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I recently upgraded my lowly socket 939 workstation to a mini-itx motherboard with a socket AM2 dual core CPU and integrated GPU. I’ve always tried to minimize noise in my workstations since I have a great pair of Grado SR60 headphones and extraneous noise bothers me.

Now that the noisy GPU cooling fan is gone (yay!) I’ve begun to notice the noise that my dual SATA hard drives generate. I got sufficiently motivated last night to figure out a way to silence them. What I came up with was a “hard drive suspension mechanism” of sorts that cost, oh, probably about $0.13. Best of all, the drives generate ZERO noise from vibration now.

Click here to see some pics. My wife’s laptop is now actually louder than my dual core workstation :-)

You may on occasion have a need to convert .bin firmware images such as those used to flash linksys based devices into .bin formatted images that can be accepted by OpenWRT. Its actually quite easy to do:

That will strip the first 32 bytes off the image, thus making it a valid .bin formatted firmware image file. Neat, huh?

I am constantly forgetting this and having to look it up so here are the equations to convert each unit of measure to the other:

C = (5/9)(F-32)

F = (9/5)C+32

This will be pretty obvious to seasoned *nix admins but it’s possible to tar/gz/bzip files over an ssh connection onto a remote file system. Read on to find out how…

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I recently converted from Arkeia (a horribly overpriced and buggy piece of software) to Bacula (a free, stable, higher performance alternative). At the same time I upgraded my backup server to Debian Etch and started having a problem where my tape library would alternatively show up as either /dev/sg0 or /dev/sg2 depending on what order things were powered up. Obviously that presents a problem if certain pieces of software expect your auto changer to located at a certain device node in /dev.

This can be fixed by making a custom udev rule…

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