The Japan Page

OK, it's a nerd thing to do, especially when decent hardware RAID is available for about $200. And by decent hardware I'm talking about a Promise FastTrak SX 4000 or better, not the fake RAID TX series that offloads all the RAID onto the local CPU. (You spend money and still get software RAID...!)

Note, this takes a bit of work to set up and will probably void any chances of getting MS support, not that the chances are very good of that anyway...

A brief summary: Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 share the same base OS design, and software RAID is disabled for Windows XP. You can enable it per the instructions below. Note - I've not tried this, I'm perfectly happy with an older adaptec U131 SCSI card for my XP workstation, thanks.

Read the article here:
http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleid=830&page=1

Posted by John Seaman at 10:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

1. Enter "about:config" in the address bar and hit return. Browse down the page and look for the entries below:

network.http.pipelining
network.http.proxy.pipelining
network.http.pipelining.maxrequests

2. Change the entries below to "true"

"network.http.pipelining"
"network.http.proxy.pipelining"

Set "network.http.pipelining.maxrequests" to a high number like 25. (Default is 4)

Normally the browser will make one request to a web server at a time. Turning on pipelining will enable the browser to make multiple "parallel" requests at once. This won't work well for dialup, but should be good for high speed broadband users.

Posted by John Seaman at 8:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I found a great ASP (PHP also available) application to stream MP3 files from a PC or server. Andromeda is a sharware application consisting of one .ASP file.

Just put it on IIS, dump folders of MP3 files underneath and it produces a very clear and easy to follow interface into your MP3 collection.

It has a good search engine, supports comments and is a breeze to install. The eval version has no timeout, but only displays every-other MP3 file.

I've installed this on my home server for testing, and stream the MP3 files into my work PC over a SSH tunnel. This is the perfect solution for me, access to my extensive music collection (ripped from my CD's) without cluttering up my work PC with personal files.

The SSH tunnel isn't required, but I use it for security to block external access.

Posted by John Seaman at 2:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Fedora Core install on a Via Epia-M motherboard failed on initial boot while decompressing the kernel. A little research shows that Fedora Core 2 and newer are compiled for the 686 (aka Pentium) platform. I had to go back and install Fedora Core 1.

Posted by John Seaman at 10:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)