Astronomer

So sincerely sorry for your loss. It's never easy when they cross the bridge.

Can't wait to see the final product, KaptCrunch. I'd love to see pictures of other folk's rigs, mods, and racks. I'm a gear-head and an enthusiast, so I'm always interested in this stuff.

Welll...uhhhh...I showed mine...

What? You were expecting pictures of something else? I installed 3 additions to the rack over the past week: a new 24 port Gigabit switch up top, a new-to-me HP DL360 rack server, and a second Liebert UPS, also new-to-me. The Liebert is the second one from the bottom. The DL-360 came with 3x 15k 146Gb SAS drives. One was bad and I tossed it, the other I'll keep as a spare. The server is running SOPHOS home UTM (Unified Threat Management), so one drive is enough. If it dies, I can be up and running again in a half-hour. It's my router, wireless controller, firewall, spam/malware/virus scanner and more. I've added a firewall rule to block ad-servers before any browsers can see them (it blocks those pesky ads on web pages). I have several hundred site addresses loaded in from from 2 large up-to-date files I found on the Web. The home version is actually their full enterprise version with all features enabled. And it's FREE. It will manage up to 50 end-points and 12+2 users (the license says 12, but you have "grace" coverage for 2 more). The big HP ML350 on the bottom has 10 drives and is running Ubuntu Linux Server. It's my shared file server, media server, Apache Web server, OwnCloud Server, FTP server, and soon to be TeamSpeak3 server, plus a couple of other things that I'm looking into. The one above it has 16Gb RAM and is my VMWare virtual server. I had 3 servers running on it full-time, but I consolidated their services onto the Ubuntu machine. For now, I use it for testing configurations on my existing servers and for trying out new things. As I mentioned in a previous post, I work for an IT company, and occasionally we get gear back when their leases expire, usually after 3 years. I've only sunk $250-$300 of my own money into it. The rack unit, 2 ML350's, bottom battery, and monitor cost me $0. The DL-360 and 2nd Liebert UPS cost me a $150 donation to the company charity committee. I bought the switch and cabling. Once I buy a couple of longer cables this week I'll tidy up all of the cabling so it looks nice and neat. The black power cord in the back right goes over to my work bench, otherwise there'd be no power cables visible.

It's hilarious, but not for the weak of stomach!

Not sure what was causing it, but once we hit 20-21 players on the server, severe lag would kick in, crushing game-play for everyone.

Good to see you on the forums, Dickie! See ya back in the WAW FT server!

Good top see you on the forums Gump Jr!

Hey ViPRZ, you may be thinking of the classic Highland Links course in Ingonish, Cape Breton. This one is the shiny-new 2 year-old Cabot Links in Inverness an hour and a half drive away from Highland Links. The names of the courses and villages are pretty similar!

Nope. Nopenopenope. What Djmot said. 1000%. Running 2x EVGA 680's. Latest driver is smooth and seems to have fixed a bug that previously caused a zoomed-in scope to be jerky and unusable when running 2 cards in SLI (and from anecdotal accounts, some single cards as well too). Same idea with Windows/Linux/OS X patches: install them because they've invested a bunch of resources to fix and improve things.

XI Downloader is downloading fast and furious. Thanks Rugger!

That's me on the far left at the awesome 16th hole at Cabot Links.

Heh, I tried golf 16 years ago and didn't get it. Fast-forward to the present. I played a company tournament 2 years ago this June and caught the bug. My little and isolated hometown on the east coast of Canada built a new course 2 years ago, and Golf Magazine and Golf Digest have already ranked it in their top 100 courses in the world, and it's 5 minutes from my family home. I've played it 3 times now. Where I live in Southern Ontario has more courses per capita than anywhere in North America. I have 7 courses within a 10 minute drive of my home. Within a half-hour I have dozens. Now, I've become what I used to mock . I've really caught the bug. Doesn't help that there's an excellent practice range 5 minutes down the road from my house with a very good pro.

