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2401

General Software Discussion / Re: $20 if you make me a 6' Molex cable. $10 for recommending a better solution.

« Last post by Shades on July 17, 2009, 11:46 PM »

How come your drive is eating so much power to begin with?

My external HD enclosure came with a power supply that delivered 12Volt and 1.5Ampere as output. That would make 18 watt and it was not bigger than wall charger for a cell phone. Building a power supply with high voltage is rather simple and cheap, but if it has to deliver a decent amperage...

The hard drive in that enclosure was an IDE Western Digital Caviar 160GByte 7200rpm. Ran nice for four years with the original power supply (in ambient temperatures from 40 degrees Celsius and above). Putting a faster 10000rpm drive in an external enclosure seems overkill as you would hit the bandwidth limit of the USB channel you are using and it does not require that much more power.

50 to 80 Watts, it seems a lot to me. Dividing 80Watts with 12Volt results in a device that uses 4 to 6 Ampere. Has it a double function as electrical heater? Or as a cigarette lighter similar to the ones found in old cars? A standard ATX power supply like my own 350Watts power supply requires about 10Ampere (at full capacity) from the electrical grid it is connected to.

2402

General Software Discussion / Re: $20 if you make me a 6' Molex cable. $10 for recommending a better solution.

« Last post by Shades on July 17, 2009, 11:07 PM »

Darn, I should have read your story instead of glancing over it. Those connectors on the back are mainly for  connecting a hard drive when an emergency occurs. Of course you can use it on a more permanent basis but I do not know how much power it can sustain like that.

With each power supply you see several bundles of cables coming out. Each of those bundles is also known as a rail and can only output a fraction of the advertised power (watts) mentioned on the power supply. I have to assume that the molex on the back of the power supply is connected to one of these rails and it is hard to tell which one without inspecting the circuit board of the power supply.

Now I don't know which power supply you have installed and how you have divided the load from the (enormous amount of) connected devices regarding the available rails. So when you use the back molex together with such a long cable, make sure that you don't overload that particular rail because you can be in for a nasty surprise.

It would not be the first time that dividing the load from a misbehaving PC differently has removed a lot if not all of the problems it had. Power supplies that have their load not evenly divided wear out more quickly as well. A little bit of common sense here works wonders.

 

2403

Living Room / Re: Looking for P2p file sharing for personal use

« Last post by Shades on July 17, 2009, 10:38 PM »

An interesting albeit somewhat disturbing article... 

HTTP tunneling I had heard of, but ICMP- and DNS-tunneling were strangers to me.

Many thanks for the article. 

2404

Living Room / Re: Send Yourself To Mars!

« Last post by Shades on July 17, 2009, 10:04 PM »

And on your head would be a Bounty.

2405

Living Room / Re: linux network question

« Last post by Shades on July 17, 2009, 10:03 PM »

Always had a thing for XAMPP. This is a German site by default, but an English version is there as well.

Windows and Linux version available. In 35 to 45 Mbyte you will get an Apache webserver, MySQL database server, Mail server, PHP, Perl, OpenSSL, PHPMyAdmin etc. All ready to run after unpacking and executing 1 small batch script.

Having said that the default configuration is very open, making it ideal for developing but not to put in a (semi-) public place. There is a link in the opening page that takes care of that so you should not have to lose too much sleep over it. 

2406

General Software Discussion / Re: $20 if you make me a 6' Molex cable. $10 for recommending a better solution.

« Last post by Shades on July 17, 2009, 09:50 PM »

Are the electrical losses over such a length of cable (6 feet = about 2 meters) not too big? Or would a cable with that length impose a big strain on (one of) the power rail of the power supply?

Jumpstarting two separate ATX power supplies with one and the same button is easier...and in my point of view preferable. 

2407

General Software Discussion / Re: Hannah Montana Linux -- about time!

« Last post by Shades on July 17, 2009, 09:40 PM »

Oh, the Paris Hilton edition? Definitely the easiest Linux distro ever...if you can afford the hardware that is.

And besides that, its wifi works only in a certain not to be named hotel chain.

 

2408

Living Room / Re: DonationCoder loading funny in Firefox - colors missing - proportions strange

« Last post by Shades on July 16, 2009, 08:48 PM »

That page looks similar to what one gets using an activated 'NoScript' extension.

If you used it (or a similar one) on previous versions of FireFox and you upgraded that version to 3.5, then it could be that your preferences/settings are scrambled.

2409

Living Room / Re: Looking for P2p file sharing for personal use

« Last post by Shades on July 15, 2009, 08:27 PM »

The tunneling thing sounds interesting, would it be possible to send it to me as well?

2410

Living Room / Re: A Problem for A Real Expert - the Haunted Router(s)

« Last post by Shades on July 15, 2009, 08:26 PM »

Now those old but very handy oscilloscopes could come in handy (to find out if and how much dirt the input/output takes and puts out)...too bad they always were so damn expensive, which is also true for the recent digital ones.

2411

Living Room / Re: Looking for P2p file sharing for personal use

« Last post by Shades on July 14, 2009, 11:11 PM »

Creating a new key pair for each client is the good and proper way of certification. By doing so you can setup secure connections between clients as well.

