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](http://nginx.net/)
webserver for possible serving static content. Especially the [Mirror on Demand](http://hostingfu.com/article/nginx-and-mirror-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](http://www.siliconimage.com/products/product.aspx?id=28)
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](http://www.freedos.org) but all working now:
# df -H /media/disk1 Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/sdb1 739G 207M 739G 1% /media/disk1
Useful links:
* [George Pantazis explains the problem and suggests using FreeDOS](http://ssh-lroot.blogspot.com/2007/10/sil-3114-add-on-card-bios-update.html)
* [The BIOS Update Utility and IOS images](http://www.siliconimage.com/support/supportsearchresults.aspx?pid=28&cid=15&ctid=2&)
* [A good article on how to create the FreeDOS boot image with the utility on it](http://www.linuxinsight.com/how-to-flash-motherboard-bios-from-linux-no-dos-windows-no-floppy-drive.html)
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
