Hi, I'm trying to find an online vendor that sells bare trackpoint/pointingstick/etc eraser-style mice. The idea is that I want to integrate it into a custom keyboard. I've spent an entire day looking over the usual electronics supply sites and nothing has turned up. Does anybody have any...
Hi, does anyone have any concrete performance benchmark numbers for disks attached to SATA port multipliers? I'm wondering if there is any overhead incurred by the switching/multiplexing of the SATA protocols. If I have a SATA 6 Gbit/s controller with a port multiplier and I attach 5 disks which...
I did the impossible - I managed to bork my IBM Model M. I spilled a glass of water into the keys while it was plugged in, let it dry for two weeks, and tried it - the bottom row of letters has some anomalous behavior where keypresses send two characters, typically the key I press plus an...
Hello, I'm shopping around to replace an aging NAS system. I like what I've been reading about eSATA (6.0Gb/s) and DAS-type setups. However, I'm unclear about some things.
I would basically like to build a small 8-disk box with hardware or software RAID, and then hook it up to a desktop PC...
I'm trying to get a low power system together by the end of this upcoming summer. My initial intentions were to get that new Via Nano board with the PCI-E 16x slot and add discrete graphics, but I've decided it isn't economical enough from a power standpoint - If I'm aiming for a low power...
I'm interested in eventually building a low-ish power HTPC, probably MythTV-based or something similar. I would like to use a VIA CPU because I am constantly impressed by their offerings. There are some VIA mini-itx platforms that offer PCI-E 16x slots, and in one of them I'd install one of the...
Hi, I'm recently starting to see that VIA is a pretty good platform. I run a mixed environment with various Linux distros and occasionally OpenBSD, and I picked up a VIA C7 mini-itx board a while back on a whim thinking I would make a web radio appliance out of it. Well, I then did some more...
Hello, I'm looking for some good open source backup solutions for a small business that can handle grandfather-father-son types of backups, preferably with delta/differential backups to minimize the time on the wire. Storage will be on harddisks off-site. I see I have two real options, Amanda...
I've successfully installed, configured, and run an OpenVPN-based VPN using per-client certificates and all-Linux hosts. There are two network layouts that I'm trying to achieve with this software, one has worked out and the other has left me without a clue.
The first layout, which worked...
Hello, I'm not really sure where to put this post, so I'll try here.
We've recently been introduced to working with FPGAs at school. We're using Xilinx ISE and Verilog to program the units. I am consumed by admiration for these devices and am interested in doing something with them in my...
I'm looking for a way to mirror storage devices over the internet in an efficient way. Here are features I'd like to see:
1.) Efficient use of bandwidth. This means that doing a simple once-daily rsync would not be ideal, because if I had ten nodes in the "distributed cluster," each node...
Asking this question out of curiosity, mostly - is there a way to show an estimate of the remaining time left on a simple cp operation? It doesn't seem like there's a functionality for that built into cp itself, but what about a separate program?
Recently, one of the drives in an 8-drive software RAID5 array began making a buzzing noise, but the system wasn't throwing any errors so I couldn't figure out exactly which one it was by checking logs. Thus, I thought it might be a reasonable idea to unmount the array, and unplug the drives one...
Hello, I bought a Gigabyte GA-M61P-S3 to use as a motherboard for a fileserver. My powersupply is a Silverstone Olympia 650watt. I have all the components connected, and I have no video. This is not my first build.
My PSU did not come with the ATX_12V four-pin plug which my motherboard's...
Aside from having set up a few OpenBSD servers on a spare machine, I have little BSD experience and therefore am curious - are programs and modules and so forth that are present in the FreeBSD tree portable to OpenBSD? To be specific, I know that ZFS and RAID-Z are present in the FreeBSD tree...
I need to print my own circuit, but I don't think the usual PCB etching technique is what I want - I need to print onto plastic (like an overhead transparency.)
The reason is that I'm trying to convert a straight rectangular keyboard into an ergonomic one by adding a bend in the middle. I had...
Hi, I'm planning a 18-drive (2x 9-drive arrays) storage server for this summer, and I've decided to use Solaris and ZFS to take advantage of RAID-Z.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZFS
RAID-Z is basically a tweaked RAID-5, and can tolerate a single drive failure.
Anyway, I've been reading...
Hello,
I'm looking for a CM Stacker 810 in decent condition, new, used, whatever. I live in New Jersey. I do not want to pay retail (Newegg shows $155, found it for as low as $100 via Froogle) - Depending on the condition, I wouldn't mind paying $90-$100 or less or so via PayPal. Why are...
Hello, I'm new here, so I apologize if this was touched upon in the past.
This summer I'm building a storage server that will contain 18 storage disks and 1 OS disk. I am looking for a PSU that will be able to power these drives in addition to an AMD 64 X2 Brisbane at stock clocks, with 4 SATA...