Since you are presumably the one and only user you could do with the already created key pair(s). Likely you already have enough key pairs created (as I don't know your network topology and how you desire to use it) during setup. However, differentiation between machines/sessions is quickly becoming unclear this way, limiting their use.

Note that it is not hard to create an extra pair. Last time I made a set of those using the generation script (included with OpenVPN software) I was able to produce 50 unique ones (1024 bit) in less than half an hour without any automation.

2412

Living Room / Re: Looking for P2p file sharing for personal use

« Last post by Shades on July 14, 2009, 06:58 PM »

You should setup the invitation based remote desktop client from Microsoft for a RDP connection between the PC at your work and any of the PC's that are accessible in your network.

After you logged into your VPN network you should use the RDP connection for the PC you want to access. Once that connection is build you should get a new login screen, the default one from windows (assuming you use Windows and that particular way of logging in). Finish that login procedure as well and you have as much access to the PC/LAN as you would have sitting behind the PC/LAN (again, assuming you log in as a user who is allowed to do all things on that PC/LAN). 

2413

Living Room / Re: Show us a photo of your mutt or other creatures..

« Last post by Shades on July 14, 2009, 06:42 PM »

@Target:

An Alaska Malamut?    (at least that is the only name from type of dog that is known to me)
My brother had one years ago, only that one had two blue eyes (quite rare in the breed, I was told). That was the most friendly dog I ever met and when people lay first eyes on the dog they always were not so pleasantly surprised to downright afraid of those eyes.

2414

Living Room / Re: A Problem for A Real Expert - the Haunted Router(s)

« Last post by Shades on July 14, 2009, 05:31 PM »

Computers, more particularly their power supplies, can actually take a lot of bad treatment like "dirty juice" or even milliseconds of no power at all. Get into the named brands of power supplies (and associated price tag) you will be able to mistreat them even more, but not by much.

Compare this with the warts that normally come with a home router...hence one of the reasons why you have a bigger chance of failure there. 4wd is totally right about the phone line and how it is (electrically) secured. 

2415

General Software Discussion / Re: Windows 7 evaluation

« Last post by Shades on July 11, 2009, 01:08 PM »

Sorry...big fingers and tiny buttons...

It should have been 512 Megabyte of RAM.

2416

Living Room / Re: essential office equipment: usb powered chainsaw

« Last post by Shades on July 09, 2009, 11:40 PM »

...or are we splitting

2417

Living Room / Re: essential office equipment: usb powered chainsaw

« Last post by Shades on July 09, 2009, 10:15 PM »

'Cos in us we feel the beat...

Yeah yeah yeah

(Songwriter would not be the best reason to give up my day job)

2418

Living Room / Re: essential office equipment: usb powered chainsaw

« Last post by Shades on July 09, 2009, 09:51 PM »

yeah...and drum sticks are 'log-a-rythmics'  

2419

Living Room / Re: essential office equipment: usb powered chainsaw

« Last post by Shades on July 09, 2009, 09:16 PM »

Is this for-estimat-or real?

2420

Living Room / Re: essential office equipment: usb powered chainsaw

« Last post by Shades on July 09, 2009, 09:13 PM »

No, but the log clearly states that we are getting divided...

2421

General Software Discussion / Re: Windows 7 evaluation

« Last post by Shades on July 09, 2009, 08:54 PM »

If you don't do games and have a decent (256Mb or higher) video card, you can use Windows (and standard Office apps) already at 512Kbyte RAM. It is not nearly as resource hogging as Vista is. Of course, it thrives with 2Gbyte or more.

2422

Living Room / Re: Show us a photo of your mutt or other creatures..

« Last post by Shades on July 09, 2009, 08:47 PM »

@cranioscopical:
Is your dog of the type/model 'Mechelaer'? (Sorry, it is the only name I know)
It looks so similar to the dog of a friend of mine. Absolutely brilliant dog she was. Very smart in interpreting commands given to her.

2423

Living Room / Re: Looking for P2p file sharing for personal use

« Last post by Shades on July 09, 2009, 08:44 PM »

You could also try this freeware tool (apmReader) to create your certificates.

At least this is a tool that I know of what is able to create certificates with a GUI. Undoubtedly there will be a (lot more) tools able to do the job. But besides creating certificates, you can also manage them with this tool. Windows is actually also quite capable with certificate management out of the box (but you have to fold the box first, if you catch my drift).

2424

Living Room / Re: essential office equipment: usb powered chainsaw

« Last post by Shades on July 09, 2009, 08:26 PM »

Yep, here we part...

2425

Living Room / Re: Looking for P2p file sharing for personal use

« Last post by Shades on July 09, 2009, 01:49 AM »

The text in the client log file mentions port 1194, which is officially designated to OpenVPN by IANA (the governing body for port numbers). So that would be the port you use in the port forwarding section of your router.

Because of the certificates you have already put up quite a hurdle for 'drive-by attackers'. If you use strong passwords with your (Windows and/or Linux) user login then you already have quite a decent security perimeter setup.