New Disk
It’s been three weeks since my last blog entry ( I aim to do at least one per week) so I thought I’d best post something.
The main news is that I have left Telecom ( after 3.5 years ) and have been at a new job for the lat two weeks. The new job is part of a small team ( approx 5 people ) which look after the servers (and some other equipment) for one of New Zealand’s top 10 websites.
Things have been pretty busy as I’ve had to get up to speed on the environment fast since one of the other guys is on leave for 4 weeks but learning the technology has been interesting. Things also move a lot quicker than they did at Telecom.
Technology wise I’ve been playing around a little bit with the nginx webserver for possible serving static content. Especially the Mirror on Demand concept looks pretty cool for syncing multiple servers.
I also had a bit of fun today getting a new 750GB Hard drive working. Because my old machine doesn’t have any SATA ports I’m using a SiI3114 – PCI to 4 Port SATA Card to access the disks. However it didn’t recognise my new drive because it was too big.
A bit of googling around and found I had to flash the card’s bios to a new version in order for it to recognise the drive. It took me a couple of goes since the bios update programs only work for Windows or DOS so I have to boot into FreeDOS but all working now:
# df -H /media/disk1 Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/sdb1 739G 207M 739G 1% /media/disk1Useful links:
- George Pantazis explains the problem and suggests using FreeDOS
- The BIOS Update Utility and IOS images
- A good article on how to create the FreeDOS boot image with the utility on it
Anyway time to head to bed. I have to get up at 7am these days to get into work and my sleep patterns are still adjusting. The good news is that I’m actually starting to get through my TODO list and I’m only a little behind in my email. END
