Dryice Liu's Blog » Uncategorized

Never let the BIOS beeps confuse you

dryice — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 11:55:16 +0000

My old desktop got an ASUS A8N5X mother board, and sometime ago it stops working. Whenever when I try to boot it up, it ends up with the system beeps, one long, two short, and then repeat.

Then I look up Google and the manual, that signal means there is a problem on the display card, and/or a problem on the power supply part of the mother board. So I did everything I could imagine: Clean up the slots on the motherboard, and the display card, remove all the perpherals, check the power supply, and finally replace the GigaByte PCIE-16x display card with and old ELSA PCI display card, all didn’t help. I was thinking about send it back to ASUS for repair.

Today I called ASUS, and the tech support asked me to re-install the RAM. Hmm, why RAM? I know it’s the suspect for most hardware problems but the BIOS beeps told me it’s the display subsystem!

Anyway I did it and Bang! It worked! All I need to do is pull those two RAM out and then reinstall them back! It took me about a month to figure this out! What I have learned? Never let the BIOS beeps confuse you, try everything you could, even it looks unreasonable.

Why the FreeBSD ports system rocks

dryice — Mon, 03 Sep 2007 02:19:15 +0000

Well I need to handle some PHP upgrade on a Debian server some days ago, and it turns out to be a nightmire…

Debian is famous for its “apt-get” package management system, and I thought it would be easy. However, it turns out all the packages are binary and have exact version numbers in dependency. To make it worse, the previous sysadmin uses both sarge and etch packages. Now if you want to install something from sarge, it complains some dependence in etch is too high and won’t continue, and if you want to install something from etch, well, some dependences got a version too low.

And I tried the “smart” “apt-get dist-upgrade” command, and it removed my bind9! All sites going down because of this. And to make it worse, I can’t install it again because of the sarge/etch mix. And finially I have to deinstall many packages and re-install them, and stick to sarge.

I know this is not a pure problem on Debian, the previous sysadmin should be blamed mostly, but, hi, the binary package system with hard coded version numbers makes all these possible… And I have to say, compile from the source rocks! The FreeBSD ports system rocks!