A Philippine police mascot attempts to cheer a baby in a shopping mall in Makati's financial district in Manila December 22, 2002. The Philippine police has enhanced security in shopping malls and other public places to counter the threats of terrorist attacks or bombings this holiday season. Selected police officers were tasked to wear mascot costumes as they patrol the shopping malls in the capital to make their presence less obtrusive and more friendly. REUTERS/Romeo Ranoco
"You're not buying music, you're buying a key," says Larry Kenswil, the president of the eLabs division of the Universal Music Group, the world's largest record company, which recently started charging 99 cents for a digital single that can be burned to a CD but not copied to certain portable devices, like the Apple iPod. "That's what digital rights management does: it enables business models."
So, while we were testing some things trying to figure out how to recover the motherboard with the scorched BIOS, I accidentally typed "shutdown" at the wrong machine: I shut down the machine in colo (the mp3 server.) I lost all of my sysadmin cred with that one (if I ever had any to begin with) and we had to get Tom to let us in to colo to try and fix it.
There are three machines involved, all of which are VA Linux FullOn 2230s, with Intel L440GX+ motherboards. Two of the machines are at the club (the MP3 encoder, and the RealVideo encoder) and the third is in colo (the MP3 server that the outside world connects to.) Here's what we've learned:
We could not find any way to get a 1GHz chip to boot unattended; we could not find any way to get any chip but a 500MHz to work on a mobo whose BIOS had been upgraded; nor could we find any way to downgrade the BIOS. Fuck you very much, Intel.
So, we had three machines, five motherboards with various BIOSes on them, nine CPUs of various flavors, and a jigsaw puzzle of an evening ahead of us. One of the motherboards had a corrupted BIOS, and another of the motherboards has a dead SCSI controller.
We spent a long time trying to un-scorch the dead BIOS to no avail; and we considered switching to IDE disks for the one without a SCSI controller. But to make a long and tortuous story short, here's what we ended up with:
| Machine: | Last week: | Desired: | Actual: | ||||
| MP3 Encoder, club | 2 x 500MHz | 2 x 700MHz | 2 x 500MHz | ||||
| Real Encoder, club | 1 x 700MHz | 2 x 500MHz | 2 x 1GHz (must type F1 to reboot) | ||||
| MP3 Server, colo | 1 x 700MHz | 2 x 1GHz | 2 x 500MHz |
We could have gotten the 2x1GHz CPUs onto the MP3 Server as originally intended, except then I would have had to go to colo to reboot it, so we made the "have to type F1" machine be at the club.
It turns out that RealEncoder will work on a 2x700MHz machine, or on a 1x700MHz machine, but not on a 2x500MHz machine. In hindsight, this makes a kind of sick sense, if you assume that the single RealEncoder process requires (say) a dedicated 600MHz to work properly. When we had 2x500MHz in there, I imagine that what was going on was that one of the CPUs was overloaded, and the other was mostly idle.
It remains to be seen whether 2x500 is better than 1x700 for the MP3 Server machine. I suspect it will be, since there are many load-ful processes running on it. But it still remains to be seen whether load was the cause of the "chipmunk" problem at all.
If any of you have any suggestions as to how to get an L440GX+ to work with a 1GHz Pentium III (Slot 1, 100MHz bus, 256K cache) please let me know! At this point, all I can think of is replacing both the motherboards and CPUs at the same time with some totally unrelated model, and I'm pretty tired of throwing money down this rathole. We just spent $330 on these new 1GHz CPUs because I thought the MP3 Server machine might have had a load problem! I don't even know if it'll fix anything...
