by this mapping I removed the possible activity 😀
The number of attempts to access these pages has since dropped.
Nevertheless, I’ll keep a close look on the we activity.
04-Mar-2009
PC trouble
Tonight I tried to boot the Ubuntu installation – and that failed with error 17 – whatever that may be.
Next I tried booting from the Ubuntu CD. Loading it without changing anything on the system causes the system to hang at some point, after Gnome has started. Installation using the graphical interface shows the same symptoms. Installation using the text interface succeeds – until the disk on which Ubuntu is to be installed, has been formatted 33% – anmd again, it stops.
Memory test shows a lot of errors but that may be in the video memory, the Power-On-SelfTest does not show any errors, 1ll 1.256 Gb is Ok.
Next possibility might be adding a external video card, disable the on-board one and retry. Last resort: have the system checked…