by Tony on February 9, 2010
Over the past couple months, the lack of desktop here at home has driven me up the wall. Turning to my laptop time and time again, hooking it up to an external monitor while consulting helped, but no laptop can truly replace the performance of a decent desktop. So after after drooling over the current Mac Pro systems, and then realizing I could buy 2 new laptops for the same price… I decided to look into the hackintosh world. While I’ve installed OS X on non-Apple hardware before, I’ve never done it on a system that I am planning to depend on. To me, that means I need a system that is not only rock solid, but is easily update-able.
After doing some digging through the OS X 86 Project wiki and the Insanely Mac forums I was able to determine that there are several platforms that provide excellent support, and stability. I finally settled on the following hardware.
Gigabyte GA-EX58-UD5 LGA 1366 Intel X58 ATX Intel Motherboard
Intel Core i7-920 Bloomfield 2.66GHz LGA 1366 130W Quad-Core Processor
Mushkin Enhanced Blackline 12GB (6 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 Memory
BFG GeForce GTX 275 OverClocked Video Card – 896MB, PCI Express 2.0 x16 Graphics Card
Thermalright CoGage True Spirit 4-Heatpipe Core i7 CPU Cooler (w/Thermalright BoltThru Kit)
2x Western Digital Caviar Black 500GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Disks
Plextor 24X DVD/CD Writer Black SATA Model PX-880SA LightScribe Support
Corsair CMPSU-850HX 850W ATX12V 2.3 / EPS12V 2.91 80+ Modular Active PFC Power Supply
Antec Twelve Hundred Black Steel ATX Full Tower Computer Case
While, I chose the i7 platform for its well known speed capabilities, I soon also learned that the i7 920 is also a great processor to overclock with several users reporting stable air cooled setups running at 4 – 4.2 ghz. While I only planned to step my clock speed up to the 3.7 – 3.8 ghz range, I decided to do a bit of research on CPU coolers. And I must say, I’m glad I did. The original heatsink I ordered has issues interfering with the memory slots on the ga-ex58-ud5 motherboard. So, per the shoot out on HardOCP, I choose the CoCage True Spirit Cooler.
For any of you considering your own hackintosh build, the most important advice is to pick a compatible motherboard, cpu, and video card. Do you research, find others that have used the same hardware. See if you can locate adequate kexts and a dsdt for your setup. Do your research, you wont regret it.
I’ll follow up soon with some build instructions and my own kexts and dsdt for anyone using the same hardware to use… As always, if you have any questions, please feel free to leave a comment and I’ll do my best to get back with you.
by Tony on November 23, 2009
This is one of those tricks you wish you learned about 10 years ago, but never did. You know how easy it is to mess up a nice looking access list. You get one setup on the router, and then you end up tinkering with it over the next month and the next thing you know you have the ACL that fell out of the ugly tree and hit every branch on the way down. I have the same issue, actually the other day I was working on some ACLs for a clients VPN configuration when I realized I had forgot to include some entries. So after adding what I needed, I ended up with something like this… ( IP address have been obviously changed to protect the innocent. Ok, honestly, the whole example is just hog wash. I’m way too lazy to actually go lookup the ACL I was working on. )
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by Tony on November 19, 2009
A while back I asked everyone to vote on what topic they wanted to see next, and by no surprise almost every voted for MPLS VRFs. When I started working on this, I decided to take a new approach to these posts, in my previous posts about JunOS Olives I provided ample screen shots and a video demonstrating fully functioning multicast. Today I am going to supply you with a Dynamips configuration file that you can run and follow along as we work within the topology. Here is a link to the file which includes 7 routers and a Frame Relay Switch (for simplicity I connected them all via Frame Relay). Basic MPLS is running over IS-IS on routers 3,4, and 5. All of the interfaces have been configured according to the following diagram. You will need a copy of IOS c3640-jk9o3s-mz.123-14.T7.bin or something for the 3640 that runs MPLS and VRF, check the Cisco Feature Navigator. You will also need to know a little something about Dynamips / Dynagen.
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by Tony on November 9, 2009
By now, you’ve heard about the tragic shootings at Fort Hood. Obviously such things are not my normal topic for discussion here, but after hearing that the shooter may have had tried to contact someone within Al Qaeda, it certainly got my interest.
As posted on NY Daily News, it appears that Nidal Hasan, may of attempted to contact this Anwar al Awlaki, how he attempted to contact him is unreported, also I would like to point out that the intentions of this attempted contact are also unknown.
It is not known whether the agencies informed the Army that Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan had attempted to connect with
Anwar al Awlaki, a radical mosque leader who runs an English language anti-American web site that promotes jihad, U.S.
officials briefed on classified material told ABC.
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by Tony on October 12, 2009
So, this weekend Jessi’s best friend Mindy got married. She asked me to come and take photos, so I did. Here are some of my favorites photos after a bit of post processing…
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by Tony on October 4, 2009
As a follow up to my JunOS Olive tutorial, I made a demonstration video that shows Multicast functioning via OSPF to another Olive and an ImageStream VM.
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