So the last couple of days my internet connection has been acting pretty strange.  Pinging my fileserver was taking about 4000-6000ms … which is not normal.  When pinging the LinkSys WRT54G running DD-WRT v24 it was taking about 30ms which is pretty high.  All of a sudden my wireless dropped and all the settings were reset to DD-WRT default ….  Spent about an hour setting it all back up, while doing so I decided to upgrade to the newest version of v24.  All seems well now and much quicker to boot.

So I spent a few hours redoing the File server setup, switching out the mother board drives etc… Only to recall why I never used the dual 1ghz machine in the first place.  When placing an IDE or SATA PCI card into the motherboard everything slows to a crawl.  Its some issue with the motherboard and is stated on the TYAN site.  So I wasted away a few hours of my life for nothing.  I did however reinstall the File server with the old hardware and a copy of Ubuntu Server.  The new install is much more optimized than the later which is the only plus from the experience.  Damn you TYAN and your Dual p3 motherboard issues.

Over the past couple of weeks Vegas sure has gotten hot.  I had forgotten how hot it gets during the summers here.  Ohh well once I get a job I think it will be time to fix the AC unit in my car since it doesn’t seem to work anymore.
Ryan was here over the last week and I wish my luck was as god as his.  Seems that he had a lucky streak as he was up around $1000 during the time he was here. Even though I haven’t won like that in a long time, he still treated us to nice steak dinner at Claim Jumpers.
I have started to plan out my new fileserver setup.  Mainly I have a dual 1ghz machine with 4gig of ram that I am going t put in pace as the fie server, and then take the d fileserver and make it a MythTv frontend for my bedroom…  Lets see how well this ends up working out.
 

I have been a long time user of phpSysInfomebeli, but I must say the newest version that I installed takes the cake. I am digging the new layout, and yes mainly because of the fade effects put in place and the colors etc. It seems to display the information a bit better than prior versions, and the layout is much easier on the eyes than that of older versions. You should upgrade to this if you haven’t already.

After abruptly being woken up today nice and early I figured that I would put some work into my linux box. It was almost foreign to me, since I haven’t been doing anything linux since I moved. My Mediacenter has mainly just been sitting online running as a Transparent Squid proxy, Caching DNS server, Fileserver to my XBMC. The specs of the machine are as follows:

1.25ghz AMD XP
512 PC2700
784gb of Random SATA Drives.

As you can see its not anything that special, but houses a decent amount of drive space and handles everything just fine for my needs. That being said I wanted to squeeze a as much juice out of it as possible. I figured the best way to do this would be to remove any unused services that start, really no need in running cups when there is no printer connected to it. I also removed bluetooth, pcmcia, and a bunch of laptop services.
I really need to find my extra ram that I have laying around and spruce it up to 1gb of ram, as well as purchase another SATA card so I can add a few more drives that I have laying around. Adding the SATA card should boost me up to around 1tb of storage. More than enough space to start downloading the internets.

I came across SSHMenu, and its is very handy if you have multiple machines that you connect into on a regular basis.  Here is a screenshot of the program to give you an idea.

You can get more information on it over at their Official Site.