Thushan Fernando Uncut

Yes, thats right, Apple fans everywhere rejoice, for your saviour has released the hugely anticipated iPad. While one Steve Bing’s Bings Bings, another whips out his iPad.

Thats right folks, it’ll be a hit with the ladies! But seriously, can’t wait to ArsTechnica to do a proper review about it.

I guess Bill’s vision of people using Tablets Slate’s is finally coming true. I still have a Compaq HP TC1000 which I scored from MSFT back in the days when TabletPC was all the rage -- but unfortunately it didn’t pickup. I remember Dr Neil Roodyn used to carry his TabletPC around everywhere he went.

For anyone who doesn’t mind not having the latest shiny toy from Apple, but still functional, beautiful and may not lock you in to the WWoA (Wonderful World of Apple), checkout the Tegra Android SmartPad.

Me likey, checkout the technical specifications.

Excellent review of the Google Nexus One on ArsTechnica – as always. Don’t forget that the Nexus One SDK got released too recently.

Impressive! Definately awaiting the launch here to get one to replace the Windows Mobile phones. Whats even more impressive is the fact that it ships with a 1Ghz Snapdragon (ARM Cortex A8) processor with 512Mb of memory! Smooth cat!

Here’s a video stream of CES 2010 with Steve Balmer launching Microsoft’s 2010+ products.

mms://wm.MS-STUDIOSMEDIA.COM/a10065/o9/presspass/1002811_CES_750k.wmv

Skip to about 6:00 because its all marketing blah – wait till you see Steves presentation!

We Bing, We Bing & We Bing, Bing Bing Bing. (12:30)

*sigh*

Ryan Asdourian from the Windows team comes in at about 27:00 which goes into touch devices.

• 28:38 – Dell’s new thin notebooks
• 33:20 – Bleo (?) book reader
• 35:10 – Live Drive & Office sharing
• 39:33 – TV, CableCard
• 48:00 – HTC HD2
• 49:30 – Slate PCs
• 51:00 -  HP Slate PC
• 54:40 – Robbie Bach – President of Entertainment & Devices (MSFT)
• 58:00 – Alan Wake
• 59:30 – Halo
• 01:09:22 – Natural User Interface
• 01:11:30 – Project Natal (awesome!) will be available Holiday 2010 (November?)

Enjoy!

SHOCKING news today, Asustek has decided to…

Taiwan’s Asustek Computer on Friday said it would spin off Pegatron Technology, a subsidiary which makes more than half of the world’s computer motherboards, distancing itself from the business which made it into a familiar name in the computer industry.

The company is following a similar path to that taken 10 years ago by Acer, which has since gone on to become the world’s second-largest PC maker behind Hewlett-Packard. While its Asus brand is still only a small player in the global PC market, its successful Eee PC low-cost computer series, launched in 2007, helped to pioneer the netbook market and gave its Asus brand a position on electronic store shelves particularly in Asia and the US.

From XBIT Lab’s news article:

Asustek Computer, the world’s largest maker of mainboards, has decided to completely spin off its mainboards and graphics cards manufacturing arm Pegatron Technologies, the company said this week. The move will allow Asus to become more competitive in terms of branding, but will further withdraw the firm from the actual manufacturing.

According to a statement posted with Taiwan Stock Exchange, Asustek company had convened a board meeting to resolve the spin-off of its ODM business. As a result of the meeting, Pegatron Holding, the company that made virtually all Asus-branded motherboards, will issue two billion new shares to a number of shareholders.

I sure hope the quality and stability of the boards do not suffer. Read more from the Financial Times or XBIT Labs. When it comes to solid boards you can’t go past ASUS, XFX and Gigabyte (bang for buck!).

Just when you thought you can start a new month without some new software, Sun has blessed the world with a ray of VirtualBox 3.1 goodness on us all! All hail the Sun. I’ve been using the Betas and trying out the spanking awesome Teleportation feature in VirtualBox 3.1. So lets take a bit of a look at the new grub.

Beam me up Scotty!

