Switched On Tech Design

  • BIOS update: Asus P8B WS

    Asus have updated the bios of this workstation board to support Ivy Bridge CPUs; please note that you’ll need a Sandy Bridge CPU installed to do this update so please make sure if you are upgrading that you do so before installing a new CPU.   You can find the update (#2009) here.

  • SAS Cable Length for Norco 4224+M1015

      This is a question we get asked reasonably often – what is the right SAS cable length for a Norco 4220/4224 chassis while using IBM M1015 HBAs?   50cm: Doable but puts a great deal of strain on the connectors, particularly on the card end. 60cm: Enough with some slack and no excessive pressure…

  • ECC in Intel Network Cards

    Intel have released some information about ECC in their networking cards;   Some of the older chips like the 82571 – found in cards like the Pro/1000 PT single/dual/quad port NICs – actually do have error correction on the in-band traffic, which is good news. You can see that the latest generation (i.e. i-350, i-540…

  • Napp-it update: 0.8h

    Napp-it has a new default build – 0.8h, mostly incorporating bugfixes and adding a couple of alert options. You can update from your napp-it->update menu. For more info see the changelog.    

  • HD6450 – Review for servers/non-3D workstations

    The AMD Radeon HD 6450 is a low-end graphics card that’s perfectly suited to basic graphics duties such as you’ll need on a server or workstation board that lacks inbuilt graphics capabilities (on-CPU or a discrete chip). It’s flexible in output – VGA, HDMI and DVI – is more than powerful enough for everyday use…

  • Ubuntu 12.04 Released

    Ubuntu 12.04 Released

      Canonical have released Precise Pangolin, the latest update to the Ubuntu operating system. It is a LTS release, meaning that it will be supported for five years – this time on both the desktop and server version.       You can download from: http://www.ubuntu.com  

  • BIOS update: Asus P9X79 WS

    For those customers with a workstation or server based on one of these boards you may be interested in the latest BIOS update. The most notable part of the update seems to be improved RAID mode compatibility.   For the full list of updates and to download the update see the update page.    

  • Napp-it update: 0.8g

    Napp-it has another update – this one is a little different as it adds the ability to encrypt pools on OpenIndiana and Illumian on ZFS v.28. You can update from the menu – napp-it->update. For more info see the changelog.

  • Ubuntu 11.10 Released!

    Ubuntu 11.10 Released!

      Canonical have released the latest update to the Ubuntu operating system, this time named Oneiric Ocelot. Oneiric apparently means dreamy…       You can download it from:   http://www.ubuntu.com

  • Intel Pro/1000 PT Quad review

    Intel Pro/1000 PT Quad review

    One of the more common quad-port network cards that pops up online is the Pro/1000 PT. This is a 2006 Intel design – discontinued in 2009 – which generally seems to be priced anywhere from AU$120-160 as a server pull. It uses two Intel  82571 chips, each controlling two gigabit ports, and is PCI-E 1.0…