It's, Uh, March?

It's March. Almost April. Haven't posted. I hate everything. Almost have school done. Cisco CCNA coming up. Haven't got anything working on the side (what side?). Just tooting my horn for a minute before I go to class.

No Noose is Good Noose

Whee! Flibble drool *splech* Rar!

Heh I've been looking at the sys admin docs on the Gentoo site and there's a ton of absolutely awesome HOWTO type docs published there. There's stuff on setting up Kerberos, LDAP, on hardening, and all sorts of good stuff.

I gots to get some of that shiznat going. I just haven't had time to push ahead on side-side-side projects (e.g. anything on top of work, school, and CCNA). Well, maybe not the time, but my brain is definately too mushy for anything more. I've been spending my free time drooling in front of the Playstation... *splonk* Or drinking most of a bottle of scotch when I thought I had "only" drank half of it :P

Dead Again

Well, I've been without Friday the last week or two. Stupid suck. When she boots she complains that she can't find the keyboard. This is just fucking lame. I'm going to end up sending both mainboards back to ASUS in the hopes then when then come back, one or both of them will be working. This is just total bullshit.

That and the stupid unionists were on strike Monday which puts me out a class. It's a part-time course so that's never going to be made up. Since the content is largely online, we don't really miss too much thankfully. Stupid administration. Stupid union. I hate them so many!

Friday's Back and Better Then Ever

Finally got that CPU fan sorted out today. Got everything mounted and slapped back in the case. Fired 'er up and Friday's smokin' hot now. All the good things from before plus the RAM is now dual channel and she has a nice DVD writer.

I've really missed having a wicked box at home. Everything runs fast, runs smooth, and it's tight as a rock. And now the case does rattle from the CPU fan. So good, ah!

It's Not a 939!

I lied. I got a Asus k7v880pro. I didn't step up the CPU. Sadly, I got the wrong stupid CPU fan so the one I got doesn't have the correct mounting bracket for the socket 462. I will work on a 754, 939 or 474 (or whatever the one for the P4 systems is called). See, I ordered the Zalman CNPS 7000 AlCu but I should have ordered the Zalman CNPS 7000B AlCu. See? Not really? Yeah, well, that was the problem. I paid close attention right up until I placed my order and ended up with the wrong heatsink/fan. Netlink did exchange it for me, but I have to wait a couple days for the 7000B to come in from the warehouse. Until then, still no computer. Bastards!

She's dead, Jim

I lose, you win. F*&$%ing mobo! That thing is dead. Time to move on. I'm going to boost my system a bit and shave my pocket a little to go to an AMD 64b CPU. I was looking at maybe doing an Intel P4 w/ Hyper Threading but that would be a couple hundred bucks more. If I'm going to put up a real budget for real hardware, I should skip up to dualies. If I pony-up for dualies, I should really go ahead and step up my secondary storage (to a nice little SATA RAID). Once my hard drives are up, I should really just make the extra investment and getting higher quality RAM. Not to mention finally adding proper speakers and a second LCD...

So a few hundred bones to go up to a 64b AMD and a new mobo. This one I'm looking at has dual-channel RAM and that will be good. New CPU, mainboard, and CPU fan. That's it. But it will be nice, oh yes, it will be very nice.

New DVD Writer and Bad Mainboard

Well, I tried ordering a DVD writer online. Tried using the online bill payment thing from my bank only payment takes freaking forever. It's been four full business days and still it's not up. Sucks.

And as if new hardware problems aren't bad enough, my mainboard has been flaking out since Friday. I would press "on" and POST would give me four beeps. This is not good. After some coaxing, it booted. I ran memtest for a while just to be sure it wasn't just a memory problem but nope, looks like a mainboard issue. I think it's that stupid vantec fan that's just been sitting there vibrating the mainboard day and night since I installed it. Bad stuff. Hopefully my box will run until the new year because replacing stuff right now will really suck. A lot.

Ugh!