Last night I received in the mail the external USB 2.0 hard drive enclosure I had ordered - under $50 shipped! After Buffy, I took apart the Dell server I was running Red Hat 8.0 on as a backup server, determined which drive was the /home drive I was using for backups by the simple method of unplugging one drive and booting the box. Up pops the Grub loader, so I guessed right. Reconfigured the Red Hat unit to not know about the second drive - then installed it into the External unit.

Now I have an external 80gb drive to do all my backups to! No need for samba or the like, I can directly back up to the unit using MS Backup and Synchronizer, and for an image backup I can ghost the partitions to the drive as well! (with the Ghost USB boot diskette).

Nice! Tonight I'll start the backup process - will take a while to make the first synchronizer images, so I better get started!

Today at work I downloaded ALL SIX RH9.0 ISO images - I will be putting a kitchen sink install on the dell once I have time. I'm hoping to eventually get it working as a business computer for Patty. No need for fancy graphics cards, just basic office suite apps. Should be fun.
posted by MikeM at 4:11 PM    

 
Well, Monday I ended up going home sick - apparently I caught something nasty that has been going around. Hopefully I didn't pass it on to anyone. Once home, I slept for 4-5 more hours and then rested on the couch, watching my Revolution OS DVD that just arrived! Interesting material for those who might be interested in the development of computers and Operating Systems, especially the Linux and variant systems. I got to play some Deus Ex late in the day, but not much, as I was still not feeling great.

Tuesday back at work - took care of some problems and began researching Poledit. I updated my forensics CD, and put together utility folders for 98, NT, and W2K - including the regedit and poledit programs, as well as all of the networking items.

Tuesday night was a new Buffy! Only 3 more after this one, and then the series is over! I'll miss it, but it is really getting intense. Last episode, Zander had an eye poked out by the bad guy, and this time the same bad guy just thrashed Buffy around like a helpless rag doll, then waled away laughing. The entire gang of potential slayers and the scooby gang of old all agreed that Buffy was getting reckless, and voted her out. (!) Faith took over the group. Personally, I place more trust in Faith. She at least wants to be alive. Buffy I'm not so sure of anymore. The next few episodes should really be great! I just hope they put them out quick and don't make us endure reruns between each new one.
posted by MikeM at 8:44 AM    

 
Saturday was relax day - took it easy and didn't do much of anything, except screw up my computer again. *sigh*

The problem was that it will not shut down. It goes thru the motions, pretends to shut down, then halts at a light blue blank screen. After about a minute, the HD stops activity and the light in the optical mouse goes off. This is when I have been just turning it off. I would prefer it turn itself off like it used to before I installed the APC PowerChute software.

So, in an effort to tinker some more, I uninstalled Powerchute! Well, actually, add/remove programs has that 'stutter' when you first bring it up while it is loading, then it refreshes once fully loaded. I clicked on Powerchute, chose remove, then it refreshed and selected Direct CD for me, so that when I said Yes, it uninstalled Direct CD. I love computers. Patty asked what all the shouting was about.

So, last night at around 8pm, I got DirectCD and the Adaptec EasyCD reinstalled, but they wouldn't run. Couldn't initialize engine. Google is your friend. Several sites said simply to reinstall EasyCD and ignore the dire warnings that you really should remove it before re-installing it. So I installed it over top of itself, and sure enough, this fixed the problems and I once again have full CD-R/CD-RW powers. And the computer still won't shut down by itself.

Strangely enough, during the reinstall of EasyCD, the system rebooted by itself. Normally on a restart it gets to the lt blue screen and hangs, and I have to hit reset, but during the last reinstall it actually restarted correctly. Of course afterwards it still locks up on reboot. Ah well. But there is hope there. It is capable of doing it correctly, I just need to figure out why it is not getting the right signals.

I also installed Deus Ex. Haven't played at all, but got it installed.
posted by MikeM at 7:52 AM    

 
Well, the BrightStor tape backups have been rolling merrily along for a week or so with no major problems, so I expect a failure soon. :)

Last night Patty and I went to the Olney Theatre and saw Moliere's "The Miser". Very well done, funny, and ever-so-slightly updated for modern audiences.

I'm still working on the Amber novels, just finished "Blood of Amber" - only three more to go!

Heard yesterday that Brian and Marcia's dog Sally had a stroke and is in the hospital. :( Hopefully she will recover and be well soon!
posted by MikeM at 7:54 AM    

 
I got home last night to discover that some friends of ours in New Jersey sent us a 1 month subscription of gourmet pizzas! We got a shipment of three pizzas on dry ice yesterday - the month's supply - and promply cooked the deep dish one. Wow. It was truly fantastic - I don't know what it was about it, but it was the best pizza I have had in years, and it was just a simple cheese and sauce pizza - deep dish. The other ones are a gourmet cheese and pepperoni thin crust and a shrimp alfredo pizza. Yum!

I've been playing more Mechwarrior since Patty started her new business, as she needs more time to work on it. Right now she is busily making samples from all of the molds she just bought, and buying items for new baskets and such. What fun!

