Digital Rants

Yes there really is a price war going on in Perth. Between MSY and Netplus, they are trying to better each other in computer parts - specifically hard disks. MSY is a new comer to the Perth scene -first and only store in Balcatta.

Went there twice to get some Noctua fans. It's a small establishment, but apparently well stocked, and can't really complain about its service.

I am not sure when this starts, but NetPlus and MSY has been trying to better each other with the price of the 1TB WD and the 1.5T Seagate. Beating each other by 10c, 50c and $1. It is a slow and painful process, but the prices of hard drives has dropped because of this war.

Can they come on already and cut it in $10s rather than pocket change? I want more 1.5TB drives, and I want them yesterday!

All things considered Google is probably the most powerful private organisation out there right now. It might even wield more power than any government bodies in the world. Why? Ever hear of the old adage that information is power? Google has every public (and maybe secret) information indexed. The Google search engines will return you any information you require in under one second when fed the right keywords or facts. So far it even seems they can predict flu! In the past couple of months I have used various Google tools and achieved a almost 100% success rate. So what did I use Google for?

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Updated the blog software to its "latest and greatest". Decided to use this skin for now. It seems all skins are designed around 800x600.

Yeah, think there are way too many Google ads and none of them are effective at all. Trying to cut down on the ads to improve overall "neatness". Will tweak more things as I go along. Main thing to do this weekend is to get my 2TB MyBook up and running again.

Gotta sleep soon.

So the amplifier is one week old today. I would have form a good solid opinion on the Elektra Theatron 7 after a solid 7 day test.

Want to hear what I think? Read more to find out!

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New firmware for N7700 is out. I wonder if they have "fixed" the kernel to allow >1GB RAM this time.

So I wrote the above yesterday.

I can confirm that firmware 2.1.09 fixed this problem as the OS can see the full 2GB of RAM now. Whether the extra 1GB of RAM will provide any benefits at all remains to be seen. But the fact that Thecus is reading and listening to user requests are encouraging. This shows their dedication. Kudos.

Update:
Jumbo frame is broken. If you login via SSH you'd notice (dmesg) that the MTU is set to a size you specified, and then set back to 1500 immediately after. I raised a ticket with 'em and they confirmed the issue but closed the ticket . I guess you win some, you lose some.

Funny thing about iSCSI. Tried the same commands over and over again and it didn't work, until it did! Strange.

This is just preliminary, but iSCSI is FAST! First time it hit 72MB/s on a single 10EACS drive. This is over 2xgigabit trunked via a 8 port HP ProCurve.

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Wow!

OK. Somebody actually googled and hit this page. So I guess I have to expand it further.

Although there's always a YMMV factor, in short, what a difference!

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So FedEx delivered my item first.. And TNT an hour later. TNT delivered the package in a FedEx box. I wonder if they are one and the same?