 |
 |
Scott's Column
PC Resurrection, IP Address Change, Web
Hosting & Virtual PC
June 1, 2008
By Scott Lewis
Introductory paragraph goes here.
Current Topics:
Last month I select components to revive my desktop PC that was
ruined when struck by lightning over a year ago. I selected the
following components:
Intel Core 2 Duo E6750 Conroe 2.66GHz LGA 775 65W
179.99
GIGABYTE GA-P35-DS3L LGA 775 Intel P35 ATX
89.99
Kingston HyperX 2GB (2 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 1066
66.99
GIGABYTE GV-NX85T512HP GeForce 8500GT 512MB x16 SLI Supported
67.99
------
Total 404.96
For a hair over $400 we could have a computer that will run Vista and
all its eye candy. Keep in mind that this $400 is an upgrade. I would
expect to reuse my case, hard drive, DVD burner, speakers and monitor. I
also mentioned getting a Hauppauge WinTV-HVR-950 TV tuner card that
would allow this computer to be a Media Center. With Media Center
capability I would record TV shows that could be synced with my Zune 80.
This month I want to cover additional configurations. If you recall from
last month, my opinion of a good gaming PC is one that will run Crysis
at a decent frame rate (30+ fps). The $400 configuration above
will not run Crysis.
A quick note: The prices from last month's article (and quoted above)
were current on 4/3/2008. The prices below were current on 5/26/2008.
Keep this in mind as sometimes the dollars may seem a little off if you
are actively searching for components yourself. By the time you read
this almost everything listed here will be a little cheaper.
The absolute least we could spend to upgrade my old computer to play
Crysis will require a minimum of a nVidia GeForce 8800GT video card. If
we substitute the GeForce 8500GT ($67.99) with this:
XFX PVT88PYSF4 GeForce 8800GT 512MB 256-bit GDDR3
SLI
169.99
We get a new total of $506.96. This would be in the middle of
Extreme Tech's Bang for the Buck PC, which uses the GeForce 8800GT but
with a faster processor than I chose, and
their $800 PC which uses a
slower 9600GT and even slower CPU then the one I selected. Extreme Tech
was able to get 37fps out of their $800 PC (at 1280x1024 with Low
detail). The low detail is not acceptable to me. But the frame rates
from their Bang for the Buck PC give hope that my configuration might be
playable with some of the eye candy in Crysis.
Ideally we should go with a faster CPU and a motherboard that supports
SLI (using two video cards as one for double the performance... in
theory). I stepped up one notch in the CPU in the Core 2 Duo line (E6850)
because is came down a lot in price:
Intel Core 2 Duo E6850 Conroe 3.0GHz LGA 775 65W
184.99
ASUS P5N-E SLI LGA 775 NVIDIA nForce 650i SLI ATX 119.99
Kingston HyperX 2GB (2 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 1066
66.99
XFX PVT88PYSF4 GeForce 8800GT 512MB 256-bit GDDR3 SLI
169.99
------
Total 541.96
So we have a slight boost in CPU speed and the ability to add a second
video card later with SLI. Now we are a good deal over $500. For this
configuration I wanted to go with SLI
so I could upgrade later for a modest investment. Ultimately
we should look at a faster video card or buy two 8800GT video cards to
play Crysis properly. If we want a faster video card now that might play
Crysis we could step up to the 8800 GTS.
Here is one of the cheapest 8800GTS cards I could find:
MSI NX8800GTS 512M OC GeForce 8800GTS (G92) 512MB
SLI
224.99
This would drive our total up to $596.96. We are pushing 6 bills, but
might have a better chance at playing Crysis. And we can still add a
second 8800GTS card later.
That's it for this month. I need to warm up my wife to the idea of
letting me build up my desktop PC. I may have to make some compromises
to get a decent widescreen monitor. I am currently running a very old
17" Sony Trinitron monitor that I bought when
I built my first PC back
in 1999. Next month I will look at the state of
things and come up with a decent configuration that will include a
monitor and not break my bank account.
