Stuart's Weblog

The Jetway J7F5M MiniTIX motherboard is yet another entry in the 17x17cm small HTPC/low-powered server market. This particular model runs at 2GHz and features Jetway’s proprietary expansion connector for adding additional network, video, or serial ports. I have a 2xRS232 expansion card on mine, to allow me to fix otherwise broken servers via a serial link – it’s the way of the future

What impressed me is that options for the expansion board appeared in the BIOS, and without any obvious option-ROM loading sequence as is often seen delaying the boot sequence nowadays (JMicron, I’m looking at you) – I can configure the additional ports along with the rest of the system.

What is unfortunate, then, is that Jetway have broken ACPI DSDT tables, built with Microsoft’s non standards-compliant ASL compiler, installed with their BIOS.

This causes a number of issues, including premature shutdown and standby/resume failures – but luckily these are all fixable!

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Read all about it

(Additionally, the Contact links from their Support Forum return an ASP error page, as does attempting to post any topic whose text includes an apostrophe! Colour me highly unimpressed…)

Further to the situation documented here: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=869249, it appears that Foxconn are still shipping motherboards with BIOS which are either intentionally or inadvertently broken under any non-Windows OS.

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… or why I vow never to build a PC ever again

Having last built a new desktop computer (I do have an ever expanding collection of MiniITX servers, but these don’t count ) in about 2003, I decided that it was high time to upgrade my 256Mb Athlon 1800+ desktop to something more recent: I was finding that I wasn’t updating my Gentoo Linux installation on the basis that I’d probably be replacing it in the near future, and I really wanted to play a few more interesting recent games such as Bioshock.

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I noticed recently that when certain house-mates turned on their computers, suddenly my internet connection would become very slow and highly unreliable – ah, the joys of Bittorrent and P2P traffic <sigh>

Rather than just trying to ban people from using these services (like that’d ever work… and anyway, BitTorrent has legitimate uses and they’re all paying towards the cost of the connection anyway, so it’s not my place to get all dictatorial) I decided to be a bit smarter: a packet-filtering system which can prioritise certain traffic whilst holding-back other types would not only allow people to run P2P software with abandon, but also keep everyone’s connection steaming along whilst hopefully improving subjective responsiveness.

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Currently, the server hosting this blog (a 300MHz Silicon Graphics O2 with two SCSI discs) is sitting on a shelf in my bedroom, where it’s been housed since I moved house in December. This’d be fine, except the discs are so damned noisy! So basically, for the past 8 or 8 months, the server’s only been switched on whilst I’m not there (and even then, only when I remember to turn it on before leaving) and so there have been long outages, and few updates.

The good news is that, as of tomorrow, this should all be a thing of the past: The electrician is coming back, and is fitting the power sockets, network sockets, and a light under my stairs, so that I can finally move all of the computers into here, where they can run all day long without disturbing anyone!

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