Yesterday was slow - not much happened at work other than researching and making preparations for the big move coming up in a few months.

Tuesday I reconfigured the backups to allow more time between the normal backups, the merge process, and the large bi-weekly backup of largely static data. This new arrangement allows all of the normal backups to completely merge into the database before the large backup begins, and spreads the whole process out across a weekend rather than pushing it all together on Friday evening.
posted by MikeM at 7:55 AM    

 
Sunday - ate too much. Watched 'Royal Tanenbaums'. This is a movie that the most dysfunctional families watch and exclaim over just how screwed up the Tanenbaum family is. D+. I watched it, I wanted several times to get up and stop watching it, but the combination of all the good food I had eaten and the poor quality of the movie served to suck the energy from me, so I sat there and watched the whole thing. Not the worst movie ever, but not in the top 1000 all time best movies either.
posted by MikeM at 10:28 AM    

 
Wow - it has been a while since I posted, eh? Well, a quick catch-up seems to be in order:

Wed: Got the car back for just over $1000. *sigh* radiator was cracked along the seam. The serpentine belt was also cracked and fraying. 120k tune-up and oil change. Seems that I had been running with almost no water and low on oil for 2 weeks or so. :) Saturn makes tough engines.

Thur & Fri : Patty selling Easter items at a local Bowling Alley - bunny/duck/etc and custom-made baskets for Easter - she made over $300 in two evenings!

Sat : Went shopping a bit with Patty - got some sale items at Michaels. Went out to the movies and saw "Bulletproof Monk". Not bad - good fight scenes, but the plot was kinda thin and the logic nonexistent. If you have a scroll that confers absolute power over any who read it, wouldn't it make more sense to destroy it rather than to protect it for hundreds of years while constantly fighting off the powers of evil who all somehow know about it? Then we got home and watched "Princess Mononoke" DVD. I really enjoyed it - great animation and decent storyline.

Today : Happy Easter everyone! No plans today - rest, relaxation, and possibly eating a wee bit. :)
posted by MikeM at 11:13 AM    

 
My car is once again due for service - 120k service, plus last time they told me the universal belt was worn out, plus the overheat/low water lights are coming on at random now, plus the drivers side door would not wind down - electric. When I shut the door a little later, it fixed it - now it winds up and down just fine.

I think perhaps I may have a few other misc electrical system issues as well. Like the dome light doesn't come on when I open the driver's side door.

Anyone in the market for a slightly (ab-)used 95 saturn SC2? 120k+ miles. ;)

posted by MikeM at 4:39 PM    

 
Tonight is the new Buffy! Phone ringers will be off - this is a good one! Faith comes back to Sunnydale!

I'm still having a problem where my computer will NOT shut down. I get to a blank light blue screen, then the mouse shuts off (usb), and at that point it is hung. The drive light goes out after about 30 sec or so, and that is where it stays for as long as I want to leave it there. 4 hrs one time. I usually just turn it off, and it has only come up with a disk check required once so far.

I never get the message that it is now safe to turn off my computer - it doesn't get that far. I even went into the services and process viewer and stopped or killed every service and process possible, and even with the absolute minimum of stuff running, it will not shut down. I also re-applied SP3 for W2K, no dice.

This started when I installed the PowerChute software from APC. It disabled the UPS power drivers that come with Windows, and even uninstalling the new APC software fails to re-enable the default drivers. *sigh* It also locks up if you try to hibernate the system. Not good. I need to find a way to get the original UPS drivers re-installed, even if just to the point where the power-saving software works - I think the problem lies in that area. When I uninstall the APC stuff, it tries to reenable the default windows drivers, but they fail because I don't have a UPS attached via serial cable. Never have. The new UPS is a USB cable, not serial.
posted by MikeM at 4:36 PM    

 
Good news - the leaf cleanup has begun. The contractor called me at about 2pm, apologized, and said they would be finished today. I went over all the streets, with instructions to get all the gutters and walks as well, not just the new piles of leaves, but the old piles left from the missed previous fall pickup. I also added in the fallen branches and other detritus in the common grounds and he promised that by tomorrow they would be gone as well. Let's hope that our problems are over...
posted by MikeM at 4:28 PM    

 
When I got home after spending all day reinstalling and reconfiguring the BrightStor database, I got to go to the Home Owners Association meeting. Oh Joy. I caught seventeen kinds of he** because the leaf pickup which was scheduled for today and tomorrow did not happen yet. Same as last Dec - they showed late and only did half the homes. This left huge piles of leaves in and near the road, which the homeowners pushed into the circles and street, where they have been since Dec - through all the snows.

The contractor who was supposed to clean all this up and pick up all the leaves today never showed, even after many promises to clean it all up and even promised to walk around the entire neighborhood and make notes of other things to clean up and correct. Nothing was done. I think if the leaves are not gone tomorrow that we will be looking for a new landscaping contractor for the HOA.
posted by MikeM at 10:18 PM    

 
Over the weekend we relaxed and took it easy, for the most part - yard work, shopping, and TV - Patty worked on some orders she got, and continued making samples for the website. She came up with a price list and I just need to get it online!

