RAID - PX4 Storm - 3G Dongle
RAID
Well I sorta hated to cover up the pic of my daughter, but I s'pose Skoosh has a point and life goes on. Overall my week has exhibited major suck factor - my T1 went down Sunday and I spent 18 hours dealing with that. And that's the good stuff.
I deal with and build a lot of RAIDs. Not for clients - to use. A buddy of mine who worked for a data recovery center (where they have clean rooms and open up and rebuild critical drives that fail) once said to me "RAIDs are the best thing to happen to my business." His point being RAIDs are often built of identical drives, sometimes with sequential serial numbers, and are housed in the same place, experience the same conditions, etc. Sooo, it isn't so rare that more than one will fail at the exact same time. That's why I tend to avoid the common trend and build my RAIDs from somewhat dis-similar drives. It can be a small performance hit, but I figure it's worth it for the added security.
The culprit (actually one of its twins, but you get the idea):
Sunday I had a Seagate and a Western Digital fail on me in the same RAID at the same time. And the Maxtor SATA drive I used for backup died, too. So I have been spending much of my time looking at stuff like this, instead of doing productive work that we get actually paid to do:
The bottom line is I'll lose about a week of real work and take maybe a $6800 out of pocket hit. The fun never ends!
PX4 Storm
So while I am formatting and verifying and loading off of tape etc. I do have dead time in between. Time to run to the various gun shops when they call that an order of mine has arrived. About a year ago I hit upon the Beretta CX4 Storm Carbine paired with their PX4 Storm Pistol as a magazine-sharing pistol/carbine combination for home defense. I'd owned the CX4 for nearly a year, and maybe three weeks ago ordered the PX4 and picked it up today.
My first impression was that it is a nice, solid feeling naturally pointing full frame pistol. It was not going to replace my Sig 226 SAS as my primary full frame carry pistol, but that was never the point. The issue I have arose as I began to dry fire to test the action. The PX4 comes in a variety of actions or "operating systems". I knew I wanted some form of a double action only. They had two models that seemed likely candidates: the "D" (double action only) and the "C" (continuous action).
Continuous action? Huh? So I researched it and the best review I found was that the "C" model was compared to the trigger system on my Sig SAS DAK - a specialized double action only system designed for the requirements of law enforcement carry. Perfect! So I got the "C".
I release the slide...squeeze off a dry shot - "click" - and go for the follow up - nothing. WTF? As near as I can tell EITHER the "C" is a stupid name for a single action only, or my pistol has a defective action. I fear it is the former, though it is staying in the box until I can confer with Beretta tech support.
It sure is purdy, though.
3G Dongle
When I bought my new cell phone I had them throw in a Sierra Mercury - a USB dongle that acts as a 3G modem. As a cool add on, it also has a microSD slot that allows you to add a memory card to use it as a standard Flash drive (or microSD card reader, if you prefer).
I did not expect much - I am on the edge of decent cell service, and my old Sprint PCMCIA usually performed at about 20% of the promised already limited bandwidth.
Well with the T1 down it was worth trying. After the usual worthless driver issues - made a little worse as I had no connectivity to seek alternatives - it was up and blazing - at about 3.5Mbps throughput. Yeah, about 1/3 of 10-BaseT. And that's with -99dB 20% or so connection strength - 1 bar.
The thing ROCKS (see the 8GB chip next to it?):
So after all that I am pretty happy that in about a week I'll be fishing!
RAID
Well I sorta hated to cover up the pic of my daughter, but I s'pose Skoosh has a point and life goes on. Overall my week has exhibited major suck factor - my T1 went down Sunday and I spent 18 hours dealing with that. And that's the good stuff.
I deal with and build a lot of RAIDs. Not for clients - to use. A buddy of mine who worked for a data recovery center (where they have clean rooms and open up and rebuild critical drives that fail) once said to me "RAIDs are the best thing to happen to my business." His point being RAIDs are often built of identical drives, sometimes with sequential serial numbers, and are housed in the same place, experience the same conditions, etc. Sooo, it isn't so rare that more than one will fail at the exact same time. That's why I tend to avoid the common trend and build my RAIDs from somewhat dis-similar drives. It can be a small performance hit, but I figure it's worth it for the added security.
The culprit (actually one of its twins, but you get the idea):
Sunday I had a Seagate and a Western Digital fail on me in the same RAID at the same time. And the Maxtor SATA drive I used for backup died, too. So I have been spending much of my time looking at stuff like this, instead of doing productive work that we get actually paid to do:
The bottom line is I'll lose about a week of real work and take maybe a $6800 out of pocket hit. The fun never ends!
PX4 Storm
So while I am formatting and verifying and loading off of tape etc. I do have dead time in between. Time to run to the various gun shops when they call that an order of mine has arrived. About a year ago I hit upon the Beretta CX4 Storm Carbine paired with their PX4 Storm Pistol as a magazine-sharing pistol/carbine combination for home defense. I'd owned the CX4 for nearly a year, and maybe three weeks ago ordered the PX4 and picked it up today.
My first impression was that it is a nice, solid feeling naturally pointing full frame pistol. It was not going to replace my Sig 226 SAS as my primary full frame carry pistol, but that was never the point. The issue I have arose as I began to dry fire to test the action. The PX4 comes in a variety of actions or "operating systems". I knew I wanted some form of a double action only. They had two models that seemed likely candidates: the "D" (double action only) and the "C" (continuous action).
Continuous action? Huh? So I researched it and the best review I found was that the "C" model was compared to the trigger system on my Sig SAS DAK - a specialized double action only system designed for the requirements of law enforcement carry. Perfect! So I got the "C".
I release the slide...squeeze off a dry shot - "click" - and go for the follow up - nothing. WTF? As near as I can tell EITHER the "C" is a stupid name for a single action only, or my pistol has a defective action. I fear it is the former, though it is staying in the box until I can confer with Beretta tech support.
It sure is purdy, though.
3G Dongle
When I bought my new cell phone I had them throw in a Sierra Mercury - a USB dongle that acts as a 3G modem. As a cool add on, it also has a microSD slot that allows you to add a memory card to use it as a standard Flash drive (or microSD card reader, if you prefer).
I did not expect much - I am on the edge of decent cell service, and my old Sprint PCMCIA usually performed at about 20% of the promised already limited bandwidth.
Well with the T1 down it was worth trying. After the usual worthless driver issues - made a little worse as I had no connectivity to seek alternatives - it was up and blazing - at about 3.5Mbps throughput. Yeah, about 1/3 of 10-BaseT. And that's with -99dB 20% or so connection strength - 1 bar.
The thing ROCKS (see the 8GB chip next to it?):
So after all that I am pretty happy that in about a week I'll be fishing!
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Good stuff!