Thanks Rugger!

Hi all, In-game downloads: The first file comes down at 8-13kb/sec, then the second part just hangs. XI Downloader: Nothing downloads. The error for all files under the "state" column says: "WaitingForReconnect, The remote server returned an error: (404) Not Found". Having spent the day yesterday configuring Apache, MySQL, an FTP server on my Ubuntu server, and troubleshooting my weather station's real-time data website, I can sympathize with the system admins. Looks like I'll be watching the Sony Classic on the Golf Channel this evening...

Happy birthday Rookido!

Wonderful to see someone step up and do something good for the critters. As an owner of a pair of rescues, "Thanks!"

In my experience, yes, you need to install all of the motherboard drivers - network, BIOS, bluetooth etc etc.., whatever is listed for your board. All my gear is ASUS and I've had to do this for Win7. Oddly, I didn't have to with the bump to Win 8.1

I've never tried Hyper V yet. I do have a copy of Server 2012, so I may give it a shot. VMWare is great because its recourse hit is tiny and it just gets out of the way. I'll have to dig into the key differences between the two. Our shop is 99% VMWare, but Microsoft is really giving us the hard push and incentives to get into HyperV.

Here's my current network diagram. I have 100-foot runs of cat6 cable running from my office sown to the basement server room. I'm also going to task one of the servers, either in a VM or the Dell, as a Sophos Unified Threat Management gateway/router. The Wyse terminal has weather software called Cumulus installed on it. I use it for data collection from my wireless weather station. The data is then sent to the Weather Underground and to their map, and FTP'd to a personal web page where I can check in for more real-time data. It also tweets current conditions 4 times a day, which is also auto-forwarded to my extreme weather Facebook page.

Heeee-yaaahhh! Nice one there Tball! My requirements aren't quite that extreme, but that is nice. I also have a Dell T610 that I have to add some memory and drives to. No rush on that.

Neither do I. so when opportunity knocks...

Hi all, Check out my rack in a spare room in my basement! The rack is a 24u APC Netshelter. The front door, sides, and 2 rear doors come off easily. One of the rear doors has a gap at the bottom for power cables, and there are three grommeted holes on top of the chassis for cables and whatnot. On the bottom is a Liebert 1500VA Uninterruptable Power Supply (UPS) for power conditioning for the servers and backup in case of a power failure. Another one will be added shortly, so the mess of cables in the back to a 2nd external UPS will disappear. The servers are 3-4-ish year-old HP ML350 towers, with quad-core Intel Xeon processors, laid on their sides on L bracket shelves. The bottom one has 9 drives and 8Gb of ECC memory, and is my file/media/web server. It runs Ubuntu Linux server. The top one has 16Gb of ECC memory and runs VMWare and several virtual servers. I pillaged some parts from it for the bottom server, so it's powered off until I replace the parts this week. Both have redundant fans and power supplies. I added a shelf on top for the gigabit network switch and other bits. On top is a mouse, keyboard, monitor, and KVM switch so I can use all the peripherals between both servers. I plan on adding a rack-mount 24-port gigabit network switch (our household of 2 actually needs it, especially when the DSL modem and router are moved to this room) and a couple of other bits. The best part is all of the above cost me next-to-nothing (I bought the switch, mouse, and keyboard). All of the rest were equipment returned to my employer off-lease. They were taking up space in the warehouse, so I was given the go-ahead to load up my truck with whatever I wanted. I work for an IT company, and every now and then we get a pile of gear back. It's paid for and done, so it's either given to interested employees or sent out for recycling. The rack was a huge score! Our 15-week-old kittens and dogs can't play with the cables.

Agree with you Merlin. I'm in the same situation. I'd like to see the game return as I'll have some time to play it, but if it isn't worth it as per the Admins analysis, well, that's that. Shame too, as both of us waited for the sales and deals to buy the whole map-pack shebang.

Same here. Bad time of year, expenses, had to fix the furnace...