home audio query

So, I think it’s time to replace my second hand receiver that nikarc gave me a while ago (it overheats every so often, and the “Phantom Surround” is kinda lame). The thing is, I don’t really know audio stuff, so I’m looking for suggestions.

I know I’d want something that can actually handle 5.1 sound (if not better) and has at least 3 A/V inputs (Tivo, DVD player, and some sort of game system if I ever get one). It seems that more watts == more better, but other that, I’ve got no clue.

Also, I’m looking in the sub-$300 range, and it’d be nifty if it were available at Best Buy, since I got a gift card from there for xmess this year.

So, brands to look for/avoid, features I hadn’t thought of, etc? Also, reputable online audio sites would be welcomed too, since I’d probably just be Googling about--some sort of direction would help.

Thanks!

late nights at work...

Last Friday, I woke up and launched Firefox. Work's web page wasn't coming up. "Crap," says I, since we've had problems with Postgres and Linux PERC (RAID) drivers in the past. I launch Thunderbird, and can't get email either. "Double crap." Launch Terminal, and try to SSH to a couple boxes -- no dice. "Triple crap". A quick shower and slightly less quick bus ride into work later, and it definitely appears my file server is no longer talking to my SAN. After an hour trying to track down a red herring driver issue, I get one the phone with Gold Support. After troubleshooting a few things, they say they'll ship a new fiber channel card. Now, we've got 4 hour parts delivery, so I was very pleasantly surprised when I got a new card a half hour later. However, it didn't work--still no access to the disks. A hour or two later, it was determined I needed a new storage processor (basically a dedicated PC that manages everything). At 3pm, I was told that they didn't have one in the local warehouse, and none in Milwaukee either. In fact, they'd be able to get me a new one by 11:40 that night. So, I went home, and came back later to do the swap. Luckily, everything worked fine after the replacement.

The kicker to all this is that SANs are supposed to be stable and redundant. The problem is that we didn't have funding for the redundant bits, and had just the base bits. However, we did buy the switches, extra fiber cards and whatnot for redunancy and had the install scheduled for Tuesday night. That's right, just one week later, and nearly 12 hours of downtime would have been avoided.

Speaking of last night's installation, I'm reminded once again why I'm glad I'm a Linux admin. Adding redundancy makes the software end of things a bit more complicated, and so there's upgrades and whatnot to be done to the servers attached to the SAN. My end of things went extremely smoothly once I commented out the SAN file systems in my fstab. However, we got stuck just sitting around waiting for the Windows admin to get his system up. These upgrades needed to be done without access to the SAN disks, and he was having Active Directory (*spit*) problems. Apparently the AD log files (not the AD data itself) was stored on the SAN, and AD wouldn't start w/o access to the log files. I guess that makes sense, but apparently there is no way to boot Win2k3 server when you can't start AD. Grah. Nothing like getting home from work at 1am.