You know, people say the catch phrase thinking its from Star Trek, but did you know that it was never actually mentioned in any episode?

Teleportation or ‘Live Migration‘ in Xen/KVM  or vMotion in VMWare allows you to move a running virtual machine to another host without any downtime. Sun brings us this ‘Enterprise’ feature to VirtualBox. Whats even cooler, is that you can teleport your running VM on different host platforms (Windows -> OpenSolaris or Linux, vice versa) but not from one hardware set (Intel) to another (AMD) unless they both have the same instruction-sets. The transport layer for the teleportation is TCP/IP, so as long as the agreed port is open and accessible you can even teleport it through the tubes! (assuming you have a fast link like those pesky Dutch)

There are a few conditions and caveats as I’ve found. Firstly you must ensure (as you’d expect) the target VM has to have the exact same configuration as the source VM (same RAM, graphics memory, storage, CD/DVD images etc) the other thing is to be weary of the CPUs the host computer has. As long as its between the same generations (different clock speeds are OK) it should work (I tried between a QX6850 -> E6600 but QX6850->AMD X2 4600+ wasn’t so pretty!).

Once you’ve configured the target host to match the source host, time to ask VirtualBox to keep its eyes open for an incoming beam.

VBoxManage modifyvm [VirtualMachineName] --teleporter on --teleporterport [Port]

Then on the source host, send out the beams to initiate the teleportation:

VBoxManage controlvm [VirtualMachineName] teleport --host [TargetIP] --port [Port]

Give it some time to think and if you tried a localhost migration, it should migrate seamlessly

Scotty doesn’t know

Scotty doesn’t know about the other little changes, but you will. The new VirtualBox has lots of refinements in the UI. For one, new icons for all the Guest operating systems. The settings window has had a make over and includes ‘optimal settings’ detection.

Windows 2003 VM in VirtualBox 3.1

Here its telling me my Windows 2003 VM should have atleast 20Mb Video Memory assigned to it to work well in full-screen mode. Heading over to the Display options in VirtualBox 3.1 we find that the Video Memory selectors have got little indicators now, as well as the inclusion of 2D Video Acceleration.

Windows 2003 VM - VirtualBox 3.1 Display Settings

Depending how ever many cores you have, it will highlight what you should set as the maximum number of cores available for your VirtualMachine as well as the recommended RAM allocation. This is what I see in my Intel QX6850 development workstation.

VirtualBox 3.1 System Processor Settings

VirtualBox 3.1 - Motherboard Settings

VirtualBox now also has experimental support for Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) which will eventually replace the aging BIOS bootstrap (which is the default). Well known operating systems that boot via EFI include Windows Vista and Windows 7, Apple OS X and Fedora 11+.

The Storage controls in VirtualBox GUI has also had a bit of a make over. The options to select a disk and a controller have changed, CD/DVD drives can be attached to an arbitrary IDE controller too now!

VirtualBox 3.1 - Storage

The networking settings GUI in the new VirtualBox has change too, not only that but you can now configure the network interfaces whilst the guest is running – YAY!

VirtualBox 3.1 Network Settings

Snapshots are a lot more flexible in this release (much like VMWare’s snapshot feature). Previously you can only restore from the last created snapshot, now any arbitrary snapshot can be restored too or branched off.

For those who use OpenSolaris (like yours truely!) the rewritten USB support (still experimental btw!) should mean we can interact with our USB devices in Solaris Nevada 124 or higher now – I’m running 127 and have USB devices appearing in my VMs.

If those don’t give you any indication on to the pure awesomeness of this release, there was a significant performance improvement for APE & AMD64 guests (VT-x/AMD-V) which will be quite noticeable from what I’ve been told by a college.

As Barack Obama said, tis time for a change..log.

He didn’t say that, I just reused 36 Mafia’s Lolli Lolli. The entire change log appears below from the website.

