Category: House

So, the media server died. Well, it’s not dead. At 10 years old the Athlon XP’s power supply started to fail. I have a faint feeling it may have failed before, but this time I wandered into the Laundry room / Store, and went ‘gosh, it smells of hot components’. Having checked over the motherboard* and found no leaking capacitors I took out the power supply (which I suspected anyhow) and peered in. And in the darkness there lurked multiple failing capacitors.

So. I thought about it. I thought I could replace the power supply. But I hate just slinging something that needs only minor work to repair it. I thought I could replace the whole PC and freecycle the old one, but a quick check of e-bay revealed that PCs that are are on there are either on buy-it-now for way more than a new power supply (or repairs to the old one) or more than I’m willing to spend.

Having visited Nikki and Kate, they had a Packaged Hell Intel P4 that was filling space in their lounge (ironically it’s one that’s been here before, and we returned to them having decided we had no use for it). Having revised my processor knowledge from 10 years ago, it’s slightly higher performance and it sports 2 gig of ram. This, it seemed was a winner. And so I brought it home and performed open heart surgery:

And then sat down and played the ‘getting a new OS onto an old computer’ game.

It’s actually not that difficult, ‘cept I didn’t want to disassemble my desk – pulling the monitor and such, but upstairs there’s no WiFi adaptor and no wired network point (yes, I should have got them to run the cable at the same time as they rewired, rather than sneaking my network cables in after they’d wired downstairs and not bothering with upstairs) and this machine plugs into the flood-wired downstairs network when it’s fully installed. So I took it upstairs, and after a couple of failed disk burns (the stack of very cheap CD-Rs that I keep kicking around providing a staggering fail rate) produced a CD which worked (they report 24x burning, but 10x is about as fast as they’ll cope with). Having installed Ubuntu I shut down the machine for the night (having found it doesn’t have VLC on the base install CD).

Then yesterday I booted it downstairs connected to the network, forgetting that X needs some tweaks before it’ll boot headless. It didn’t boot, obviously. Then I gave in and pulled the monitor from my desk (time to be grateful for LCDs) and tried again. Still not booting. After a few more goes (it’s not making it to any form of command line either) I reinstalled Ubuntu. It still failed. Then I looked at the power supply in the P4. 315Watts. Whatnow? Running the notoriously power hungry P4, three hard disks and a DVD drive? I suspect it’s a bit much for it. It already ‘whined’ – apparently it’s always done that – or at least for a long time, but I think the whine eminating from it may have been a death-whine.

So the new plan:
– Replace capacitors in old power supply and use to switch out with old power supply on Garage PC – which is the same age as the power supply that’s failed.
– New power supply in P4 – if that works and it runs properly, use that.
– If not, nick memory from P4 (although there’re only two slots in my Athlon) and use it to marginally upgrade the Athlon server.

Unfortunately, this means I get to reinstall software that I’ve spent a fair while tweaking. Mediatomb. So feh.

ETA: I was hoping to go and pick up a power supply today, from a local store (for local people). Unfortunately, ringing around demonstrated that there is a difference between “profit margin” and “I’ll wait a day or two for it to arrive from an internet supplier”. I understand they have much higher overheads, but the difference between 16 quid delivered for a 700 Watt power supply and 40 quid I go and collect it for a 500 Watt one is too much for me, even with my ideals about buying locally, to ignore. This is more frustrating because I wanted to treat myself to a new episode of The Newsroom before I went to work for my night shift, which I thought was unlikely, but I had vague hopes for. Feh, basically.

ETA2: Bollocks. Unintentionally bought my new powersupply from Scan. Bought it on ebay, didn’t pay attention to seller’s name… Arse.

ETA3: And the capacitors have arrived… The Royal Mail left them outside the house… in the rain. How helpful.

*Not motherbard, which is literally different.

So, good news first, eh?

I am going to go and spend the afternoon doing data collection. Yay. Err, or something. No, seriously, I thought that retrieving the data for the study was going to spiral into this infinite nightmare, but actually? It’s going okay. I need to go in today for a few hours and hopefully it shouldn’t be too traumatic. Then tomorrow I can start to enter it for processing. My original-modified plan suggested I’d stick it all in a database on the computer, but I can’t get it from there into SPSS easily and I had to submit the data collection form for approval which is less easy to do with a data collection database.

