BarryGrussling.com

Why a Dell D820N

Unfortunately, my Toshiba Satellite 1800-S203 died recently. The high voltage circuit for the display went out, along with other various issues that were driving me nuts. I decided it was time to replace the ~6 year old laptop with something a little more modern.

My requirements were as follows:

• Durable
• Standard enough hardware that Linux will work

The Durability requirement pushed me away from the Inspiron line and toward the Latitude line.

While browsing the internet this afternoon, I stumbled upon http://gentoo-wiki.com/TIP_GIMP_Fractal_Backgrounds and was pleasently surprised at how easy these "cool" backgrounds were to generate. Here is my first fractal background:

So I have this nice new ABMX box running FC5 for my main server. It is a great setup, and it is small (1U). The unfortunate part is that the raid array keeps degrading. This box has a 3Ware 7006-2 running two WDC WD3200JB harddrives. At first everything was fine. After two or three days, I got a notice that I had a drive error (0x0F:0x000A), and that the raid 1 array was now a single drive. I went into the nice 3DM2 and started a rebuild. It worked fine and ran for about 2 more days as a raid system. It then failed again. This time it had a controller error (0x0F:0x0004).

At this point in time, I contacted 3Wares technical support. They were fast to respond to email, and they recommended I try different cables. I gave that a try (using 3ware certified cables even), but it was the same problem. I emailed them again and they recommended I try swapping drives and seeing if the error moved, or if the same drive had issues. At this point I got a little frustrated and ordered a new WD3200JB drive. I figure if the drive is bad that is in the box, I can replace it with this new one and RMA the old one. If the drive isn't bad, I now have a new drive for backup on my main computer.