VirtualBox 3.1.0 (released 2009-11-30)

This version is a major update. The following major new features were added:

• Teleportation (aka live migration); migrate a live VM session from one host to another (see the manual for more information)
• VM states can now be restored from arbitrary snapshots instead of only the last one, and new snapshots can be taken from other snapshots as well (“branched snapshots”; see the manual for more information)
• 2D video acceleration for Windows guests; use the host video hardware for overlay stretching and color conversion (see the manual for more information)
• More flexible storage attachments: CD/DVD drives can be attached to an arbitrary IDE controller, and there can be more than one such drive (the manual for more information)
• The network attachment type can be changed while a VM is running
• Complete rewrite of experimental USB support for OpenSolaris hosts making use of the latest USB enhancements in Solaris Nevada 124 and higher
• Significant performance improvements for PAE and AMD64 guests (VT-x and AMD-V only; normal (non-nested) paging)
• Experimental support for EFI (Extensible Firmware Interface; see the manual for more information)
• Support for paravirtualized network adapters (virtio-net; see the manual for more information)

In addition, the following items were fixed and/or added:

• VMM: guest SMP fixes for certain rare cases
• GUI: snapshots include a screenshot
• GUI: locked storage media can be unmounted by force
• GUI: the a log window grabbed all key events from other GUI windows (bug #5291)
• GUI: allow to disable USB filters (bug #5426)
• GUI: improved memory slider in the VM settings
• GUI: the VirtualBox website couldn’t be opened from the help menu (bug #4559)
• 3D support: major performance improvement in VBO processing
• 3D support: added GL_EXT_framebuffer_object, GL_EXT_compiled_vertex_array support
• 3D support: fixed crashes in FarCry, SecondLife, Call of Duty, Unreal Tournament, Eve Online (bugs #2801, #2791)
• 3D support: fixed graphics corruption in World of Warcraft (#2816)
• 3D support: fixed Final frame of Compiz animation not updated to the screen (#4653)
• 3D support: fixed incorrect rendering of non ARGB textures under compiz
• iSCSI: support iSCSI targets with more than 2TiB capacity
• VRDP: fixed occasional VRDP server crash (bug #5424)
• Network: fixed the E1000 emulation for QNX (and probably other) guests (bug #3206)
• NAT: added host resolver DNS proxy (see the manual for more information)
• VMDK: fixed incorrectly rejected big images split into 2G pieces (bug #5523, #2787)
• VMDK: fixed compatibility issue with fixed or raw disk VMDK files (bug #2723)
• VHD: fixed incompatibility with Hyper-V
• Support for Parallels version 2 disk image (HDD) files; see the manual for more information
• OVF: create manifest files on export and verify the content of an optional manifest file on import
• OVF: fixed memory setting during import (bug #4188)
• Mouse device: now five buttons are passed to the guest (bug #3773)
• VBoxHeadless: fixed loss of saved state when VM fails to start
• VBoxSDL: fixed crash during shutdown (Windows hosts only)
• X11 based hosts: allow the user to specify their own scan code layout (bug #2302)
• Mac OS X hosts: don’t auto show the menu and dock in fullscreen (bug #4866)
• Mac OS X hosts (64 bit): don’t interpret mouse wheel events as left click (bug #5049)
• Mac OS X hosts: fixed a VM abort during shutdown under certain conditions
• Solaris hosts: combined the kernel interface package into the VirtualBox main package
• Solaris hosts: support for OpenSolaris Boomer architecture (with OSS audio backend).
• Shared folders: VBOXSVR is visible in Network folder (Windows guests, bug #4842)
• Shared folders: performance improvements (Windows guests, bug #1728)
• Windows, Linux and Solaris Additions: added balloon tip notifier if VirtualBox host version was updated and Additions are out of date
• Solaris guests: fixed keyboard emulation (bug #1589)
• Solaris Additions: fixed as_pagelock() failed errors affecting guest properties (bug #5337)
• Windows Additions: added automatic logon support for Windows Vista and Windows 7
• Windows Additions: improved file version lookup for guest OS information
• Windows Additions: fixed runtime OS detection on Windows 7 for session information
• Windows Additions: fixed crash in seamless mode (contributed by Huihong Luo)
• Linux Additions: added support for uninstalling the Linux Guest Additions (bug #4039)
• Linux guest shared folders: allow mounting a shared folder if a file of the same name as the folder exists in the current directory (bug #928)
• SDK: added object-oriented web service bindings for PHP5

Overall this is a solid new release from Sun – unsure about its stability as I’ve only been running a few VMs (Windows 2003, CentOS and Fedora 12) for about 10-12hrs. Nothing bad as yet.

