HYPERAXE

RAID Level 1, also called mirroring, has been used longer than any other form of RAID. It remains popular because of its simplicity and high level of reliability and availability. Mirrored arrays consist of two or more disks. Each disk in a mirrored array holds an identical image of user data. A RAID Level 1 array may use parallel access for high transfer rate when reading. More commonly, RAID Level 1 array members operate independently and improve performance for read-intensive applications, but at relatively high inherent cost. This is a good entry-level redundant system, since only two drives are required. - http://www.bytepile.com/raid_class.php#02

Since nobody in the office would be competent enough to administer Linux servers after I leave, my boss asked me to port our Linux file servers to a Windows XP box. I am quite hesitant at first since I trust Linux more than Windows when it comes to stability, performance, and security on file and network services, but I had to agree with my boss since Linux won’t be that useful in the office if nobody really knows what to do with it.

Anyway, to make the long story short I setup a Pentium 4 box with 4 hard disks. This was how I partitioned and configured the disks:

Disk 1 - Windows XP Home OS Disk
Disk 2 - Partition for software installer files
Disk 3 & 4 - Connected to a PCI IDE RAID Controller configured for RAID 1 to host all important company files

It was really pretty easy to setup everything. As if there’s anything hard with Windows XP installations when almost everything is done for you with just a click of the mouse.

[tags]Linux, Windows, RAID, hard disks, partitioning, disk mirroring[/tags]

Today we had our office blessing and it was really cool! First, there was a mass, then I got to play the guitar for our office choir, and then there were lots and lots of food!

Sad to say though, that I would be leaving soon, but at least what happened today would add up to my happy memories for this company! Cheers!

Lynx - a text web browser for the World Wide Web

For some reasons, lynx was not installed by default on my Red Hat AS 3.0 VPS. I needed the said program for some things I’m working on the servers side so I decided install it. But instead of doing an RPM installation I decided to install from the source. Here are the steps I followed for installing the latest version of Lynx which is Lynx 2.8.5:

That’s it! The lynx binary would be installed by default on /usr/local/bin so that it would be included on your executable path.

[tags] lynx, text base web browser, web browser, WWW, World Wide Web, Red Hat, Internet[/tags]

Last night while doing my usual work and play stuffs with my PC, I noticed a painfully slow connection speed with my SkyDSL internet connection. So I thought that maybe it’s my DSL modem again that’s causing this problem, but when I restarted it, things are still slow. I then tried pinging my ISP’s gateway to check for connectivity and it seems to be ok as well. Just a few minutes after, I couldn’t access any web sites anymore or check my emails.

After doing some routinary networking checks, I found out that the SkyDSL DNS servers are not responding to my PC’s DNS queries. I manually tried using dig(Linux) and nslookup(Windows) to double check the DNS servers and that’s when I found out that there’s a problem with the primary and secondary DNS servers. They are answering to ping requests so it means that the server is up and running, it’s just the DNS services that are having problem it seems.

So what i did is to configure my Virtual Private Server (VPS) to act as my DNS servers by changing the following lines on named.conf:

From:
recursion no;

To:
allow-recursion { xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx; };
*Note: xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx denotes my DSL’s static IP address

After saving the configuration on my VPS, reloading the DNS service, and then configure my home PC to use my VPS’ DNS servers, my PC was able to connect again to the Internet and let me do my stuffs. I still need to do couple of tweaks though to speed up the Internet access such as forwarding the requests to my VPS provider’s DNS servers. In named.conf it looks like this:

forward first;
forwarders {
xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx;
yyy.yyy.yyy.yyy;
}
*Note: xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx denotes the primary DNS server’s IP address and yyy.yyy.yyy.yyy denote the secondary DNS server’s IP address

Well after some this and that tweaks, my Internet connection came back to how it was supposed to be.

[tags] DNS, Bind, Internet, DSL, Internet Service Provider, SkyDSL, IP Address, connection speed, slow Internet connection, network troubleshooting [/tags]

While trying to monitor our network bandwidth from several test locations using online bandwidth testers out there, I came across a list of online banwidth testers of ISPs in the Philippines from the Joomla Forum

Here’s the list:

I hope you find this useful, like I did.

[tags]online bandwidth testers, networks, network connection, Internet Service Providers, ISP, Philippines, Joomla[/tags]

Today, I decided to do a PC upgrade since I would be opening it anyway to remove a CD-ROM drive which I would give to Aphilo’s cousin and also to move my disk temporarily to another PC to retrieve my files and back it up due to a Windows XP crash (what’s new with Windows, ei?). I just did a memory and video card upgrade. So from 512MB RAM, my PC now has 1GB RAM and from a Nvidia MX440 64MB video card, I installed a Nvdia G-Force FX5500 256MB RAM. Well, I just thought of doing the upgrade for a faster PC when programming and when doing some multimedia projects. I know that my video card is no gamer’s dream card, but then again I’m no fully pledged gamer anyway. I just play games as a past time when I want to rest for a while doing programming and not as a habit.

Installing the video card was easy since it was recognized by my motherboard right after installation. My problem was the additional RAM. I had to change the position of the installed RAM modules until I finally got the proper combination. Based on my motherboards manual DIMM2 and DIMM3 share the same connectors so if I installed a double sided RAM module in anyone of it, the other should be left without anything installed. Since I purchased a 512MB double sided RAM module I installed it in DIMM1 and then DIMM2 and DIMM3 have a 256MB single sided module each. Well, after doing things right on the RAM module positioning, my PC still won’t boot up and it was then I discovered that when I installed the RAM modules, I accidentally moved the video card out of place thus it wasn’t fitted properly into the AGP socket. I was easily able to troubleshoot the problem since based on experience the most common cause of a failed bootups would be a loose video card or memory modules or using incompatible memory modules. Well, after fixing things I started installing Windows XP and all the needed drivers and modules.

I’m not really sure what time is it, all I know is I should be getting some sleep now since my eyes are already starting to close down on me.

[tags]Video Cards, DDR RAM, PC upgrade, Nvidia G-Force FX5500, Windows XP crash, bootup problems[/tags]