Psuedo random musings

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I've had a number of different computer related musing over the last couple of months. I'm not sure how coherent this will be. I hope someone finds it interesting.

System Building

Earlier this year I built a new computer. Because I was planning on running FreeBSD Unix and wanted to be able to play Oblivion I knew I needed to be careful about which video card I chose. I checked with several friends. The all indicated that nVidia was by far better about providing drivers for the various *nices (AIX, Solaris, Unix, GNU/Linux etc.).

One of my reasons for wanting to use FreeBSD was to gain experience with hardware and the current (or near current version of the OS.) I use FreeBSD at work every day. I also felt that installing a GUI so it would look nice would be as easy as the previous GNU/Linux installations I've tried. In those cases, I just answered various questions during the installation and it set things up for me. I figured with my new hardware and supported video card, it would be as easy and I'd be able to use all kinds of pretty stuff on my desktop. Unfortunately in my research it never occurred to me to ask about nVidia drivers for different types of CPU. Once I had a valid install disk, setup was easy. I got to the neat text interface in record time for an OS install. I just couldn't get anything more graphical than dos to work. Each time I tried, I lost the interface that I had been using. After a number of re installs, I found a thread in nVidia's forums dating back to 2003 or so asking, begging and demanding FreeBSD drivers for AMD 64 bit based systems. Turns out there is are drivers for systems that use Intel CPUs, but not AMD. More discouraging than anything was the almost total lack of info from nVidia. Eventually someone from nVidia said that because the FreeBSD kernel lacked two particular functions there couldn't be a driver. (Rather he said that they could do a driver once those functions were present in the kernel.) After some further research, it turns out that the release versions of FreeBSD do not have the functions they want, but the development/testing version can can have them. (Okay, maybe not perfect but they are there.) It is/was actually important enough for me (and a number of others) that we would gladly rebuild using the development/testing version, just to have a video driver. It turns out that until that stuff is part of the default kernel, nVidia isn't even interested in talking about a driver. (All of this was before AMD purchased nVidis. I have no idea if this would have any impact at all.) Turns out this issue just doesn't exist for Intel chips, just AMD. (Which is something I found totally baffling.) After over a week of trying to get the new box running Unix, I gave up.

I said, "Fine!. I can use one of the various Linux distros and get almost the same effect." That ended up being as realistic and doable as getting FreeBSD installed to my satisfaction. I could get things installed. I could even get a graphical desktop. But I couldn't set the resolution anywhere near what I am used to (1280 × 1024). The video was never detected properly. When I tried to tell the installation which video card I had, it just wasn't listed. I thought, I'll just go download the drivers and go from there. Unfortunately, the manufacturer of the video card (a different company than nVidia) doesn't think there is any reason to have drivers for anything but windows. They had drivers for non-supported (legacy) versions of windows, but nothing that I could use with my desired installation.

After about three and a half weeks of fighting with working on the computer I gave up. I installed Microsoft Windows.

Folding

Shortly after getting the new system up and running, I decided I should start working on folding proteins again. This is one of those distributed computing project where lots of people donate their processing time to work on computationally difficult problems. I hadn't done any folding for quite a while because the previous computer I build had persistent problems with overheating (even without running the folding). I think I originally starting folding in 2003. Shortly after starting again, I discovered that the 'team' I fold with was having a prize drawing. To be eligible, we needed to increase how much folding we did. They set up a number of different ways to qualify. Given that I hadn't folded in several years I figured it would be fairly easy to qualify.

Moving a website

Every day I work with people with questions or problems with websites and emails. One of the things that I see/work on several times each week is people moving a website. There are all kinds of reasons to do this. Sometimes they are moving it from their own serve to a server in one of our data centers. Sometimes they are moving between two different types of servers. Sometimes they are moving from one web host to another. A little less than two years ago, I realized that, with planning, it is possible to move a site and have none of the visitors to the site realize there has been a move. I decided I needed to write these steps down since I've heard (from people who should know better) that is isn't possible to move a site without downtime. And the thing that gets me is there are only about two or three steps that you wouldn't have to do for any such move. (In other words it isn't significantly harder to do it right than it is to such that the site is down for up to two days.) I need to write these steps up. I've been meaning to do so all day, but haven't managed to do so. When I get it done, I'll post a link.