My home IP address changed a few weeks ago. I apologies for the
inconvenience to anyone that is clicking on an old link. Since I am
hosting my web site at my house with a dynamic IP Address (one that can
change at whim from my cable provider) I don't have a domain name like
www.scott-lewis.net. I am considering changing that, especially in light
of the recent address change. This is the first time in over two years
my IP address changed.
How it started was a little confusing. My browser at work did not bring
up my favorites. This is a page on my
web site that I have as one of 4 pages that load automatically with
Firefox when I start it. Actually, it did show up until I tried to
refresh the page. Since the page was cached and it does not change
frequently I am not exactly sure how long it was down.
I noticed it the day after Mother's Day. Initially I just thought that I
was having an internet connection issue at home. When checking the page
from work I could not access my site at all. When I was at home I tried
connecting to the page from my laptop. Nothing. I was on the Internet,
how could this be. I initially assumed some setting in my router was
amiss. I tried logging onto the administration page of the Linksys
router. It would not let me in. Did I forget the password. I tried a lot
of passwords. None of them worked. In frustration I reset the router
using the recessed button on the back. This restores all the factory
settings. I went in and set a password. Then I reset the SID to the one
from before (so everyone's laptop connects correctly) and then reset the
port forwarding to my home server to act as a web server. I noticed that
the IP address of the router was not the same as, so I changed it in the
startup page of Firefox. All seemed just fine.
Next, I needed to update my Road Runner hosted web pages (which point to
my pages on my home server) to update the IP address there. I could not
login. I tried and tried and eventually had to e-mail Road Runner to ask
them to reset the password. It took three days to get a response from
Road Runner and then they told me I would have to call someone to have
my password reset. Oops! I followed the link they provided to where I
can administer the pages online. I entered what I thought my old
password was (the one I had tried a few times in Expression Web) and it
worked. I went to Expression Web and tried to open the site there. It
worked. I don't know why my password did not work originally, but I was
up and running and could edit the pages on Road Runner to point to my
new address.
Back at work I launched Firefox and low and behold I could not access my
favorites page or anything else on my web site. Hmm. Was my connection
at home down. At home I tried again and I could get to my web site. I
connected remotely to my workstation at work and tried loading up the
site. Maybe I copied the IP address wrong. Everything looked like it
should work, but it did not.
I went through all the Linksys setup screens and could not find anything
out of the ordinary. I decided to check the clients connected to the
router and I could not see my home server. That's strange. I checked
that I could access the machine. How could I see the computer on the
network and the router not have it listed in its client list.
I wondered if any of this had anything to do with the fact that I have
my home server using a static IP address. This is so that I can be sure
my home server always has the same address (internally to my own home
network) so that I can forward all port 80 (http or web) traffic to the
server. I can ping my server and it has the correct IP address. I tried
reading the manual for the Linksys router and it only said that setting
up a static IP address was handled at the client.
I tried rebooting the server and it still did not show up as a client to
the router. I am assuming here that the router does not see the server,
but the other computers do because it still has its IP address. I did a
quick search online and found reference to the fact that when setting up
a static IP address it must be outside the range of
addresses the router will pass out as dynamic addresses.
So, the Linksys router (after resetting) was giving out addresses
starting with 192.168.1.100 and it was set to give out up to 50
addresses. Ah-ha! My server is trying to use 192.168.1.125. This is
right in the middle of the range the router wants to use for dynamic
addresses. I didn't want to change the server, so I set the router to
give out only 20 addresses. I reboot the server and everything worked. I
am using my new IP address and everything is as it was.
Except that nobody knows my new address...
This leads me to web hosting. I have very simple needs. I don't get a
lot of traffic (darn!), and my pages are all static. However, I have
a lot of images on this site with the massive number of
pictures of cars from my Classic Car Watch and
Car Corner columns. I don't want to be without them. These are
my two favorite columns... yes, even over this one you are reading right
now.
At present my web site requires 775 MB. It is the disk space issue that
drove me to host the site at home. The last time I was using a domain
name and having it hosted the disc space limit was 100 MB and I had to
pay extra per month when I went over. That required me to remove the
full size images from my sight and only leave the thumbnails... with no
link to the original pictures.
