I’ve been working on and off on the next Seeds of Discontent article. This is a tidbit of an upcoming post but I wanted to push it out now since I need it published for a divergent sidebar article. It stands here bald and raw. That’s life. This system uses most of the Rampage III resources. The two Radeon cards will completely consume the PCI Express lanes (2 x16). The 24GB DDR3 will fill the six DRAM slots. ...
In the previous article Seeds of Discontent, I jotted down a few benchmarks to compare OS X, Windows and Linux performance at a system level. In this article, I explore further a test built around graphics rendering engines. In particular, I was impressed by Sintel, an open source movie built with (among others) Blender. I don’t know how long it takes to assemble the movie from source assets into a shipping product but I’ll venture it is quite a compute intensive process. I got the idea for this benchmark while reading on the sintel.org home page that the project is re-rendering the film for 4K and that it should be ready later this year (still a few months away). I didn’t know what 4K was so I looked it up. That lead me to compile a table of film formats and supported Frames per Second (FPS). I also appended three rows for HDTV of which only 720p and 1080p are real. 4320p is something bandied about as future but I couldn’t find material online that would lead me to believe it’s anything but a concept. I included it to define the upper envelope edge. (Note: different formats support different levels of FPS.) ...
I like reading Tom’s Hardware Guide. I liked it better in the site’s early days when it wasn’t so javacript and flash heavy and the articles were idomatically ‘German-English’. A lot happens in twelve or so years. Still, Tom’s is the best source of information on the web. I read a CPU benchmark this morning which got me wondering if there were a possiblity to benchmark on any operating system but Windows. I concluded for the kind of benchmarks seen on Tom’s–not really. ...
Sometimes a problem persists long enough—is an irritant long enough—that I’ll burn an entire Sunday morning simply out of spite. Today’s irrational time-waste went to solving “Directory index forbidden by Options directive.” [marmaduke ~] $ cat /var/log/httpd/error_log \ | grep '\[error\]' \ | head -1 [Sun Dec 06 09:25:05 2009] [error] [client 192.168.2.29]↩ Directory index forbidden by Options directive:↩ /var/www/documentation/public_html/ I have a development server that I use to offload work from my laptop. ...
I’ve been putting off building the software RAID10 on marmaduke. Today, I put it off no longer. The server marmaduke has six storage devices (2 IDE and 4 SATA) $ ls -1 /dev/hd? /dev/hde /dev/hdf $ ls -1 /dev/sd? /dev/sda /dev/sdb /dev/sdc /dev/sdd The CDROM is attached as /dev/hde and a 300GB HDD as /dev/hdf on which I’ve installed CentOS 5.2. The four SATA drives will be used to build a RAID 10. I’ve read through a number of postings on how to build a software RAID. The cleanest, shortest and clearest of them is on tgharold.com. ...
I just finished building a four-drive software RAID10 on marmaduke and wanted to jot down my thoughts on RAID failure. In particular, I read a number of postings on the difference between RAID 01 and RAID 10. None of them satisfactory described the differences and how those differences changed when adding more drives. Marmaduke only has four drives in its array. Most of the web postings dealt with four drives but I also wanted to see the impact on six drives. Here is a hypothetical set of six drives. ...