Download from the VirtualBox site:

• VirtualBox 3.1.0 for Windows hosts x86/amd64

• VirtualBox 3.1.0 for OS X hosts Intel Macs

• VirtualBox 3.1.0 for Linux hosts

• VirtualBox 3.1.0 for Solaris and OpenSolaris hosts x86/amd64

Enjoy!

I’ve spent the last month working with the newly built zeus server which is now powered by OpenSolaris (2009.06).

Here’s my final hardware specifications:

• CPU: AMD Athlon X2 5050e – 2.6Ghz (45W TDP, AMD-V)
• Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-MA790X-UD4P ( AMD 790X Chipset )
• RAM: 2x Corsair TWIN2X4096-6400C5 (4Gb kit x 2 = 8Gb)
• Graphics: ASUS 9400GT PCI-Express
• Hard Disks:
  • rpool – 2x WD740ADFD – 74Gb 10K RPM, 16Mb Cache (mirror’d)
  • tank – 6x WD10EADS  – 1TB, 7200RPM, 32Mb Cache (raidz)
  • base – 2x WD7500AAKS – 750Gb, 7200RPM, 16Mb (mirror’d)
• Addon cards:
  • SATA – Silicon Image, Inc. SiI 3132 Serial ATA Raid II Controller
  • NICs – 2x Intel Corporation 82545GM Gigabit Ethernet Controller (e1000g)

I’ve finally managed to get the GA-MA790X-UD4P on the OpenSolaris HCL list – woo! Unfortunately the onboard NIC will not work in the 2009.06 release even though it is detected:

Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8111/8168B PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet controller

Maybe in a future release. Make sure you update the BIOS as OpenSolaris may have an issue with the USB controller being ‘mis-configured’ otherwise.

Just for kicks I went to Jaycar and bought myself a power usage meter to measure the watts used by the new boxen (see a review of the Mains Power Meter on DansData).

Old Zeus

• Idle: 380W
• Load: 413W

New Zeus

• Idle: 232W
• Load: 270W

Nice, with an Intel Atom based server it could go _a lot_ lower, but I’m happy with this.

Now that I’ve decided what I want out of the server (and the hardware I’ve got), its time to workout what operating system to run the system on. Currently, ZEUS is running on Ubuntu Gutsy (7.10) which is running LVM with an XFS volume holding approximately 2.5Tb worth of data. There’s a cron job that defrags the XFS volume to keep things in order.

The Operating System

As the operating system is no longer maintained (my oversight into how long it would survive) I have to find an OS that supports the hardware platform without hacky hacky bits (and by this I mean avoiding buggy ACPI and issues with the NForce4 chipset and IRQ problems) and has a file system that will benefit long term.

There were a few considerations:

• Ubuntu 8.04.x LTS
  I like Ubuntu, I’m comfortable with the user land and find the Debian package system (in particular the dependency resolving) most impressive. Hardware is well supported and 8.04.3 (at the time of writing) boots on the hardware I originally selected (Intel) and the new configuration I recently selected (AMD). I could most definitely use Ext4 but the problems with data-loss (which I’ve reproduced on several occasions on desktop machines) scare me.FileSystem: I’d have to adopt either XFS or Ext4 on an LVM to factor in future-proofing, maybe get some fakeRAID happening for redundancy.
  Installation: comes with a Server edition that’s bare bones allowing it to be a minimalistic installation which is always nice!
• Ubuntu 9.04
  Initially when I started to rebuild Zeus back in April I wanted to use Ubuntu 9.04, I was really excited about Ext4 and the promise of a brand-spanking new file-system and what it would bring to the table. Unfortunately after using Ext4 with 9.04 I’ve come to realise its probably not the wisest to trust your data with it just yet – unless you get yourself a UPS! Laptop seems to be chugging nicely though.Installation: Like LTS, comes with a Server edition that’s bare bones allowing it to be a minimalistic installation which is always nice! (copy/paste!) Unfortunately picking 9.04 when 9.10 is just around the corner is not going to be ideal, I’ll be stuck with where I am right now in a year or so.