Today I have a small "home page" on my ISP's site (http://home.satx.rr.com/theburb/).
This is just a shell site that has pages that auto-forward
to the core pages on my site at home. The idea being that when my IP
address changes I just change the address in those few pages on Road
Runner's servers (see the section above).
The problem is that as Google and other search sites map out links to
pages they end up mapping out my actual IP address... where the actual
content is. Now all those Google links are broken. My traffic will go
down quite a bit until search engines refresh their links.
You can test this by clicking
this link, which will take you to Google searching for the word
Camaro on my old IP address. You will get around 100 links, but they are
all broken. If you don't like the link above you can enter this text
into Google:
camaro site:70.125.157.216
This tells Google to search for the word Camaro at the site
70.125.157.216, which is my old IP address.
If I want to use a domain name (I use to have www.scott-lewis.com, but
some real estate agent took it) I would have to do one of two things.
Find a web hosting service, or find a service to connect a domain name
to a dynamic address.
I remember researching the latter once before. It sounds like a neat
idea. Get the domain name and then find a service that automatically
updates the IP address that the domain name points to. I envision
installing some kind of client tool that would "phone home" to the
service so it knows when the IP address changes. This would allow me to
do whatever I want on my site. I could build a real site instead of a
static HTML site. I could add database access and other features.
Granted, for a site with nothing but articles those features largely go
wasted, but the option is there.
Next month I will continue the web hosting topic. I have three very real
possibilities lined up. I have already implemented one of them, but that
just makes next month's article more exciting as it will lead to a
solution, not just theory.
Stay tuned.
I have talk about virtualization software before. This is software
that lets you run a self contained operating system in its own little
environment. There are a number of products. VMWare Workstation
& Player, Microsoft Virtual PC, Sun's
Virtual Box and Parallels Desktop. Parallels
is heavily into the Mac, but VMWare has a competing product called
Fusion and there is a version of Virtual Box that runs on the Mac. When
I say they run or are geared toward the Mac I mean it is expected that
you have a Mac. None of the virtualization applications officially
support running the Mac OS in a virtual machine on non-Apple hardware.
All this is academic. I have played with one version or another of all
four of those programs. Don't shoot me for not knowing about others, if
they exist. However, when running Windows in a virtual machine on a
Windows computer I like Microsoft's Virtual PC. It is easy to setup,
easy to copy files to make backups, and it just works.
In the past I have written about testing running Windows from Linux, or
vise-versa. This time it is different. I am not playing around. All the
previous stuff was playing because I never seriously considered using
virtualization software to leave Windows XP.
My current foray into the virtual world of PC platforms has strickly
been with Windows XP... on Windows XP. I have a VB6 application at work.
This application writes input files for a product called Fusion Pro
which we use for Postscript composition.
Fusion Pro has gone through a number of revisions. Follow closely. When
we started using the product it was called DL Formatter, then it was
called DL-100, now it is called Fusion Pro. Each version has its own
plug-ins for template design applications, and that same plug-in is what
my VB6 application uses to edit template at run time.
Right now we have DL-100 in production on our servers. I need to be able
to compile other programs to work with DL-100 so I have it installed on
my workstation. However, we have one application that is relying on DL
Formatter on the workstation. So I have a virtual machine with Visual
Basic 6 and DL Formatter installed so I can compile that program for the
production machine.
Next we are in the final phase of testing Fusion Pro and we need a copy
of the VB6 program that can connect to the test server. So I have
another virtual machine that has VB6 and Fusion Pro on it so I can
compile the code for the people doing testing.
Finally, the people doing testing occasionally have to troubleshoot
problem orders in production, so I set them up with Virtual PC so they
can run the version I compiled on my machine with DL-100.
After all the playing I am actually using virtual
machine software. And this is one of the best reasons to use it... for
compatibility with older applications... or in this case even
incompatible versions of plug-ins to current applications.
Very Cool!
Conclusion
That's it for this month. There is a lot more in store for next month. Come back and see what happens next.
