intel

Flaky networking? Suspect cheap NICs

Dave Farquhar Hardware, Servers and Networking , , , , ,
Flaky networking? Suspect cheap NICs

It was 1998. I was getting ready to network my two PCs, so I asked my friendly neighborhood networking professional what to buy. He didn’t hesitate. “Intel or 3Com,” he said. “Cheap NICs will talk, but they’ll start acting flaky after a while, dropping packets in the middle of transfers, stuff like that.”

I couldn’t afford 3Com or Intel at the time, so I bought a cheap “SOHOware” brand bundle that included two 10/100 NICs, a hub, and cables for around $150. A comparable first-tier setup would have run me twice that. The hub died after a couple of years. The cards fared better. “After a while” took 11 years or so to come, and I finally got sick enough of it to retire my last one.

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Intel’s and Sandforce’s AES-128 encryption is useful, but not for what you think

Dave Farquhar Hardware, security , , , , ,

I spent some time this week with a coworker looking into the AES-128 encryption in current Sandforce and upcoming Intel 320 SSDs, and we’ve concluded it’s no substitute for software full-drive encryption.

This is important, so we’ll talk about it further.

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SSDs and built-in encryption–and how to enable it

Dave Farquhar Hardware, security , , , , ,

Update: This entry was based on preliminary information that turned out to be incorrect. Please see the following update.

One of the last knocks on SSD performance is that they don’t perform well with full-drive encryption. But on Sandforce 1200- and 2200-based drives, and the next-generation Intel 320 drives introduced today, that’s not an issue anymore. Encryption happens on the drive, in hardware, with no performance penalty.

The problem was that nobody talked about how it works. I found the details buried in Anandtech‘s review of the Intel 320 drive. The takeaway is this: If you set your BIOS password, the drive will be unreadable if you remove it and put it in another system. Update: No it won’t. But you can add ATA password support, under some circumstances.
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Why you don’t want to be the first to install a Microsoft service pack

Dave Farquhar Windows , ,

And, like most Service Pack 1 releases, it seems Windows 7 SP1 isn’t flawless. Under some circumstances, SP1 machines hang during the boot process with a C00000034 fatal error. Or sometimes it goes into a reboot loop with Error C000009A applying update operation 120782 of 367890.

Microsoft doesn’t yet know what’s causing the problems.
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How CPU multipliers came to be locked

Dave Farquhar Retro Computing , , , , , , , , ,

It was 1996. I was a senior in college, and I went to the computer store in the student commons to get a cable or something. I ran into an old classmate working in the store, who went on to work as an engineer for Boeing. We talked for a few minutes, and he told me about a web site that I just had to visit. I still remember the URL for some reason. He grabbed a piece of paper and scrawled “http://sysdoc.pair.com” on it.

It was my introduction to the world of PC hardware enthusiast sites. That mysterious URL was the early address of Tom’s Hardware Guide. The front page mostly consisted of links to articles telling you how to overclock Pentium CPUs using undocumented jumper settings on Asus motherboards, and the ads were largely mail-order houses offering specials on Asus motherboards and low-end Pentium CPUs.
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Intel and the SSD, 2011

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , ,

I saw and heard a couple of interesting bits about Intel and SSDs today.
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The decline and fall of system administration

Dave Farquhar Servers and Networking , , , , , , , , , ,

Infoworld’s Paul Venizia stirred up a controversy, asking what happened to sysadmins who can fix things, as opposed to just rebuilding machines any time something went wrong.

The definition changed, mostly. At least that’s what I think.

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State of the SSD, 1Q 2011

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , , ,

It’s no secret that I loves me some SSDs. And 2011 looks to be a good year for SSDs. Anandtech has a preview of what promises to be the fastest available drive on the market, once it’s released. It may not be at the very top of the heap for really long, but it represents the state of the art for now.

I’d rather not spoil the whole article, but there are two key takeaways from it.
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What will you do with your Freedom Box?

Dave Farquhar Servers and Networking , , ,

Columbia Law Professor Eben Moglen has a great idea. He wants every household to have a server on the Internet.

It’s not as outrageous as you might think. The hardware exists today. and I’ve talked about it before. The Pogoplug is based on it. Right now it costs about $100. The trouble is making the software easy enough that anyone can plug it in and use it. But that can happen too, and that’s the part he wants to get done.

I can’t wait.
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On troubleshooting

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , , , , ,

My Windows 7 upgrade was supposed to be a one-hour project on a Saturday afternoon. It dragged on until Wednesday. I’m at the point now where I probably have an hour’s work left on the machine–it’s Thursday now–but it’s late and I’m not sure I feel like it.

The answers–loading the BIOS defaults and changing the parallel port settings–seem obvious. Now. But when I look for my keys, where I finally find them seems obvious too, even though it sometimes takes a long time to find them.

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