LambSpam asks: "I had a nightmare week (last week) with two of our servers running Intel's U3-1L RAID controller (RAID 5). Whenever there's a power outage in our building these controllers randomly mark one or more of the drives in the array offline (even with adequate UPS support), which means I have to manually mark them online and/or rebuild. Intel acknowledged the problem, but their solution involves updating the backplane's firmware, the controller firmware (destructive upgrade!), and even the firmware on our IBM drives in the array because they 'draw too much power' in certain conditions. I've only used one other RAID 5 implementation (MegaRAID), and it NEVER had these kinds of problems, whereas if you sneeze too hard around this U3-1L card it will go offline. Is this common with most hardware RAID implementations? What RAID 5 implementations works without hassle? What should I stay away from?"

antis0c asks: "After reading many stories on Slashdot about building custom PC cases, I'm highly interested in building one myself. The only problem - I have absolutely no experience working with PlexiGlass/Acrylic/Lexan, basically any plastic type materials. I'd like to learn the basics, cutting, adhesives, special tools, all the skills required to build a PC case out of this stuff. A quick Google search left nothing really good on it, and I can't even find any books on Amazon on the topic. I hoping some Slashdotters might have some insight on good books on the topic, sites, or perhaps just information."

A not-so Anonymous Coward asks: "I'm a student in the dorms at the University of Colorado, where every room is wired with Ethernet. I bought an 802.11b access point and card, and have been using them on the network. 2 days ago, I came home to find out that my network access had been shut off. When I called ITS, they said it was because I was running the access point, and this was against policy. I proceeded to look through CU's site, and read the entire AUP and terms of use. Nowhere in these agreements is any ban on using wireless equipment in-room. When I called back to see when I could get my access turned back on, I was told that the one person that could help me was out sick. So far my access has been off for 2 days and counting, and chances are slim that I'll get it back by Monday, leaving me with a total of 5+ days without access, all for a violation I was unaware of, and had no warning about. Do I have any rights to force them to turn my access on earlier, or do I just sit without access until they get around to helping me?" Now assuming the AP was not completely open to public access, what possible reason is there for such a limitation? Most kids now go to college with laptops, and an AP is probably the best way for them to work (ie, not tied to the wall). My recommendation would be to politely talk to the University IT department? If anyone else has been in similar situations, how did you go about dealing with the University to get your account/email address/network access restored?

Traxton1 asks: "I am a student in a community college, and I spent all day in a hiring committee for a new Computer Science faculty member. I was wondering if there are many teachers who hang around on Slashdot. One of the people we interviewed had a power point presentation that didn't display correctly, and he said it was because he was using Star Office. I was shocked that someone who wasn't in the tech sector used anything beside Windows. My C++ teacher actually said that if we used anything beside Visual C++ he wouldn't even try to help us compile.I was just curious to know if people who really are very tech-savvy desire to be teachers at all. Oh, one more thing: they tried hiring for this position 2 years ago and got 3 applicants, and none of them qualified for the job." They say teaching is an "honorable profession" and I believe every word if it. If only they got paid more, maybe there would be more quality applicants across all subjects.

An unfortunete XP user... asks: "I find myself having to use a Windows XP Pro machine at work, but I want to convience of tcsh... command.com just doesn't cut it for what I am doing. Has anyone ported a *NIX shell (csh, tcsh, or even sh) to Windows XP Pro?" How well does Cygwin handle the Windows XP environment?

An anonymous reader writes: "Our company is planning to build a small server room. Initial requirements are for two or three enclosed server cabinets in which various servers and network gear will be installed. The cabinets are planned to hold between 15 to 20 servers of various types and sizes, switches, routers, four dial-in modems for after hours use by staff who do not have ISPs and a KVM switch. We would expect for a small desk as a work area, a book case, storage for some spare parts as well as server documentation and records. We know that we need some power protection in the way of a UPS and a generator. We also expect that this room will get quite warm in the summer months so it will need more air conditioning than the rest of the office. What should we expect for power and cooling needs? Are there any 'rules of thumb' when it comes to building a server room. Good suggestions and help would be appreciated."

