Bohannon Tech» admin

Apple Airport Extreme

admin — Sun, 05 Sep 2010 13:22:32 +0000

$179, Apple.

Features

USB port to plug a printer into, lets the Airport become a wireless print server
WPA/WPA2 Security with 128-bit WEP
Guest Networking – you can create a secondary wireless network (‘John’s Guest Network’) with a different password or no password at all.
Dual band
Supports up to 50 users simultaneously

Looks like a good solution for retail shop, classroom, or busy home.

BTW It’s currently on sale at Amazon
Apple AirPort Extreme Base Station (Simultaneous Dual-Band) (MC340LL/A)

No more mouse hot swap in Windows 7?

admin — Mon, 10 May 2010 17:28:43 +0000

This isn’t headline news or anything, but it sure is annoying when OS features that have worked fine for years suddenly stop working. Case in point, I purchased a new Kensington Orbit trackball yesterday and figured I could just unplug my old microsoft USB mouse and plug this in, and it would just work. No drivers are required for the trackball, as its a USB HID compliant device.

Did it work? No. No mouse cursor movement at all. Windows 7 sees the new device, but it pops up an error saying it had a problem installing the drivers. So I rebooted the machine and the problem goes away and the trackball works. I can ALMOST accept that this is the way things are now, because its a “new” device. So guess that happens when I plugged the old mouse back in? Yep, it doesn’t work unless you also reboot the machine.

So mouse hotswap is just broken in Windows 7.

p.s. I’ve tried this on two different computers with different versions of WIN7, same exact problem on both machines.

Nice deal on the Tyan 4985 Quad 1207 motherboard

admin — Sat, 24 Apr 2010 23:02:13 +0000

The bad news is newegg stopped selling the Tyan 4980 Motherboard I featured in my 16-core workstation build last year. Fortunately, they are selling a better one now. The TYAN S4985G3NR Thunder has FOUR expansion slots to the 4980′s one. This means you can improve the built-in raid controller, add a good video card and still have some slots leftover. Its on sale for $299 right now, which means its probably getting replaced by a better, more expensive Tyan Quad board in the near future. I’m tempted to upgrade my workstation!

DIY 16 core workstation part 4: Case & Power Supply

admin — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 13:44:38 +0000

One very important detail on this build is the case. Building a system with a server motherboard requires an EATX case (Extended ATX). EATX cases are the only things large enough to hold the Tyan S4980 motherboards.

So which one do you get? Well a few things to keep in mind. The motherboard supports 6 SATA hard drives and 2 IDE devices. So you should get a case that can support at least 8 drives.

The first case I tried was the Zalman GS1000, which is very nice looking, and can hold 8 hard drives. Unfortunately, I could not get ANY power supply plugs to reach the motherboard with this case.

I lucked out with the Antec 650 Titan EATX server case, because not only did it have a power supply mount near the motherboard power supply connectors, but the 650 W power supply ended up being perfect for my build. How did I know that? I purchased a 1000W power supply first and mounted it into the Antec 650 case, and I used a logging watt meter to measure the idle and peak watt usage while running IoStress on all hard drives on the server. IoStress pegged all 16 cores, and maxed out all 6 hard drives for a week. I checked the logged results — 520 W max usage. The idle power consumption is less than 300W. Windows 7 does a good job at shutting down cores when they are not being used, and the low power opterons help out alot.