Gigabit and RAID, oh my

Finally heeded the call of the semi-conductor (can you hear it? It’s outside your window right now, calling “Buy new stuff … you know you need it … you know you need new shiny electronics … you don’t need a savings account–you need new electronics.”) Ahem.

Ended up putting two 200-gig RAID 1-configured hard drives in Monolith, my main workstation, and upgraded the Casa Core Dump network to gigabit speeds. The RAID install went without a hitch, and then much hilarity ensued when it was time to get the newly-acquired Belkin F5D5005 to talk correctly to Temeryx, my old faithful G4/450. Plop in card, install driver, reboot, get 100 megabit speed. Dammit. Force card to use gigabit instead of autoselect–link goes dead without so much as a by-your-leave. Reinstall driver. Nope. Link goes dead as soon as the card is forced into gigabit.

Finally decided to try a different cable. Yup. Link goes to gigabit. Damn cheap CAT5-cables. Moved not-quite-evil-enough cable to its new position between base station and switch, where it can sit and poke along at 10 megabit without blowing a gasket.

And now for the piece de resistance–getting Ubuntu to talk to the second F5D5005 card. That took some deeper nerdery, so the how-to will end up on Tech Goes Boom. It did work, though, which was a bit of a relief, as the only reason I had for purchasing the Belkin cards instead of one from a competitor was that they were enlightened enough to put support for Linux, Mac OS X, and NetWare on the box.

Kind of a good idea if you’re selling a card that has drivers for the anything-but-Microsoft set to actually list that fact on the box.

So the RAID volume is mirroring away, the network is humming along at ridiculous speeds, and another Sunday is gone.