Well, my rough week has now reached seven days - it started last Wednesday - and is still going strong.
The late hardware arrived, but it doesn't work - with just the CPU on the motherboard (which came preinstalled in the case), and either of the two DIMMs in either of the two sockets, it doesn't start executing the BIOS. So either the CPU or the mobo is probably dead. I'll try running it with no DIMMs in; if the DIMMs are both bad (or, more likely, wrong for the motherboard) then the thing should at least complain about the memory error - assuming the BIOS is written to run the POST purely from registers, until it's tested the RAM.
Tomorrow I will order new parts, and play the combinations game until I get it working.
And on top of that, I had a horrible cough Monday and Tuesday, which I'm just getting over.
Oh, and did I mention that the dishwasher is broken, and Jean is unhappily teething, so poor Sarah is struggling with the domestic workload? There's now heaps and bags of washed and unwashed clothes all around the place, I'm out of clean underwear, the kitchen is starting to smell, and there's very few clear flat surfaces (floors, tables, worktops, chairs, ...) in the entire house.
Bleargh!
When we've been paid for the current project, I'm going to start by tidying the whole house. Then looking after Jean so Sarah can have a break. Then buying some nice books, reading them, and sleeping lots.
Anyway, on Friday evening, we attended the Masquerade Ball in Oxford.
This was quite fun. Our friend Carina took some nice photos, including some of Sarah and myself. We took some photos, too, but since getting home, I've not had time to upload them yet 🙂
Bah!
I've had a horrible past week.
Read more »
For TUNGSTEN, I plan to split the local storage manager into two layers; the physical manager and the logical managers. The physical manager takes a collection of block storage devices (such as hard disks), and a configuration giving advice on which disks to use for what, and provides an administrative interface for modifying said configuration and monitoring usage, and an interface to the logical managers. The latter interface provides access to a single unified associative data store; the local store is divided into regions for each volume mirrored on the local node (by a numeric volume ID), which are in turn divided into regions for each entity (by a numeric entity ID), which are in turn divided into regions for each object within the entity (by a numeric object ID), which may then be structured as the logical manager responsible for that object sees fit. The structure available to the logical manager within an object is a set of records, each with a key and a value. The physical manager provides the ability to create, abort, or commit transactions, and within a transaction, read, write, add, and remove records, including iterating through records by key range.
Read more »
Check out this PDF:
http://www.cs.bell-labs.com/sys/doc/venti/venti.pdf
It's a description of a new mass storage system designed for Plan 9. Venti offers permanent archival storage, with basically two operations:
- Given a block of up to 52KB of data (and some metadata, which is fairly irrelevant), the system returns an SHA1 hash of that data
Given an SHA1 hash, return the previously stored block of data with that hash.
Read more »
Alaric | alaric | 
Thu 2nd Feb 2006 12:58 am | 
Comments (1) 
Subscribe