Bert Garcia^2.0

Giga, my trusty Debian Linux server for the last six years needed a break.

When summer hit the Carolinas, extreme heat followed. Keeping my large tower server on all day was producing even more heat, constant fan noise and drawing more electricity. Keeping the home office’s room air conditioner on all day to compensate the central air, made more noise and drew even more electricity.

This prompted me to turn a five year old laptop into Lenny, the portable server. This laptop has a dead battery and last year needed the internal power jack connector to be replaced, so it was a prime candidate to sit on a desk, wired to power and our internal network.

First off, I needed to repartition the 60GB drive with GParted. I removed the Windows XP partition since there was a Gateway recovery partition, created a 1GB swap partition and a 50GB ext3 partition for Debian. Next up was a net install of Debian Lenny, chose only the base system, I would apt-get what I needed after I had a working operating system.

The laptop booted up just fine, using very little of it’s 768MB of ram. Did an apt-get of the usual suspects, Apache, PHP and MySQL. With very little tweaking I had a nicely working LAMP machine where I can work on my websites. I use XAMPP on my main laptop, and it works rather well, but having a true LAMP stack for testing is worth the dedicated machine.

Though I’m comfortable with editing config files in the /etc directory, Webmin does an excellent job. A few more tweaks, some more apt-gets and the laptop was flying along serving web pages just as fast as my huge tower server. Seeing how well the laptop was running, I decided to install Xfce from backports. I don’t really need a GUI, but it’s nice to be able to load up Firefox for testing sites on a Linux platform.

Four days into running Lenny on the laptop, I decided to repartition. I removed the 5GB Gateway recovery partition, moved the swap partition to the front of the drive, shrunk the /root partition down to 5GB and created a /home partition of 50GB. The laptop would run Debian for the remainder of it’s life, it felt like the right thing to do.

If the sun refused to shine
I don’t mind, no baby I don’t mind
And If the mountains fell in the sea
It ain’t me, you know you’ve got to be free

My 5 year old laptop was running hot.

After cleaning out the vents and raising the laptop a bit from the desk’s surface, the idle temps were still hovering around 50C, and under load, the temps would jump above 60C, prompting the bios to issue a shutdown order.

Went out on the Net and started doing research, everywhere I turned, aging thermal compound appeared to be the culprit. In order to alleviate the overheating issues, I would need to open up the laptop to gain access to the processor, but I lacked instructions. Gateway had manuals on user replaceable parts that you could get to from the underside, but no full blown schematic on where internal parts resided.

More time on the Net yielded images, user contributed wiki pages and how-tos that pointed me to the processor location. I’m no stranger to the insides of desktop computers, but a laptop was always this sealed box that you left alone and when it died, you went out and bought another one. But I didn’t want another one, I wanted to keep running Windows XP.

A quick trip to Radio Shack to buy Arctic Silver 5 thermal paste and I was ready to start the operation. Gathered all my small tools, cleared the kitchen table and gingerly took off the keyboard. An aluminum plate was the only thing separating me from the processor heatsink and fans. Once the heatsink came out, I could see that the old thermal paste was dry and brittle, not doing much of anything.

As per Net instructions, I used alcohol and q-tips to clean off the processor and heatsink. I sparingly applied the thermal paste to the top of the processor, just a thin layer as per instructions. While I was in there I decided to add more memory, switched out the internal 512MB with 1GB, matching the 1GB in the user accessible bay.

Booted up, fingers crossed, fired up Speccy. Idle temps had dropped to 35C, amazed I was, ready to go apply at the Geek Squad. But the true test is under load, Firefox playing a Flash based movie always lights up task manager, just a test I said to the laptop. Under load, the temps never got above 55C, and shortly after stopping the movie, they were well under 40C.

With new thermal paste and 2GB of ram, my laptop and I are happy campers. Yes, you could say I’m entrenched in Windows XP and I ain’t leaving, except to the Debian partition.

We’re having a heat wave
A tropical heat wave
The temperature’s rising
It isn’t surprising

The view from our balcony at the Holiday Inn Resort, overlooking the intracoastal waterway that separates Wrightsville Beach from Wilmington, NC.

This was the first time we had been to the beach since leaving Florida 5 years ago. We all got toasty golden brown, we just couldn’t get enough of the beach and swimming pools. A day of pounding waves made for a very sound and restful sleep, my body still feeling the smashing effects of water. The large waves and cold ocean water was reminiscent of my childhood when we would make the customary summer trips to Jones Beach on Long Island.

We also spent a day of sightseeing in Wilmington, seeing where they had filmed many movies and TV shows, like One Tree Hill. The area is called Cape Fear, legend has it that there are parts of the downtown that are haunted, but that’s another tour.

Afternoon delight, cocktails and moonlit nights
That dreamy look in your eye, give me a tropical contact high

The Vuvuzela, South Africa’s contribution to the 2010 World Cup soccer experience.

Some say
Silence is golden
Well, I choose noise
Well, some say
Silence is golden
Well, I choose noise
I choose noise

Our Kois, the bright yellow Taxi is on top, Peaches & Cream is feeding underneath.

12 days after spring cleaning the pond, we can see all the way to the bottom, the sediment has finally settled. All the rain this past week gave the pond it’s oxygen naturally, I had no need to run the waterfall pump which clouds the water by churning up the sediment.

Now that the water is clear, I can accurately count 2010’s inventory:

• 3 Kois (yellow, white & silver)
• 38 Goldfish (gold;)
• 2 Shubunkin Goldfish (multicolored & black)

That’s enough fish for the pond, which holds about 1,700 gallons of water. Were it not for the amount of Goldfish, the Kois would grow larger, but they’d be lonelier I think. When I see them all schooled together, happily swimming in unison, I couldn’t imagine less fish.

Down here all the fish is happy
As off through the waves they roll
The fish on the land ain’t happy
They sad ‘cause they in their bowl