Our minds cannot repel logic of that magnitude!
Archive for February, 2009
Windows 7 Woes
Feb 16th
After a successful install of the Windows 7 Beta (32-bit) on my wife’s Toshiba Satellite notebook, I decided to undertake the install of the 64-bit version of Windows 7 Beta on my desktop – which is a home-built machine with an AMD Athlon 64 X2 5000+, a Sapphire ATI Radeon HD3850 graphics card, 4gb of memory, and over 2TB of storage. The install went fine, and was very simple after I got over trying to back up 126gb worth of documents and music. Apparently I need to add another hard drive to my 1.5TB RAID-5 array, as there is only 12.1gb free. As a result, I got smart and moved my documents to their own separate 200gb partition on my 750gb system drive. Luckily, from here on out, I won’t have to worry about backing them up when I wipe the windows partition.
Anyways, so it goes through installing, works just great, comes up with the “preparing to start Windows for the first time” screen, and then it hits me. BSOD in t3h face. Apparently, I suffer from a common problem with certain ATI Radeon HD cards and the drivers that the Windows 7 Beta ships with. The BSOD came up with a fault regarding resetting the display driver and its inability to respond in a certain amount of time (stop 0×116 from the file atikmdag.sys). Supposedly, the work-around includes doing a very basic install of Vista, installing the latest Catalyst beta drivers, and then performing an upgrade to Windows 7. That’s fine and dandy, but I don’t have a Vista x64 disc and nor do I have the urge to download it simply to install a beta operating system that is going to cease to function on August 1st anyways.
Great job, though, Micro$oft in your inability to create a beta for the “latest and greatest” of your operating systems that works fine for the 50% or so of the population that uses ATI cards. For those of you who have ATI cards, specifically any of the Radeon HD series, don’t try performing a straight-up install of Windows 7. Instead, save yourself the trouble, and upgrade an already working Vista/XP install with the Catalyst beta drivers.
Recent Downtimes
Feb 12th
Okay, so I would like to explain my recent downtimes, especially since people have been pestering me about it now that I’m managing my own dedicated. Apparently in Gentoo, every time from within Webmin I make a change to the IPtables firewall and click its own “apply configuration” button, IPtables flushes all the rules, and doesn’t load the new ones. And since my default policy for the chain INPUT is DROP…you see where I’m going with this? Yeah, not a good idea to use Webmin to manage IPtables from here on out.
We’re Now Live with Gentoo!
Feb 8th
Okay, so I broke down, and got myself that dedicated server. Good news is that I got a coupon code and got it for cheaper than I had thought! So now, we’re running live on a Gentoo Linux-powered dedicated server in some datacenter in Florida. Please note that the Subversion repositories are down, as is the Redmine project management. The Brew Place, and many things Vault Head Games, are also down for the time being. I would have probably gotten the repositories back online tonight before I threw in the towel, but ColdFusion was not being very nice to me and I had some problems in getting isolated instances of ColdFusion running with each Apache virtual host. Needless to say, the Adobe documentation when it comes to Linux is extremely poor. However, after I’m all done with this beast, we will have our own IRC server and a web server that will understand practically every modern, dynamic web language (including (but not limited to) PHP, ASP.NET, ColdFusion, Python, and Ruby). I’m strapped with time, however, but regardless, I’m working very quickly to get everything back up and running, so check back here often for updates!
