[Lancaster] Observations at the folly

[Ken Hough]

Martyn Welch wrote:
> Hi All,
> 
> I wish I had had a chance to sit down and send this sooner, such is life...
> 
> A week or two ago I managed to get down to the folly to do a little work on 
> the "service" computer. I have a few observations to make:
> 
> 1) One of the PCs in the kitchen area was turned of, after trying quickly to 
> turn it on I discovered why - the power switch is very temperamental. I guess 
> this is quite easily solved, however finding out about stuff like this ASAP 
> seems quite a lot harder. We really need a mailing list/ contact address for 
> faults that Taylor (/Other members of staff?) can use so that we can get a 
> good idea of what needs to be done.

Yes. I guess that should cover PC software problems as well. Maybe we 
should have an organised format for a snagging list on this site.

> 
> 2) The package management software on the X server is not functioning all 
> together well. I set of a "nohup rpm --rebuild" command when I was there 
> last, I hope this will sort it. At any rate this box needs to be rebuilt, 
> preferably by getting a second harddrive and a set of drive caddies so that 
> the current setup can be kept whilst the new one is being built and swapped 
> over to allow for day-to-day running till the new setup is working perfectly.

Good idea!

I'm always reluctant to dump a well tried and reliable installation when 
upgrading, so I use drive caddies on two, soon to be three of my boxes.

I discovered recently that one can obtain spare carriers rather than 
forking out for numerous complete caddie/carrier sets. Do note that 
units from different manufacturers are not always compatible.

As the X server is not that new, I doubt that it handles ATA100. Should 
we install a PCI HD controller that can handle this? Most new hard 
drives are at least ATA100. As a server this might be worthwhile.

> 
> 3) The service box should be easy to install the software for the burner on, I 
> booted it up, however it had not properly initialised the SCSI card so was 
> forced to do it manually - this needs to be sorted. Sane should allow the 
> scanner to be shared over the network, so we can use the generic KDE scanner 
> client on the X-server and connect to the remote scanner. I was hoping to get 
> thi working whilst I was there last, but run out of time.
>

Do you mean the box that is to be the scanner/burner unit? If so, this 
is the box that I've had at home. It now functions OK, properly 
initialising the CD ROM, CD burner (just fitted and tested for burning) 
and SCSI card. I hung a SCSI device on the latter to check that It's 
presence was detected.

I initially tested the burner via a minimal install of SuSE v8.1 plus 
mkisofs, cdrecord (ca 350MB hard disk space). I've since added X, KDE, 
sane and from a separate source, xcdroast and will try out the scanner, 
hopefully tommorow morning. ie Monday 23rd.

> I'll try my best to get to LUG on Wednesday, looks like we have lots to do!

Hope to see you then

BTW, I've discovered a limitation on CDROM performance if it is set up 
to run under SCSI emulation as required by the likes of xcdroast.
DMA cannot be enabled for drives under SCSI emulation, at least not by 
the usual means.
I found this out after playing Video DVDs via xine. DMA is definately 
needed for this job, even on an ATHLON XP 2200.

The plus side is that distros with v2.6 kernel and recent versions of 
k3b, etc (eg SuSE v9.1) do not need SCSI emulation, so DMA can be 
enabled in the presence of a burner.


Ken Hough