The amplifier has arrived, and very nice it is too. Theoretically. It’s not like I’ve turned it on or anything, I’ve just looked at it and made a list of some of the bigger electrolytic caps (mainly power supply ones) to replace before I turn it on. I’ve even found a company that makes new electrolytic decoupling capacitors, and is not priced in the same range as many of the other audiophile ones (£30 for one fricking capacitor? That’s more than the amp cost!). And all you audiophiles can duke it out over whether using electrolytics as decoupling capacitors is a good thing or not. Me, my fig is ungiven. I just don’t want it to go ‘bang’ when I turn it on. Sadly it’s only got European mains capability, so when we go to Canada it’ll have to go, however lovely it is. But the teak and green vinyl case is quite pleasant, especially for a home-made case. And I’m just happy that I can listen to music (in the near future) in the library, without headphones on.

I’ve also got a list on Farnell at the moment of capacitors I want for the rest of the supply. Unfortunately I’ve not hit their minimum order price, so I’m hoping that John is wanting to place a Farnell order. Really I want the kind of shop that existed when my dad was a kid, filled to the brim with passive components and such, that you can just wander in and go ‘hey, I want some of these’ and they’ll have ’em. I don’t think they exist anymore tho’, at least, not in this country.

Anyhow, my paranoia derives from this telly:

I loved that telly. It was dreadful in innumerable ways. It had a grand total of four channels which I wisely tuned into the same output signal, that of my video recorder. This is because at the denouement of any TV show it would wander out of tune and you’d get dancing static instead of the fact that would make your film, or show, make any kind of sense. To alleviate this problem, they were all tuned to the same channel and you could leap across the room, hitting the channel selector to catch the vital moment. If you were quick.

It also fluctuated, vaguely, between People Are Lavender, and some strange everyone-is-from-outerspace green tint. It took an age to warm up, and warm up it did, running at approximately the same temperature as a nuclear reactor.

But for all it’s dreadfulness, there was a kind of perverse pleasure in watching TV on something so aged, and so very definitely not of our time. I doubt I’d’ve replaced it even now, had it not gone bang.

It went bang many times through its life. Early colour TVs really pushed their components to the limits, and in the case of mine, as they aged, they wandered past their limits. Indeed, it finally went bang in a sufficiently irreperable way that it ended up going to the tip. I did offer it on freecycle, my post generated a lot of ‘that was a very funny offer, I don’t want the tv, but you almost made me want it’ e-mails, but none who’d love it and take it away and fix it. That made me quite sad. I’d pulled it from the tip in my teens and my dad helped me make it work (having actually turned up at the tip with one exactly the same which I’d salvaged from my school, which had also gone bang in a manner so spectacular that the TV repair shop declared essentially ‘we could fix it, but we’d have to replace every part including the tube’ which seemed excessive).

Anyhow, I recall it having the same type of electrolytic which lurketh in my new amp. I remember it because it went “BANG” and let out magic smoke quite early in the TV’s life. Unfortunately it’s one of the ones I have so far been unable to find a replacement for, an Electrolytic 220nF, 1000V capacitor. Now, I faintly wonder if I can replace it with another kind of capacitor, because you can get 220nF 1000V capacitors, just not electrolytic ones. If anyone fancies enlightening me on this, although you probably want to know what it uses it for, and I didn’t look that closely. I just hunted out electrolytics for replacement.

Also arrived is the watch strap for my Moskva watch.

I feel it now looks very cool on my wrist…

Although, given its current atrocious lack of accuracy it’s pretty much an affectation at the moment. If I want to know the time I actually need to check a device which tells the time. Finding somewhere to service it has proven to be difficult. It never really occurred to me (and you may call me stupid for this) that watch repairers would only repair specific makes. One shop in Bristol alledgedly will look at some Russian watches, but not mine. I’ve so far had one positive ‘we can look at it…but obviously won’t be able to get any spares’ from a shop in Devon. Which is fine… It will have to wait though, because I think I’ve burned through enough cash this month. It’s odd wearing it though, I’ve not worn watches for a long time – this is purely because I wanted one for a specific evening out, and realised that I don’t have one. Then realised that there’s no point in having battery watches because I wear them so infrequently…and that lead to vintage watches, which (obviously) lead to vintage Russian watches (it being me).