• CentOS 5.3 or wait for CentOS 5.4 coming soon!
  CentOS is based off Redhat Enterprise Linux and having only started using CentOS after joining HSD (though my first splash in Linux was with Bowtie Redhat Linux 6.0 – I still have the CD!) I find the RHEL clone to be stable and solid as a rock! CentOS 5.4 will (thanks to RHEL 5.4) bring some KVM goodness that is a high priority on my list.

  FileSystem: Ext4 is not in the RHEL5 stream (have to wait for RHEL6 – which is a good thing!) so the best bet here is to use XFS with LVM.
  Installation: Customised via kickstarts or setup a cobbler server to install via PXE.

• OpenSolaris
  OpenSolaris has some really exciting technologies that are worth a look at, but in particular is ZFS. ZFS breaks all the rules – and for a good reason. I’ve yet to really use Solaris – quite cosy with Linux, but there’s nothing like getting used to another OS by jumping straight into the deep end!

  FileSystem: ZFS all the way baby!
  Installation: Installation is via a LiveCD, I’ve looked into customising the installation so it removes some bits I don’t which I’ll discuss later but its quite fiddly.

So in case the sudden influx of OpenSolaris posts didnt give you the hint, I decided on OpenSolaris to power the new iZeus 2.0, actually no that sounds lame, zeusy will be the new ZEUS until ZEUS is retired in which case zeusy becomes zeus (confused?).

Why ZFS?

ZFS is one of those file-systems you look at and think, wow! Why didn’t anyone else think of that before?

• Very simple administration – you only use two commands, zpool and zfs.
• Highly scalable – 128-bit means we can hold 16 exabytes or 18 Million terabytes worth of data! More porn for you! XFS can no doubt handle the TBs we use for our home boxes now, but no-chance you can get the performance or benefits of ZFS in Ext3/Ext4 or XFS.
• Data integrity to heal a filesystem (no fsck’ing around!) – 256bit checksuming to protect data, if ZFS detects a problem it will attempt to reconstruct the bad block and continue on its merry way (utilising available redundancy)
• Compression – you can elect to compress a particular file-system or a hierarchy just by setting one command! I’m thinking things like logs here.
• No hardware dependency – JBOD on a controller, let ZFS maintain the RAID volumes in software. Checkout Michael Pryc’s crazy adventure with ZFS using USB thumb drives and Constantin’s original voyage with USB drives! RAID-Z is essentially RAID-5 without the write-hole problems has plagued it if power is lost during a write, it can also survive a loss of a drive (with RAIDZ-2 you can loose two drives).
• Happy snaps for free! Snapshot (a live) file-system as many times as you like, again one easy command. Its like that tendency to hit {CTRL+S} when your working in Windows from back in the days of Windows 9x, snapshot regularly!

So ZFS sounds much like marketing spiel right now, best thing since sliced bread, cooler than a cucumber, and you’d be right it is cool and the best thing since filesystems came to being. Over the coming days I’ll post some more on my musings with ZFS – keeping in mind that I’m still learning these things. It helps to have lots of hardware to play with, but even if you don’t, you can knock up a virtual version of OpenSolaris in VirtualBox, create some virtual disks and try it out.

There are a few caveats that I’ve come across though using ZFS, one is memory! ZFS will try and cache as much data as it can in RAM, so if you have 8Gb of RAM (as I have in this box) it will happily use as much of it as it can afford. Rightfully so, I was getting ~96MB/s transfering a 16Gb MPEG from one box to the other over our Gig link (thats from one end of the house to the other!) mind you this was just a test configuration using 2x 74Gb Western Digital Raptors (WD740ADFD) in a RAID-0 style hitting a single 150Gb Western Digital Raptor (WD1500ADFD). They could have gone much higher, but I was happy with that.

