Everything Else

vishnu wrote: And your main usage of that enterprise-class storage is for photos of the wife and kids, right?

When I got the DS4300 it had no disks, so I only had the controllers to mess with. I quickly figured out that they run vxWorks. I deal with vxWorks professionally more or less on a daily basis so that got my full attention. Now I have all the optional licensed features like flash copy, volume copy, FC/SATA mix etc etc.

Up until this moment this thing was nothing but yet another way to waste my free time. I got it in exchange for a charity donation so it didn't cost me much. Then I figured out this thing actually works with IRIX clients, unlike some other SAN hardware. It's an Engenio unit, also rebadged as the SGI TP9300. So I bought some disks for it. At some point I found a cheap EXP710 (extra disk tray). If I run into a cheap EXP810 I'll pick that up too -- it supports SATA disks, and if I hack the carrier firmware to accept generic SATA disks I can offload all my old 1TB disks into it.

And it's used to store funny cat pictures, what else?

And I've got sound! Yay! Finally

I improvised with a pair of SGI 'Polk' speakers until now but there's no substitute for a decent pair of speakers. They're powered by a Rotel amplifier and a Cambridge Audio DacMagic Plus.



If you look carefully you can see one of the few mistakes I made during construction: the holes in the wall for the speaker cables are too high...

Awesome! It's been more than a year since you treated us to pics of the computer room. It would be wonderful if you could share what it looks like now... in the last pics I saw, things were still in transition.

jan-jaap wrote: If you look carefully you can see one of the few mistakes I made during construction: the holes in the wall for the speaker cables are too high...

Set the speakers on some of those fashionable conic supports. That'll give you a few inches and you can say you intended it that way

I keep thinking that my workshop was an impressive feat but then I remembered you practically built an addition to your home just for your computers.
Now that it has been a while, has there been any issues with ventilation?

sgifanatic wrote: It would be wonderful if you could share what it looks like now... in the last pics I saw, things were still in transition.

It's still not finished ... the realities of life with a family with two small kids and a full time job, I'm afraid. Weekends are always incredibly busy, so realistically I only spend time on my hobby in the evenings during the working week.

I still need to install the network cables plus the Fibe Channel / FDDI fibres on one side. For quite a while the baby room furniture was stored in my computer room until I had the time to fix it up and sell it. This was massively in the way of everything.

I hope to finish the wiring this winter. Once the wiring is in, I can fill up the large cupboards with spares etc. That should clean up nicely.

Next year I hope to design a comprehensive KVM solution for my workstation rack and get rid of most of the CRT monitors. That will clean up nicely too.

Less is more. How zen

And I need to put some decoration on the walls. I have some failed old Geometry Engine boards of various generations, maybe I can frame some and turn them into art or something.

pentium wrote: I keep thinking that my workshop was an impressive feat but then I remembered you practically built an addition to your home just for your computers.
Now that it has been a while, has there been any issues with ventilation?

It gets warm there during the summer, but not a sauna. I have not installed an airco (yet). When it gets that hot it's a better idea anyway to sit in the garden with a cold beer

jan-jaap wrote: And I've got sound! [...] They're powered by a Rotel amplifier and a Cambridge Audio DacMagic Plus.

So it turned out that my Dynaudio speakers were a bit too much for my poor Rotel RA-970BX integrated amp. I've had the same problem before with the stereo system I have in my office at work and that was solved with a bigger amp (also Rotel, a pre + power amp combo).

Having good experience with big Rotel amps I got myself an RB-991 power amp. The Dynaudios, being 4Ohm speakers and relatively insensitive ( ~86dB) can handle (and need) a lot of power. Recommendation is 200W I think. The RB-991 puts out nearly twice that and that's continuous output power at low distortion, not some fancy unreal impulse power number. It also has a damping factor of 1000 over the entire audio spectrum -- this thing can drive difficult speakers.

The difference is profound Before, the sound was muddy, with booming bass. Now it's much tighter, with better definition. Amazingly, it sounds like you're in a bigger room, yet full of music. I haven't tied yet, but I'm quite sure this setup can also play so loud it will make an Onyx in 'fastfan' mode completely unnoticeable (and probably make my ears bleed ...)