Andrew Bolster's questions

Trying to diagnose random hardware freezes and did the natural thing; started memtesting everything.

DDR400 DDR2 Ram CAS 5-5-5-18 Four sets of sticks; 2x2GB PNY's and 2x1GB Elixirs

So far I've tested one of the Elixirs and one of the PNY's, and both are failing at the same point (around 129MB) and only failing on the Random Number Sequence test.

Am I missing something? Is this normal failure? Is it a case of getting new ram or throwing the Motherboard out?

I'm trying to get my hands on another DDR2 machine to do comparative tests but thought I'd ask anyway.

Unless I'm missing something, there appears to be no simple way in *NIX to read from a serial port directly into a file

I had imagined something as simple as cat /dev/ttyX > file but apparently not

Does anyone know a trick that I'm missing?

Having read through the rsync manpage, I can't see any way for rsync to automagically transform absolute symlinks between machines, i.e

Server A
file -> /home/username/path/file

Server B
file -> /home/differentusername/path/file

Any ideas (bearing in mind that the rsync would only be run under /home/username/)?

Is there any straightforward record/poll of long term load record instead of the usual 1,5,15 minute load values?

Background: Trying to convince faculty that current cluster solution is underutilized XX% of the time and could be used for BOINC / etc during periods of 'silence'

Any ideas for essentially creating a loop-back display on a remote server, so I run a X application, and instead of forwarding that display to a local client, the output is essentially 'screen-grabbed', just without a screen?

Explanation: High performance visualizations (read:pretty pretty pictures) with no interactivity needed while I'm 3000 miles away.

I think I have found a bug in Ubuntu 10.04 beta, but since its a fairly vague problem of non booting after an install (Question Here) i wanted to know what information to gather?

Summary of question: Install of 10.04 goes happily, but boots to a frozen un-responsive splash screen

I'm working on a hopefully unrelated question question and I've got to a strange situation.

First: I know very little about the very low level hardware kernel storage driver magix, so I'm hoping a) someone can help and b) someone can explain it to me better.

I've been trying a dozen different configurations of my 2x500GB SATA drives over the past few hours involving switching between ACHI/IDE/RAID in my bios; After each attempt I've reset the bios option, booted into a live CD, deleting partitions and rewriting partition tables left on the drives.

Now, however, I've been sitting with a /dev/mapper/nvidia_XXXXXXX1 that seems to be impossible to kill!

It's the only 'partition' that I see in the Ubuntu install (but I can see the others in parted) but it is only the size of one of the drives, and I know I did not set any RAID levels other than RAID0.

Anyone have any ideas how I can kill this and get back to just two independent IDE drives? Or can anyone convince me of a reason to go the AHCI route?

Many thanks in advance.

Update Thanks to you guys this was sorted, and I've updated my blog with a summary walkthrough