James Titcumb

I’ve managed to sell the server cabinet now, but I’ve still got a few things to sell. If you might know who would like a server for their birthday… please send them this way:

• 4U Rack Mountable Server 1.7GHz (bidding starts 4th August)
  
• 4U Rack Mountable Server 2GHz (open to offers!!)
• Air Conditioner Unit Silver 9,000 BTU (bidding starts 4th August)

Please buy them, we have a wedding to fund, and they don’t come cheap!

Now, even though I still don’t have Internet due to BT crossing my lines, I am already singing Newnet’s praises. Their customer service is simply supreme. The difference is quite simple… call centre in England, with English speakers, but the important part is this, so I will emphasise this a lot:

The technical support know what they are talking about.

I have never had such a pleasurable experience being told I can’t get internet just yet. It was simply bliss. The good thing is, they explained the problem clearly, in simple-to-understand language, and without just repeating what BT Wholesale just told them, or just reading from a script!

So, here’s to Newnet, possibly the best ISP in the UK.

Pesto is quite a strong flavour, but I think it goes with Salmon just excellently. You can do whatever veg you like with it, but this is the meal I prepared last night.

Ingredients

• 2x Salmon fillet (steaks if you have lots of money!)
• Small jar of Pesto
• 4-5 British potatoes
• A courgette
• Milk
• Butter
• About 4 cloves of Garlic

Instructions

Prepare the Salmon by using a spoon to spread Pesto sauce on top in a thin layer (or if you really love Pesto, a thick layer!). Add a touch of salt & pepper. Slice courgettes, and dice up the garlic into tiny little bits, or use a garlic press… Peel and chop up potatoes into quarters.

Boil potatoes as normal until soft (I usually boil them slightly longer so they fall apart a bit easier). Mash with a tad of milk (or cream if you feel adventurous!), and butter. Salmon should be grilled for some time – I’m not sure how long as I undercooked ours last night, but use common sense here! Finally, fry the courgettes in butter for a minute or so, add the garlic, and turn up medium-high.

It’s a simple dish, but I still managed to undercook the salmon, oops!! Very tasty though.

Inspired by this tiny gadget, a thin client in a wall socket, I got thinking about hiding away your computer in the wall. I came up with this solution…

You could probably hack the Jack PC thin client so that you have the corresponding connection on the wall-facing side of the socket. That would enable you to run cables down from the attic and simply plug into the wall socket, and install.

With that sort of setup (although slightly hacky), as opposed to being a thin client and requiring a Terminal Server, you would literally have a PC in the wall that you can just plug into. You could even have a whole network of PCs.

Of course, the original design of this is meant for thin clients, so converting it into a solid PC would defeat the point of the thin-client-ness. Thin clients are there to save money, and my idea basically just hides away your ugly PC case, and puts it into a nice neat wall socket where you just plug in your monitor/speakers/keyboard/DVD/Blu-ray drives.

An issue thats been annoying me a little over the last few days was trying to get my nVidia nForce RAID array working. I’d taken 4x 300GB hard disks out of one of my servers as I wanted to keep them. Initially I tried to set up the array using my shiny Adaptec 2410SA. Alas, on a brief check, Adaptec don’t have Vista drivers. I tried hacking it a bit, but didn’t get it to work.

I gave up on that and tried setting up the array using the onboard RAID device… which actually makes more sense as it’ll probably be a lot faster and efficient than using a PCI RAID device. Anyway, I enabled RAID in the BIOS, set up the array in the nForce BIOS, and it was happy and existing as a nice big striped 1.2TB (!) array. Then it came to Vista, and the annoyance began.

The array appeared in Disk Manager as four seperate drives. My first instinct was to reinstall or upgrade drivers. I tried re-installing, to no avail. Having no internet meant I had to go round a friends house and download the latest nForce drivers (and get exceedingly drunk in the process…). I installed these, and still the same result. I did a lot of Googling, and some people recommended upgrading the BIOS. I managed to get my mobile phone to connect my PC to the internet just long enough to get on the ABit site and download the latest BIOS. No difference…

I tried various hacks that were suggested, and I finally gave in and posted on the nVidia forums. A bloke called Fernando responded telling me that the latest nForce drivers (15.17) didn’t support nForce 4 for RAID. Nice one, nVidia. This guy has obviously done a lot of work on this issue as he’s actually made a driver pack (even WHQL’ed!) for nForce 4 systems that worked straight off. If anyone has any issues at all with nForce 4 boards, I highly recommend installing this driver pack at the first instance. I am now happy with my 1.2TB hard drive… now I just need to fill it!

More detail, and the download links can be found here.

And lastly, thanks to Fernando for putting the effort in and making the solution so simple.