SS4200 woes

Well, ever since I had the SS4200 it just froze from time to time. I never had a chance to find out the details, because it mostly froze during the day when I was at work, or at night when I was out drin^H^H^H^H studying.

I always thought it was related to my custom kernel. Now it finally froze in my presence, so I could check it out. I opened the case and found the fans spinning rather slowly, and the CPU and northbridge were very hot. I figured the poor thing overheated.
So in fact I was right, because I enabled thermal management and CPU throtteling in my kernel, and loaded all those modules of course.
Add the fact that the Celeron 420 actually doesn't support SpeedStep, and you've got a few kernel moduels going crazy.
I'll remove the thermal and cpu throtteling modules for the time being and see whether that improves stability.

In the long run I want a NAS that doesn't consume more power than really necessary, so I'll probably switch the CPU to a Celeron E1400 or similiar. Those already got a 2nd core and support SpeedStep. While that's got a higher TDP, I think the power consumption is going to be lower, over all.

Guess we'll have to wait and see.

C# debugging

If you are a C# developer using Visual Studio 2008 and you need to debug your solution using arguments? Then read on.

There is a nice security feature in VS2008 that prevents arguments from being passed on to your executable. There even is a nice warning message, that tells you something about some bogus debug security settings. I haven't found any of these settings anywhere in the project, solution or even VS2008 settings.

I've still found a workaround, however:

1. In your C# project settings under Debug activate SQL-Server debugging
2. Make sure you've entered some arguments in the run options
3. Debug your solution
4. Profit!

You'll see the familiar messagebox telling you that the security settings permit the arguments from being passed on to the executable. Continue anyway. Then you'll see a second messagebox, yapping on about some debug security settings that were disabled. Well guess what - from now on you can use arguments to debug! Oh and of course you can disable SQL server debugging, it's only needed to trigger that metaphysical process in VS2008. ;)