Milo_Mindbender writes: "Over the weekend I was attempting to improve my CD ripping performance and discovered RedHat 7.2 was running my Ultra/ATA 100 hard drive in a very slow non-DMA mode. After a fair amount of searching for how to fix this, a trivial change (look here) improved drive performance from 3MBs to 38MBs! FSCK on my 40gb partition went from over 5 minutes to under 1! This issue wasn't documented in RedHat's manuals but it effected a number of boxes in our office so I'm betting many other people in the world have the same problem. This made me wonder how many other common Linux tuning snafus there might be that a lot of people are probably missing. Do you know of any?"

TrebleJunkie writes "I've spent some time recenting looking for open source projects dealing with Automated Text Summarization -- automatically generating detailed summaries from longer documents -- to no avail. I can find a lot of research papers and several commercial projects, but no open source code or projects? Does anyone out there know of any?"

Mark Hood writes: "I've been asked to provide a simple trouble-shooting guide for new engineers to follow when presented with an unfamiliar fault or bug report. Mainly this can be done with static web pages and a series of 'yes/no' questions... (Is it plugged in? Is it switched on? etc) but a nice facility would be to allow engineers to update it with what they did to fix faults / gather information. The question is: does anything simple like this already exist? Web searches turn up loads of 'Expert System Shells' or 'Programming Systems', but I was hoping for something that wouldn't require months of dedicated time (this is not my job, I'm just helping out :). Anyone done this at their workplace? Any hints? Or should I knuckle down and write a few CGI scripts for adding data to a web page?"

Some random reader sent in: "Hi, I'm wondering what others out there use for server naming conventions. Our data centre right now houses a little under 200 servers, with plans to grow up to 4000 servers within the next five years. We'd like to pick something flexible and easy to manage with any tracking system. The servers we'll be implementing include SUN, HPUX, and AIX servers, in addition to existing Compaq and HP Intel servers, so we'll have to adhere to limitations placed on hostnames by manufacturers (ie HPUX lets you have an 8 character hostname)." We had a similar story a few years ago.

GizmoDuck writes "I'm working in a computational chemistry lab, and we find ourselves using memory and CPU hogs like Amber and Gaussian. The CPU hogging isn't a problem, thanks to Condor, but when submitting one of the jobs that request (and pretty much require) all the physical RAM in the machines, Linux promptly starts swapping so hard that the mouse pointer in X stops moving, NFS and NIS halt, and things don't get back to normal for five minutes. I've tried toying a bit with the settings in /proc/sys/vm/kswapd to no avail. I've done some poking around on the 'net looking for answers. Faster disks and swap partitions at the beginning of the drive aren't really an option at this point. I haven't found a good solution yet. I was wondering if the /. community has any input on how to keep the system from locking during periods of necessarily high swap activity?"

racerx509 writes: "I just did something thats probably going to cost me much. I was reinstalling my hdd after trying to ghost the partition for another pc, when I jammed the cable in wrong. The cable is keyed and the keyed side was in correctlty, so I figured that it was going in right. However, I have severly bent several of the pins. The HDD will no longer detect even after I attempted to straighten the pins. Pin #11 has receded into the aperature and pins #15 and #16 are seriously bent. I've straightened them out with tweezers as much as I can, but it looks like this drive is gone. I would replace it, but i have some very important data on it. Does anyone know of a way I could straigten the pins and pull receded ones? If not, what about a good data recovery service in the Atlanta area?"

cheros writes "I work in an office which has various printers, and printing documents with a few color diagrams in is actually a pain. Due to the high cost of the color prints the preference is to use B&W, and print the color pages separately (with obviously an finishing stage to collate and merge the two). Is there a print filter that would automatically split the PostScript print job into a feed for two different queues? (and yes, we use B&W drawings where possible ;-)."

thaddjuice writes: "I'm interested in installing a computer on my sailboat to interface with the ship's navigation and communication systems. What I'm wondering is what needs to be done to a computer to protect it from salty air, potentially damp surroundings, and temperature extremes. What parts are most vulnerable? What about peripherals - can you protect keyboards, mice, and monitors from these conditions? Power is also a concern, it has to run off of boat batteries. Should I start with a laptop, desktop, or rackmount system?"

