Detecting memory type on FreeBSD

If you need to upgrade your RAM on a Windows machine, you can just use the Crucial Memory Advisor wotsit, which scans your computer using the power of, er, power to find out what your motherboard is, what RAM you already have, and then can tell you which overpriced Crucial RAM to buy.

On FreeBSD, this doesn’t work so well. However, you can tell manually tell the Crucial site what motherboard you have and it will tell you exactly what sort of RAM is best.

This is fine if you know what motherboard you have.

if you don’t, the answer is dmidecode(8) (/usr/ports/sysutils/dmidecode). This utility grabs the same information which the Crucial thingy does, so all you need to do is find the info you need.

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Hard drives hate me

Last week I finally got my ~terabyte storage finished!

Filesystem     Size    Used   Avail Capacity  Mounted on
/dev/ar0s1d    677G     99G    571G    15%    /raid5

It’s less than 1024GB thanks to drive manufacturers using dodgy calculations, and also it’s RAID5, so I lose a disk’s worth of space (250GB). Seem to be doing a reasonable job of filling it up though ;)

This morning, though, I was greeted with the this email:

This email was generated by the smartd daemon running on:

host name: yomi.jamesoff.net DNS domain: jamesoff.net NIS domain:

The following warning/error was logged by the smartd daemon:

Device: /dev/ad0, Self-Test Log error count increased from 0 to 1 `

Arrgh :argh:

At least that’s the system drive rather than one of the new ones, but now I’m going to have to buy a new system drive and prepare to migrate over to it. At least thanks to having plenty of space, I have full dump(1)s of the drive so even if it does die before I replace it I can recover fairly easily.

New UPS installed

This weekend I installed my new UPS, an APC SmartUPS 700 which I got by part-exchanging one of my old BackUPS 350CSes (CSen?) which had a dead battery. Although I ended up spending slightly more than planned by doing that, I’ve ended up with a much better setup. The 700 is enough to comfortably support yomi and tomo (server and desktop) in the study for about 20 minutes. The other 350 is now under Roz’s desk in the lounge running her PC and also the DSL router. Overall I have better runtime than I would have had with my original plan of fixing the 350 and buying another one for the lounge.

I also got apcupsd setup on my two machines so that the server monitors the UPS status, and the desktop picks the status up from the server. apcupsd also works on Windows so when I’m booted into Windows for gaming it still looks after me. Unfortunately, if the power fails this won’t actually work as the network switch in the study isn’t currently UPS’d, so the desktop won’t be able to communicate with the server. I’ll be fixing that soon. I also want to see if I can get apcupsd to talk to the 350 so Roz’s computer can shut itself down in a power failure too. Oh, and I want to make my desktop shut down faster than the server to give the server more runtime.

I think I’ll scribble a howto page for jamesoff.net after I get it all sorted :)

Netgear WG311

Bought a WG311 (v3) today while trying to sort out Roz’s parents home network — and I think I shall be taking it back tomorrow. It freezes the computer within minutes of starting; no blue screens, no errors, just flat out freezes. Having Googled around a bit it turns out I’m far from the only person having problems with this card, and other people haven’t had much luck fixing it either.