There are also (as of writing) no recovery tools for ZFS, but these are slated to arrive soon (Q4 2009) which is quite scary after you read this post about a guy loosing 10Tb worth of data, however a possible revert to an older uberblock may fix some problems.

Virtualisation

Initially I wanted to concentrate quite a bit on Virtualisation, I tried Xen on OpenSolaris. It was quite easy to setup a Xen Dom0 in OpenSolaris but with the 2009.06 release you had to tweak the Xen setup a bit. I wasn’t too enthusiastic about using Xen after seeing the performance lag in Windows in my musings. Instead I’m opting for my crush, VirtualBox.

So why use VirtualBox when you can get a bare-metal hypervisor? Firstly, performance seems to be sluggish with Xen for me (I didn’t investigate this too much), secondly I want to be able to run the latest and greatest OS’s out without worrying about upgrading Xen (I’m a sucker for OS’s!). VirtualBox development has accelerated at a feverish pace, I started with VirtualBox 1.3 in 2007 and its come an insanely long way since then. When a new release comes along, its as easy as updating VirtualBox and getting all the benefits. Plus with SunOracle’s backing of VirtualBox you know things are going to work well on OpenSolaris, the Extras repository of VirtualBox makes it as easy as doing a pkg update.

I’m still quite intrigued by the way KVM is heading and how it will pan out, but for the future zeus, it will be VirtualBox.

After a bit of digging around, my original spec’d hardware I’ve decided is too much for a boxen that will be on 24×7, especially with the rates for electricity going up next year – every little Watt counts. The existing 65W CPU isn’t ideal, instead I’m opting for a 45W CPU instead and this means – looking at the lineup, its going to be a walk down AMD way. Less watts, less heat and less noise, noice! See AMD’s product roadmap for 2010-2011.

The original specifications I mentioned were:

• Motherboard: ASUS P5QL-PRO
• CPU: Intel Core-2 E6750 – 2.66Ghz (65W TDP, VT)
• RAM: Corsair TWIN2X4096-6400C5 (4Gb kit x 2 = 8Gb)
• Graphics: ASUS 9400GT PCI-Express

I’ve decided to change the CPU and Motherboard but keep the other bits and bobs – I could loose the graphics card and go onboard but I felt like leaving it there for now. The target budget is $250 maximum for both CPU+Mobo, so this means I’m sticking with DDR2 which implies AM2+ but it must also satisfy:

• CPU has to be 45W and be atleast 1.6Ghz, dual core no more, has to support Virtualization.
• Motherboard has to Support 8Gb (most boards doo!),  have atleast 2x  PCIe and a PCI slot, it would be nice if the network cards work (gigabit) but no fuss if it doesnt. No crazy shebangabang Wifi, remotes etc bling and if it has onboard Video great, otherwise its OK to use a crappy card.

I picked the AMD Athlon X2 5050e CPU because it was cheap (~$80), supports a 45W, has virtualisation and is an AM2. Next was the motherboard, looking at the ASUS, Gigabyte & XFX models as my target.

Chipset wise only the following fit the criteria for a possible match because others just don’t have the number of SATA ports available onboard. Primarily AMD boards are supplied by NVIDIA or AMD themselves.

• NVIDIA nForce 750a SLI
• NVIDIA GeForce 8200
• NVIDIA GeForce 8300
• AMD 790X Chipset

Initially I looked at the ASUS  boards (they’ve been nothing but rock solid for me in the past) but after a lot of research scouring through the manufacturer sites I ended up picking out the Gigabyte GA-MA790X-UD4P which is based on the AMD 790X Chipset. The board came with 8x SATA Ports, 3x PCIe and 2x PCI and a  Gigabit NIC all for a $137 from PCCaseGear. Not only was the power consumption lowered but the noise and heat generated was substantially lower too!