I’m quite enjoying the ticking it makes, at least at the moment.

However, in bad news, the much praised media server is…making a warm component smell. I’m trying to decide between chucking in a new power supply and just picking up a crappy second hand PC. One problem is I now won’t touch either DABS* or SCAN** computers. Both have been such shitty companies, which means I’m down to ‘random suppliers’. I need to make a decision though, although I should pull the machine out (I’ve shut it down at the mo) and see whether there’s evidence of capacitor leakage on the motherboard.

On the plus side, Cathedral Pens sent the new ink sac for my little pen, which has been fitted and I shall be trying out later today :)

* Tried to charge me for a delivery the delivery company driver reportedly stole. Repeatedly. Ended up with my bank returning the funds. Tried again a year or two later to get the funds. Won’t go near with a bargepole.
** Treated me like shit when a device they supplied ceased to work a month outside the warranty and well within the UK law’s lifespan of components laws.

There’s a moment as you’re hodging together archaic, or at least well obsolete technology that you think ‘oh ah, maybe using new stuff would be nice’. So, the garage security (and music) system is to be made from bits that if someone half-inches them will not cause me too much distress. Thus, the 8 year old PC (which for some reason takes several attempts to POST, but does it all by itself and has done it the same for at least several years), the freecycle 1280×1024 LCD monitor*, the keyboard sporting a handy XT/AT switch (no, not a nice IBM clicky keyboard, a Tandon knockoff)*, a PS/2 mouse*, some of those dinky little plastic speakers you used to get and connect to your ‘puter* and a WiFi dongle that was designed to work with a G3 Mac. There’s also a £3 night-vision camera, a webcam**, and soon a second somewhat better webcam. It runs Linux on a 200gig hard disk.

Getting it running using this shonky heap of hardware has actually proven to be very easy, if a little slow. Ubuntu went on in a hitchless fashion. Motion and the handy graphical config utility kMotion went on smoothly. kMotion has some rather irritating quirks that limit Motion’s function with it***, but the handyness of the instantly viewable webpage showing multiple cameras makes for niceness. In the end, a back up utility that basically writes a CRON job which runs every 3 minutes and updates a permanently stored backup of images on a remote machine kinda made up for the bit that I couldn’t do with Motion.

So all that works. The cheap camera can’t be used for motion detection because it sends corrupt images every few seconds and they trigger the motion detection, and it was essentially permanently recording video.

But it’s handy for seeing what’s going on in there, so it can stay.

And then we get to the network.

The G3 dongle? That works fine. Drivers picked it up no problem.

Then we get to extending the network down to the garage. I have an aged PCI 102.11b802.11b (‘scuse the thinko) network card in the media server, it’s not used because it has a nice wired connection. I would use it, but the drivers struggle to make the benighted thing work at all. It’s never been reliable. So I asked John if his venerable collection of stuff included any spare wifi kit. Didn’t have to be new, or shiny.

He pulled out a router and a WAP box. John rocks.

It turned out that contrary to initial thoughts, the router does not include a WiFi component. It’s just a router. But that’s handy, because the little dinky 4 port 100baseT hub that I swear is hiding in the house, is doing a damn good job of hiding. Really damn good.

I have been through a lot of boxes today, and it’s stayed well hidden.

So I set up the router to behave and play well with the Be Internet Wifi router. All is good.

Then I come to the Belkin WAP box. And there’s a special hell reserved for the designer of this box.

Yes, I’m sure you made it really very cheap. Well done. But a Windows only configuration utility? On a network device? How could you? Your mother would be ashamed.. I see her now, weeping, asking what’s become of you. How you could sell out your soul like that. A network device that can’t work without windows. For shame.

So now I’ve updated VMWare. Hopefully, after this reboot I can download and install the software required to make the device work, and set it so it’ll only allow devices with specific MAC addresses to connect (‘cos it has WEP “security” only *sigh*).

And *then* I can mount the computer down in the garage. And we can have our lounge back.

* Thanks John!
** Thanks Nikki, I think
*** You should be able to add any command for it to run after saving a movie or image, but you can’t add any commands that kMotion doesn’t automatically generate when it’s running as it overwrites the config files each time it’s run.