Monthly Archives: November 2008

Poor little Mini!

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I’ve been using a MacMini as my home server for about 6 months now. I found one cheap (£250) on ebay. Its only an Intel core duo (not core 2) running at 1.66 but it works great as a server. I had problems with it when I bought it. It wouldn’t boot and showed all the signs of a faulty RAM module.

The seller kindly sent me a replacement 1GB stick as it looked like one of the RAM slots was faulty. I had been running fine for about 5 months, then last month I did a re-boot after OS X 10.5.5 was released and boom….the mini wouldn’t boot. After spending about 5 days trying to fix it, even trying to reinstall OS X I gave in. It looked like OS X stopped running if there were memory issues.

I installed Ubuntu which worked flawlessly….for 5 days. I’m still running Ubuntu and have to re-boot every 5 or so days as it locks up. Nothing in the logs, it just locks up. I’ve come to the conclusion that there’s something not right hardware wise and cant be fixed.

I’m going to be looking into replacing it, but cant really afford to splash out on another MacMini. I think I’ll be making a new server using an Intel Atom package. I can still run at 1.6 Ghz and its still a small sized motherboard.

Since the Atom integrated motherboards are fairly cheap, I will be able to spend some money on getting system to boot on a solid state drive. I found that you can get 32GB CF Cards, and a CF to SATA drive for under £50 which is great! You can even get duel CF readers, thus giving you a 64GB solid state drive on the cheap!

So heres my spec plan:

1.6Ghz Intel Atom
2GB DDR2 RAM
2x 32GB CF solid drives (using a SATA -> CF adaptor)
A small case (not much bigger than the MacMini case hopefully)
DVD RW +/-

Since I’m off on holiday soon I cant really afford to build this, however when I’m over in the states, I’ll pop into circuit city, Best Buy and a few other places to see if I can get some of the parts….will be much cheaper than buying here! :D

RikeMedia Update!

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I know I’ve been a little lax on blogging recently. All will be revealed. I’ve had a fairly large amount of uni work to do plus lots of Rike related work going on!

So, whats been going on? Well the first thing, WebmasterStash had a refurb, and merged with another webmaster community, giving us a much larger array of content in the forums. I decided to close the main site as we simply didn’t have time to add new tutorials, templates and scripts due to work and life commitments. I think we tried biting off more than we could chew with WebmasterStash. Anyway, take a look at the new site (well, forums) and feel free to provide some feedback!

Next up, CLUBdb. This is still a fairly secretive project so I cant go into much detail at the moment. All I can say is that its being backed by a large club in the UK. CLUBdb is to fill a huge void in the market and provide some fantastic features. This probably makes no sense at all due to its secrecy…but don’t worry. It will make plenty of sense soon!

Mike has been working hard at a new Rike script. He started off working on a download manager, much like FMDeluxe (if anyone reading this can remember that far back! :p). However decided that his time would be better spent on a non open-source script, that way it could be marketed and licensed out to other companies. Mike is now working on an e-commerce based script with some fantastic new features that rival some of the best shopping carts out there!

The RikeMedia website will also be making a return soon with a new design and company blog. We will be issuning press releases and updates on projects, plus have sections showing what services and products are offered by the company.

Well I think thats about it for now. I’ll be launching the WSDReg Christmas promotion in the next few days and will be offering some fantastic offers! Be sure to keep your eyes on WSDReg.com for the full details!