A couple weeks ago my machine took a nose dive. I powered down my machine for the first time in a loooong time. The poor machine has basically been up and running for 3yrs usually only rebooting when I recompile the kernel. Well, I turned the power off in that room to do some electrical work and when I finished I took this down time as a sign to replace the hard drive that is currently in there. I ran out of space on the old hard drive and it was starting to click and park loudly, so the previous month I bought another drive. I installed the new drive and took the old one out. Powered it on and nothing. No video, no keyboard lights. I opened it back up and looked at the bios error codes displayed on my motherboard. Each time I powered it on and off I got a different error code. Half the time it stated FF and all was good but still no go and no video. I tried swapping memory, video, no hard drives everything but the motherboard and cpu. I battled with the stupid thing for another day and then tossed my hands up and said F it I will buy some new parts. So I went to NewEgg and bought $250 bucks worth of new parts and now I am the proud owner of an AMD Phenom II X4 940 Deneb 3.0GHz Quad Core. This machine is heads and tails better than my old single core 1.8GHz Athlon. But wouldn’t you know before I could get all the data off the old hard drive I replaced it crashed. The drive is still under warranty but I don’t want to send it back because it has personal files on there and while I am pretty sure everything is encrypted I don’t want to take the chance. Stupid Computers
Archive for category Hardware
I did a short talk today on building an OpenWRT image at one of our local Linux Users Groups. I also briefly showed how to use it to be a Kismet drone since that is one of my favorite uses.
Here is a brief run down of some steps needed to build OpenWRT from source for your router. This wiki article mentions the WRTsl54gs but it really isn’t tailored to it so the steps are basically the same for any router supported.
OpenWRT for the WRTSL54GS
Gentoo on the Alix
May 18
I finished my write-up for the embedded Gentoo Alix How-To. Now I just need to get the Wiki up and running.