Switched On Tech Design

Author: sotech

  • DNS troubles with Ubuntu Server 12.04

    Some customers have been having DNS issues after setting a static IP on Ubuntu 12.04.1 where the server is no longer picking up the DNS settings as it was before; this can be easily fixed by adding the following to /etc/network/interfaces after the eth0 entry:

     

    dns-nameservers [ip.of.your.router]

     

    e.g., for a modem/router that’s 10.1.1.1 on your local network, your /etc/network/interfaces file might look like:

     

    # This file describes the network interfaces available on your system
    # and how to activate them. For more information, see interfaces(5).

    # The loopback network interface
    auto lo
    iface lo inet loopback

    # The primary network interface
    auto eth0
    iface eth0 inet static
    address 10.1.1.50
    netmask 255.255.255.0
    gateway 10.1.1.1
    broadcast 10.1.1.255

    dns-nameservers 10.1.1.1

    Restart your network with:

     

    sudo /etc/init.d/networking restart

     

    …then try pinging Google or something similar and you should have success 🙂

     

    It’s generally not advisable for Australians to use nameservers located elsewhere, e.g. Google’s public DNS’ 8.8.8.8 or 8.8.4.4 – some things which are unmetered by your ISP may be metered if you do so.

     

     

  • Intel X520-T2 Visual Overview

    There’s not a great deal to say about these cards apart from that they allow you some crazy network speeds, if you have the disk speed to keep up. They can certainly alleviate network bottlenecks if gigabit is holding you back!

    This particular card has a fan to keep the chipset cool; it’s not going to be heard in a server room but if your workstation is quiet the high-pitched whine is probably going to be audible.

    The card does get reasonably hot, particularly if you’re making good use of it’s capabilities – make sure you have enough airflow in the chassis to keep the card cool. Keep in mind it’s assumed that these cards will be used in an environment where there’s at least 200 linear feet per minute of airflow passing over them.

    10-gigabit cards are coming down in price quite significantly, though switches are still out of reach of most enthusiasts/small businesses. Watch this space, however, as 10GBe connections are making their way into high-end server boards more regularly and that will slowly filter down to the consumer level. SSD arrays becoming more commonplace will only help with that, as will the new 12gb/s cards from LSI – it’s hard to make use of all that bandwidth if you’re piping it over gigabit!

  • Silverstone FT-03 Mini Overview or Mini Review

    With the massive increase in how useful mini-ITX boards are has come a corresponding increase in chassis to fit them, all of which are challenged by dissipating a full-sized-desktop CPU worth of heat in a small space. Add in a GPU and other components and you have quite a difficult proposition – getting the right balance of size, aesthetics, noise, cooling and price. One of the more recent contenders is Silverstone’s FT-03 Mini:


    At 19cm wide, 40cm high and 23.5cm deep it’s an unusual shape for a computer case – a tiny tower with one slot for a CD/DVD. The motherboard inside is rotated 90 degrees, so that what’s normally the rear with the I/O is facing upwards; it also means that the airflow is drawn in from underneath and exhausted out the top, hence the sides unmarred by fan holes.

     


     Given that the case may be sitting on carpet Silverstone have thoughtfully provided reasonably deep cutouts on each of the four sides at the base for air to flow in. As for the exhaust, the top is a plastic clip-on plate with many holes;

     

     

    The white is tasteful and matches up with the silver nicely. There’s a power and reset button in the center:

     

    …along with two USB 3.0 ports and the usual two audio ports on top.

     

     

    The top plastic piece is held in with clips and lifts off without too much difficulty. The sides are also held in with clips:

     

    They’re particularly solid sides – though they do scratch easily. The aluminium is several mm thick:

     




     

    There’s enough room in the  chassis for a SFX PSU and even a self-contained watercooling unit if you’re feeling adventurous – it’s a reasonably flexible chassis, too, so if you don’t need a CD/DVD/Bluray drive you can leave that mounting bracket out, which gives you a little more leeway in installing other components.




     

    We haven’t built one that isn’t cooled with a Corsair H80 yet and we’ve also avoided using SFX PSUs in exchange for smaller units to give more internal space. There’s a dust filter on the base, too, which is handy as it catches a reasonable amount of dust being so close to the floor.

