2003-06-02

Analog

Got the Analog installation on Saturn doing DNS reversals. It is very slow, mostly due to the huge backlog of logs I have (since end of February, I think). But it appears to work.

It does look like I have lost a week of logs from the end of May. The file just doesn't seem to be there.

CD-RW, The Saga Continues

I'm starting to feel like this is exclusively a CDR blog...

Installed the LG drive as a slave off of the same IDE chain as the IDE CD reader. The computer boots much faster now because it no longer has to fiddle around figuring out that there's only one SCSI device attached to the SCSI cable. And I assume there are similar wins at OS boot time because the chain no longer exists to be probed again.

And, perhaps anticlimactically. the drive burned audio CDs correctly. The blanks we currently have are stamped as 16x disks, so I didn't try to burn them at a higher speed than that. The software worked correctly, although getting the Project Manager thing pop up every time a disk is inserted into a drive is anoying.

I'll wait for the next major Linux revision before trying the drive out under Linux since the SCSI-over-ATAPI emulation is reputedly a real bear to get going. Maybe I'll try a Kickstart of Saturn to see if the device gets detected correctly...

Incidentally, removing the SCSI card and drive didn't do anything to help the system's stability -- Diablo crapped out a couple of times yesterday, and the first time I tried to boot Saturn this morning I got an oops at the sound card initialization. (But not on the second attempt). I noticed while removing the SCSI card that the link light on the network card was on, perhaps I should have been unplugging the computer to make sure I'm not letting out the magic smoke when adding/removing things.