Hack Avatar Blog

Wow, hasn’t it been a while! I have been so busy recently, I haven’t had time to work with this site. College and TAFE have had me working like a slave. Anyway, here’s some updates.

I have gotten an old Proliant 1850R server off eBay, for an absolute bargain too. I foolishly made the mistake of upgrading the old fans to some newer, much quieter ones. I had to cut the wires to get the plugs to suit the motherboard. Unfortunately, the server has some strange BIOS that will not accept any fans other than the ones that are meant for it. it just complains of a fan failure, and then restarts. How it knows is beyond me, I thought it must be an RPM measurement.

So, I got some Thermaltake adjustable fans. “Surely these will work”, I thought. Instead of butchering the new, $25 each fans, I used the Proliant fan plug into a standard 3-pin fan socket. I fired up the jet engine with gusto, and watched carefully. The server complained of the dreaded fan failure, so I fiddled with the RPM dials. Regardless of the speed set, the server failed to boot time.

Then, suddenly, it booted. After numerous reboots on its own behalf, it simply continued, as if the fans were  the normal ones. I was seething. Mental note never to change the fans in a server.

Also, I had a good old LAN Party recently. 18 hours of solid, hardcore gaming. I took my server (now running ClarkConnect v4.2) as a fast file server. I won a Kingston 1GB flash drive. Any ideas what to do with it? I was thinking I might put it inside my EeePC…

I am also making a racing simulator. I want to put a Logitech G25 in it when I have finished. I’ve made a racing seat with some 1.6mm thick sheet metal, and I am now working on the cockpit’s frame. I have also bought from a wrecker’s a instruments cluster. It’s out of a Ford Futura, and I want to make it work from USB, with data output from Live for Speed. I’m currently looking at the PIC18F4550.

Anyway, thats enough for this update, more coming soon (hopefully) :).