     




    If we do a more “standard” build with one of these we’ll write up a full review – as it stands, though, the mini-workstation builds are quite popular and perform well while keeping within a fairly small power envelope, so there’s not much temptation to go with a SFX PSU and air cooling! All of our customers have been very happy with the case’s performance, and the understated aesthetic is almost Apple-esque, which is in no way a bad thing. It’s hard not to draw some comparisons there when Apple is using so much unbroken aluminium in it’s products these days. If you’re after a specific answer regarding this chassis drop us a line and we’ll be happy to answer with measurements etc. 🙂

  • Customer Build: Marguerite

     

     

    This customer wanted a small, quiet workstation with good single-threaded performance in an interesting/different case; the end result was:

     



    Silverstone’s FT-03 Mini chassis is a well thought-out, elegant little case which feels top-notch in terms of build quality – thanks in no small part to the extremely thick aluminium sides;

     



    The case sides are surprisingly heavy! For the interior, we went with an Asus Z77 board and a 3570K, overclocked to 4.5GHz;

     



    With a self-contained liquid cooling unit the system stays extremely quiet, even under load – the chip is capable of clocking higher with some more volts, but in this case 4.5GHz was the sweet spot in terms of performance vs. noise/heat. The fan on the underside was replaced with a BitFenix Spectre Pro Red LED 140mm – the red glow coming from underneath the case while it’s running gave the aesthetic a slight edge. With some nice 2133MHz RAM, a Crucial M4 SSD and an extremely power efficient PSU the build performs extremely well while still remaining power efficient and quiet.

     



     

  • New MFC in-house: Brother MFC-J825DW

    Our Canon MFC kicked the bucket recently and we’ve chosen to go with a Brother replacement this time around; it’s hopefully going to be around for a while so if you have any questions about it, drop us a line. Depending on how it fares we may do a write-up of it down the track as a long-term review.

     

    So far it’s printed a handful of pages, about a dozen DVDs and scanned in about 1,000 receipts without complaining so it’s looking promising so far!

  • New Product: LED Bulbs!

    Are you interested in saving money on your electricity bill? LED bulbs use around 20% of the power of a regular halogen bulb, while producing an equal or greater amount of light. Considering that room lighting is one of the hardest things to cut back on, this is a great way of saving money each bill – if you even have a bulb on for 6 hours a day you recoup the cost of the LED bulb in mere months if your electricity is around 30c per kWhr, which is about what we pay here in NSW.

     

    It’s not all about the cost, though – using less power is a good way of reducing your carbon footprint and your overall impact on the environment. The bulbs screw into standard light fittings – whether an Edison E27 screw mount or a bayonet mount – and also come in fluorescent sizing. You have the choice of warm white, neutral white or cool white and a wide range of wattages to choose from.

     

    There are also LED spot lights and smaller bulbs available. If you’re interested in saving money through using less electricity, contact us today and we will give you a quote!

  • New modem/router in-house…

    We’re currently testing this as a pretty comprehensive modem/router/VOIP solution – stay tuned to hear how it goes!

     

  • Ubuntu: How to view results of “ls” one page at a time

    If you’re listing the contents of a directory using the “ls -l” command in a terminal window you may find that the number of results cause pages of text to fly past your screen, leaving you with only the last page to look at. If you aren’t using a terminal which you can scroll back through this can be rather annoying; fortunately, there’s an easy fix.

     

    In a nutshell you can direct the output of the ls command to another command – less – which allows you to view the results one page at a time. We do this using a pipe: the | symbol.

     

    ls -l | less

     

    The less command shows you one screen at a time; to see the next screen, press the spacebar. If you would like less at once, you can see the next single line using the return key. You can go back a screen by pressing the “b” key or half a screen with the “u” key. There are plenty of other useful commands within less – you can see the manual for it by typing:

     

    man less

     

    You can navigate the manual in the same way – spacebar for another screen, u and b to move back up!

     

     

  • Fractal Design Define R4 Review – Part Two

    As promised, here’s part two of our review! We’re building one of our standard test systems using this chassis and the following components:

     

    Asus P8Z77-V Deluxe motherboard

    Intel i7-3770K CPU @ 4.5GHz

    8GB G-skill Ares 2133MHz RAM (2x4GB)

    Corsair H100 self-contained liquid cooling

    Crucial M4 SSDs

    Seasonic X-560 PSU

    AMD HD6450

     

    Click through to see how the build went!

     

    (more…)

  • ZFS: Stopping a scrub

    If you accidentally started a scrub on a pool or need to stop one for any reason it’s fortunately quite straightforward:

     

    # zpool scrub -s [poolname]

     

     

    e.g. zpool scrub -s kepler

     

    You can check on whether that was successful with zpool status – it will give an output above the pool status that looks like:

     

    pool: kepler
    state: ONLINE
    scan: scrub canceled on Sat Sep 29 10:30:14 2012

     

    Unnecessary scrubbing just wastes power – particularly for a large, nearly-full array where you’ll have quite a few disks running constantly for hours – so it’s good practice to cancel an accidentally-started scrub.