A Day & A Half of a "Spectre" Looking Over My Shoulder

It's a stressful time of year. Tax season (although I'm lucky and my wife does those), students are running amok (it's Spring....and all that that implies with teenagers), and testing season. For me, that means the all-important State testing is actually getting in the way of  preparing my students for the far more rigorous National Exam!!! On top of that, I had to take off on Monday because my kids were out of school, but my wife still had to work. Then yesterday, while my wife was at a workshop out of town, the school called to say that the daughter had vomited and I needed to come take my sick child home......so "A Day & A Half" of non-voluntary leave taken at the worse possible time. I decided that I could get some errands run on Monday morning, then work on computer stuff in the afternoon. That was the plan anyway......

Monday: 8AM. You know: no day starts well with a visit to this guy. So, after about 45 minutes of one-sided conversation. I was done, but the blowing cold front in combination with dental drilling had started a migraine. Then, it was off to see a client to picked up a computer that, after multiple tries was still glitchy with networking. I know that nobody in the working world should expect a low end P4 with 1Gb of RAM (maxed) running Windows XP/SP3 to function very well, but I have a reputation to uphold you know! So I picked it up to go home and work my magic. So we proceeded on to the book store (which is normally one of my favorite places), but after about 30 minutes the headache got the best of me, so gather up the kids and head home. Take Exedrin Extra Strength, curl up in a ball with the pillow over my head for a while. The rest of the day went in similar fashion and very little useful computer work got done.

Although I hadn't gone to work, this is a pretty accurate depiction of me at this stage. Here's what was on my plate, other than work: I needed to finish my file server rebuild, I needed to figure out something to do with my client's flaky machine, I had several Honey-dos and needed for my headache to go away (it had returned). Let's just say that not much of anything got done the rest of that day. Then yesterday didn't start out so well with having to leave school and pick up the sick child, return and get plans ready for a substitute teacher......THEN go back to the kids' school to pick up my son (it's in another town). After all was settled out around 4pm, I finally got to sit down in front of the computer.

Tuesday: 4PM. You might be able to ascertain that attempts to finish the server didn't go well...... And you'd be right, up to a point. You see, when I decided to pick up the HighPoint Rocket Cache RAID controller for the server, it was with a degree of understanding that I was making certain compromises. Understand, that for me, a $200 (list) component is pricey, but in the world of hardware RAID, it's pretty darned cheap. In my research I was able to figure out that HighPoint's products often receive mid-level ratings (2-3 out of 5 stars), not because they don't work, but you have to "work with it". It's not polished and the tech-support can be sketchy if you run into an issue.

Tuesday: 4:30PM.....And run into issues, I did! So for an hour or two, I was in tech-support H*LL......that is until I got it figured out.....on my own. Let me set the stage for you. First, I'm loading a server OS running mostly desktop hardware, so certain things won't go the way the manufacturer says it will. At least this time, I got the OS up and running without killing all the USB ports while trying to get USB3.0 working! Anyway, I got the drivers loaded, then got the RAID management software to load without a glitch, but despite the fact that it could see, AND manipulate the drives connected to the controller, I couldn't figure out how to get a "caching" array built. To add insult to injury, nothing about that software looked anything like the screen captures in the manual!... then it occurred to me that maybe I didn't have the correct software on my disk! There had to be a reason that this was returned to Amazon and thus bought from their warehouse site for $128! Sure enough, after a visit to their not-too-user-friendly website, I got the critical missing application. Apparently I got a disk for the RocketRaid vs. the RocketCache that I have. All the while, as I was figuring this out, I was on "chat" with their tech support trying to resolve the issue. They were very nice about it and apologetic, but clearly, their native language wasn't English. I want to say that HighPoint is Taiwanese, but don't quote me on that. So, after several hours of head-banging, the server is pretty much up and running. One of the SSDs isn't properly recognized, but I'd bet that given the used state of them, I'm not surprised. 

As you can see, the insides of this thing is pretty clean given that I've crammed 5 hard drives of various types, an optical drive, a Hauppauge HVR 1800 tuner card AND a RAID controller all in a Micro ATX case. I will say that I'm very happy with this Silverstone SST-PS07's design and construction. 

Tuesday: 10PM I couldn't stand it any more. I had to dig through the parts I had out there in the garage to see if I could scrape together something to resolve the client computer's issues. Out of various boxes came, an Asus P5Q SE Plus, motherboard, an Intel Core 2 Duo E4300 processor, an nVidia GTX video card, 2 Gb of DDR2 RAM and a Dynex PSU to run it all. I also was able to finally get the Artic Silver HSF that my brother sent me to seat properly in my "XP" box, so the stock Intel HSF from it went in as well. I haven't powered it up yet since I haven't come across a desktop SATA hard drive, but that shouldn't be a problem. At worse, I'll just use one of my many 2.5" laptop drives sitting around. 

I still have some issues to sort out, like the one unrecognized device, there's some unrecognized storage space on one of the 2Tb drives and what to do about the "other" SSD that's seen as a HDD, as well as getting the motherboard to output on HDMI. But those are all relatively small configuration things. So, in the end, after a day and a half of frustration and stress, I was able turned to my cure-all of getting computers to work to make myself feel better about things.