Re: Old Possum's book of practical hosts.

abuse@xxxxxxxxxxxx (Peter Corlett) writes:
Jasper Janssen <jasper@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
[...]
'PC BIOS' is not a monolithic entity, you know. I haven't had these sorts
of problems with anything recent, ie P6-core and above, with reputable
motherboards installed.

Then you have been Very Lucky.

Yeah. I thought NFHF was reasonably reputable, having played with
Ryvgrtebhc and ZFV and found them very much wanting.

By the time you find a problem, they no longer have flash updates.
Heck, I can't even find an Athlon with the right pins on it to max out
the CPU speed on the board. (And I know better than to try, last time
I tried that, I bought almost all of a new PC.)

Of course, Extra Controller Cards and booting from them is always
something you avoid. But boot/OS disks on builtin and Big Disks on an
Extra Controller tends to be reasonably usable.

In theory, this is the case. In reality, after trying to get it to work
reliably, the air's blue, the dog's hiding under the bed and there's a PCI
card embedded in the wall.

Sounds about right. I didn't want to boot from Extra Controller Card,
I figured that couldn't possibly work. Except Extra Controller Card
had _just_ enough BIOS-wedge on it to sort-of make it work, and it
wasn't like a goat-enabled Extra Controller Card from the very same
vendor, which lets you disable set BIOS-wedge. (Or, my
now-replaced-by-FlamingCable[1] BIOS-less goat-enabled Extra Controller
Card, which works great, 'cause until the OS kernel is running, it
doesn't exist.)

Open concept, so the card just hit the sofa, not the wall.

The problem with Small Fruit is that you can only hang fw400/usb2 hard
drives off it, which may or may not be reliable and/or work and/or have
more speed than the gnat on a donkey's ass.

It doesn't seem to be any less reliable than $RANDOM_PCI_CARD, and the
performance is acceptable for my purposes.

/me wants one of these:
<uggc://jjj.pbbyqevirf.pbz/dhergesvrava.ugzy>

....but will probably settle for one of the cheaper ones without the
removable sleds.

Oh yeah, I discovered last night while running a program that leaks
memory all away, miniFruit copes very, very badly with running out of
swap.

Took a CMD-OPT-PWR to recycle it. Or is it CMD-CTRL-PWR? I always
try both, and stop trying at the Bonggg!

[1] Stupid punny euphamisms or EBG-13 off/on/off/on/off--what's more
annoying?

--
But it is for a good reason. Not dying on the job is cool.
-- Randy the Random in the Monastery
.

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