Coming in close was the ASUS M4N78 PRO or the ASUS M4A78 PRO, each of those unfortunately didn’t have as many SATA ports (2-less) nor the PCIe ports (1-less).

I’ve been looking at upgrading our existing home server from the archaic (and unsupported!) Ubuntu Gutsy (because I was feeling gutsy at the time) to something newer, fresher and that will last me atleast another 2 years. This is purely for my documentation.

Current Setup

Currently running an AMD setup with Ubuntu Gutsy (7.10) – I didn’t think it would last this long, honest! Ubuntu 6.06 had too many issues with the hardware/driver incompatibilities.

DISTRIB_ID=Ubuntu
DISTRIB_RELEASE=7.10
DISTRIB_CODENAME=gutsy
DISTRIB_DESCRIPTION="Ubuntu 7.10"

On an ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe motherboard (because you know, servers need SLI!) sporting a AMD Athlon64 3200+ (the only AMD CPU at home!) with 2Gb of RAM (hey, DDR1 wasn’t cheap enough!)

lspci

00:00.0 Memory controller: nVidia Corporation CK804 Memory Controller (rev a3)
00:01.0 ISA bridge: nVidia Corporation CK804 ISA Bridge (rev f3)
00:01.1 SMBus: nVidia Corporation CK804 SMBus (rev a2)
00:02.0 USB Controller: nVidia Corporation CK804 USB Controller (rev a2)
00:02.1 USB Controller: nVidia Corporation CK804 USB Controller (rev a3)
00:04.0 Multimedia audio controller: nVidia Corporation CK804 AC'97 Audio Controller (rev a2)
00:06.0 IDE interface: nVidia Corporation CK804 IDE (rev f2)
00:07.0 IDE interface: nVidia Corporation CK804 Serial ATA Controller (rev f3)
00:08.0 IDE interface: nVidia Corporation CK804 Serial ATA Controller (rev f3)
00:09.0 PCI bridge: nVidia Corporation CK804 PCI Bridge (rev f2)
00:0a.0 Bridge: nVidia Corporation CK804 Ethernet Controller (rev f3)
00:0b.0 PCI bridge: nVidia Corporation CK804 PCIE Bridge (rev f3)
00:0c.0 PCI bridge: nVidia Corporation CK804 PCIE Bridge (rev f3)
00:0d.0 PCI bridge: nVidia Corporation CK804 PCIE Bridge (rev f3)
00:0e.0 PCI bridge: nVidia Corporation CK804 PCIE Bridge (rev a3)
00:18.0 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] HyperTransport Technology Configuration
00:18.1 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] Address Map
00:18.2 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] DRAM Controller
00:18.3 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] Miscellaneous Control
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation G70 [GeForce 7300 GT] (rev a1)
05:06.0 RAID bus controller: Silicon Image, Inc. SiI 3114 [SATALink/SATARaid] Serial ATA Controller (rev 02)
05:07.0 RAID bus controller: Silicon Image, Inc. Adaptec AAR-1210SA SATA HostRAID Controller (rev 02)
05:0a.0 RAID bus controller: Silicon Image, Inc. SiI 3114 [SATALink/SATARaid] Serial ATA Controller (rev 02)
05:0b.0 FireWire (IEEE 1394): Texas Instruments TSB43AB22/A IEEE-1394a-2000 Controller (PHY/Link)
05:0c.0 Ethernet controller: Marvell Technology Group Ltd. 88E8001 Gigabit Ethernet Controller (rev 13)

/proc/cpuinfo

processor       : 0
vendor_id       : AuthenticAMD
cpu family      : 15
model           : 47
model name      : AMD Athlon(tm) 64 Processor 3200+
stepping        : 2
cpu MHz         : 1000.000
cache size      : 512 KB
fdiv_bug        : no
hlt_bug         : no
f00f_bug        : no
coma_bug        : no
fpu             : yes
fpu_exception   : yes
cpuid level     : 1
wp              : yes
flags           : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush mmx fxsr sse sse2 syscall nx mmxext fxsr_opt lm 3dnowext 3dnow up pni lahf_lm ts fid vid ttp tm stc
bogomips        : 2011.59
clflush size    : 64