Rolf Marvin Bøe Lindgren writes: "For most human endeavors that involve some sort of risk, there are powerful, recognized public interest groups or even government-appointed organizations that investigate and analyze dangers, prescribe guidelines, determine criteria for acceptable risk, etc. This does not seem to be the case for software! I work for a ship classification company. The purpose of such companies are, very simply put, to determine how safe seagoing vessels are, for instance in order that insurance companies can decide insurance premiums. There are, needless to say, numerous conventions and special interest groups to determine safety at sea. That is, as far as I know (and I would very much like to be proven wrong), except the computer systems that the ships use. there are restrictions, laws and regulations involved in just about any object that goes into a ship except the computer system. Everybody seems to know, for instance, that UNIX is safer that Windows, but there are no safety, reliability or security criteria established by any recognized authority that can be used to defend one computer system over another."

mvidal01 writes: "I have been looking for hardware to digitize the VGA output of a PC. After searching for a long time I have found a few solutions but nothing really great. If possible I would like to avoid converting the VGA signal to NTSC or PAL video with a scan converter because the quality tends to suck. So how about it Slashdot readers. Anyone know of hardware that will allow hires VGA to be digitized?"

An anonymous reader sent in: "According to The Register, AvantGo is shutting down unregistered (unpaid) "custom channels" with more than eight subscribers. Until now, AvantGo has been free (as in beer). What alternatives are there for Web sites that wish to distribute free information to PalmOS devices? Blazer and Eudora Internet Suite require wireless connections; Plucker is open-source and almost does the trick but doesn't automatically synchronize and the installation is way too complicated for the average user. Is there an alternative to paying AvantGo thousands of dollars? All I want to do is give away information, not charge for it."

JeanBaptiste writes: "I work for a small company that refuses to spend the money on visual studio. I need this (or some other language) to do my job (which isn't programming), and for about a year now I have had to use borland C++ 3.0 for dos to do the things that need doing. I know C/pascal/basic from years ago, but have not had to write any programs for work until recently. My question: Are there any cheap/free programming languages that will make a stable winNT/2000 app?" Well, there's ActiveState, which has perl, python, and assorted other packages and tools.

Christian Bjerre writes: "Currently I'm using Squid as an webaccelerator to sit infront of apache and serve static files (.html .js .gif .png .jpg). Squid also serves my dynamic content which is .php files. My goal is to let Squid or another opensource program gzip the html, since I have Squid installed on another machine, where cputime is not an issue. I've been reading page up&down and Squid dosen't seem to support gzip encoding in Webaccelerator mode. I haven't tried feeding it gzipped html, which could be a solution, if there was a way of having Squid handle all content as binary. What do you guys & girls do to minimize bandwidth usage? // chris"

cryingpoet writes: "I remember the good old days, before everyone wanted a cell phone or PDA, back when you could buy a used laptop for $80 (USD). Now all the affordable laptops have hit the recycling bins as raw materials for new screens. To make matters worse, the state of the economy has driven companies to stop upgrading and keep all used laptops "in-house." Most used laptops run twice their cpu clock speed in dollars [$ = MHz * 2($/MHz)]. Auction prices seem to be worse than that of wholeseller. So I come to you, /.ers, in the hopes that there are still some used laptop deals to be had. Is there such a thing as a low-end used laptop anymore, and where?"