This faithful boxen has been the primary source of our fileserver (XFS+LVM 3Tb) – used internal to our house and also by others who upload their stuff to be backed up. Subversion repositories, Apache/LightHttpd test servers for PHP work, Virtualisation for Windows 2003, 2000 and SqlServers running for testing and several other things (think: TeamCity, Continous Integration tools, Confluence etc). Its also been damn convenient when your at work or on holidays to be able to login, muse about via SSH and even fix things remotely.

Needs & Wants

The new server will need to fufil the following roles:

• Function as a NAS to continue to offer backup (via users home directories) and storage options
  • No file-system constraints asside from no Ext3 or ReiserFS.
• Offer the ability to still run Virtual Machines, need to virtualise CentOS, Ubuntu and Windows for testing, they’ll be running in  Bridged mode
• No real need for a Gui (I can consider myself a little l33t than a few years ago)
• Run a Subversion repository (not that hard!)

The idea is to have a bare bones operating system install and have the virtual machines handle the hard and ugly work – webservers to test things, servers to try development deployments (java) and other bits and pieces. The core OS just has to manage the NAS and allow the ability to SSH in to offer subversion access.

Hardware

The hardware I’ve picked from things I had around the place, the only thing I’ve bought is just new sticks of RAM.

• Motherboard: ASUS P5QL-PRO
  This board offered some excellent specifications via the P43 chipset, the things I looked for was the number of SATA ports ‘out of the box’ – 6 native SATA2, the number of 1x PCIe slots (2!) for future addions of PCIe SATA adapters and the maximum amount of memory possible (8Gb). Oh ofcourse, something cheapy and that can run the CPU I had around. A Gigabit NIC was also important (dual would be better!) but if it wasn’t supported I had a trusty Intel PRO 1000MT Server PCI cards to fill the void – almost everything supports them (e1000)!
• CPU: Intel Core-2 E6750 – 2.66Ghz (65W TDP, VT)
  Importance was Intel-VT support, low TDP and a dualcore thats not too high.
• RAM: Corsair TWIN2X4096-6400C5 (4Gb kit x 2 = 8Gb)
  Cheapy cheapy, twice the fun of a regular kit, slightly higher CAS, but who CAreS this isnt being overclocked.
• Graphics: ASUS 9400GT PCI-Express
  The cheapest graphics card to be found at the legendary& award winning computer store MSY Technologies. Depending on how the drivers go (I’m usually biased towards ATI for all Linuxes) I might endup paying for a ATi card later.

Next up the investigation, be warned though I started this initially back in June/July (possibly a bit earlier).

After many leaks, a public release of RC1 and several premature releases of what cuda been the final RTM we finally have sufficient proof that Windows 7 has infact been Released To Manufacturing (confirmed too!).

Heres a summary of what to know.

Build information

The final build is tagged as 6.1.7600.16385.090713-1255. It was compiled on July 13, 2009, at 12:45pm.

Windows 7 x64 DVD-ISO

7600.16385.090713-1255_x64fre_client_en-us_Retail_Ultimate-GRMCULXFRER_EN_DVD.iso

CRC32: 0×1F1257CA
SHA-1: 0×326327CC2FF9F05379F5058C41BE6BC5E004BAA7

Windows 7 x86 DVD-ISO

7600.16385.090713-1255_x86fre_client_en-us_Retail_Ultimate-GRMCULFRER_EN_DVD.iso

CRC32: 0xC1C20F76
SHA-1: 0×5395DC4B38F7BDB1E005FF414DEEDFDB16DBF610

These hashes and values are from Daniel Melancthon’s blog post.

Release Dates

This is what we know.

Thats about it, if you ‘obtained’ a copy from somewhere, give Long Zheng’s Windows 7 ISO verifier a go to see what you’ve actually got, last thing you’d want is a copy of Vista with a Windows 7 Transformation pack!