This morning I got to work to find that the backups all went perfectly, even the W2K server, so that is corrected, at least. Of course, the BrightStor database was full and corrupted beyond repair. Seems like there is always something wrong with this backup software. Since it is limited to 2gb per database, and we don't have that large a drive to put it on, we can only have a weeks worth of data in it. Worse, purging the data does not reclaim the full space it took - only a fraction - so that after a few months the database fills up. This morning I deleted and reinstalled the entire database portion of the software, and added 4gb of storage to it (2 extensions) in an effort to make it last a bit longer.

Since one full backup takes it to 60% full, and in order to run the 'true purge' script we need 3x as much free space as occupied space (insane requirement), we will never be able to run the reclaim script. We have a 9gb and two 4gb drives - one 4gb is the log file drive - 2gb used. One 4gb is the main database - 4gb used as the main db is 2gb and the two index dbs are about 1g each when full. I had about 6gb free on the 9gb drive, so I added the two extensions there, leaving about 2gb open for logs and normal operations. Without a major investment in a new server and huge drive array, we will likely never be able to do the routine reclaim script. As I have said in the past, I truly do not recommend that anyone use BrightStor.

You would think that 1.2 million files would not be an obstacle in this day and age - only about 100gb total. Yet the BrightStor database claims that you need an insane amount of drive space for the databases alone in order to use the system efficiently.
posted by MikeM at 10:12 PM    

 
I have good news on the BrightStor topic! We finally figured out why the backups were failing on the W2K station, and now we have apparently corrected it. I have gotten two good backups so far, and at some point next week we will declare the subject resolved if all goes well! Turns out the problem was twofold - First, the unix server connects to the w2k server and sometimes loses the socket connection- they have a special switch for the agent to allow it to re-connect on a different port if the first one fails, so we turned that on and got better results, but still failures a large part of the time.
The second problem was that the port it tried to reconnect on by default was being used intermittently by another server to transmit data. We changed the port range that the agent uses to reconnect, and surprise - backups work now. I certainly hope this is the final solution. It only took 8 months and 6 or so techs to figure this out.
posted by MikeM at 3:11 PM    

 
At work we have steadily been making progress in the switchover to new software on a new database structure in Informix. We have also learned the hard way that BrightStor's Informix client is useless. It backs up the database just fine, but cannot be used to restore it because they embed the brightstor-specific information into the tape header itself, forcing you to use Brightstor to restore the data. You cannot restore it using the native tools that even Brightstor calls to create the backup, and Brightstor cannot restore it because they have it arranged so that you must be logged in as 'root' to run the restore program, and must be logged in as 'caroot' to connect to the database while restoring. Since you cannot be two people at once, and the ca_auth program apparently failed at making root=caroot, this is doomed to failure. So now it appears that all of our careful backups of Informix using BrightStor are worse than useless - they are misleading.
posted by MikeM at 6:21 AM    

 
Ever wonder what all those programs in your Task List actually do? Here's a great website that lists most of the items in there, and tells you exactly where it comes from and what it does. Nice! One word of warning, it also recommends either leaving it alone or disabling, turning off, or removing some items - DON'T do that kinda stuff unless you know exactly what you are doing! :)

I recently got Neal Stephenson's 'Snow Crash' - a novel that I have heard great things about, and that includes a computer virus that somehow infects humans as well. I also got both books in the Amber Diceless RPG - a collector's item! Thinkgeek.com had the 'Snow Crash' book and ohmygames.com had the Amber RPG books - for LESS than it was selling for on ebay!
posted by MikeM at 6:16 AM    

 
Looks like Brian's wife has started her own business as well! Dressmaking, custom sewing, etc.
posted by MikeM at 11:12 AM    

 
Whew - sleet and rain this morning. Nasty cold out as well.

I finished the first five books in the Amber series, now I'm starting the second five. So far, I think I enjoy it more than the first.

Major software upgrades at work the past few days, and then this morning on my cellphone I got a voice mail left for me last night. Love that reliable service.

After gaming last Sunday, we were able to game again yesterday - made some ground, learned some interesting tidbits about the local area. Hopefully we will have all of the journals up by the next game, which I believe is going to be in 3 weeks.
posted by MikeM at 8:04 AM    

 
Well, it warmed up considerably around here. As Brian said, he was watching it snow Monday, and then outside mowing the lawn in shorts and a t-shirt Tuesday!

At work, we are still fighting with getting BrightStor to back up a W2K box, and now we cannot seem to restore an Informix database. Good thing we tested this before we needed it to restore something critical. I intensely dislike BrightStor with the fury of a thousand suns. Why do we use it? Because it is among the few, the proud, the only package to support our rather old tape library. I'm pushing for a new tape library and new backup software that would actually WORK, but with budget issues, it just isn't going to happen.

Anyone have a better backup solution for a bunch of linux and solaris boxes, a few NT and W2K boxes, and a Spectralogic 4000/5000 library with 4 DDS4 drives in it? The library is hooked to a solaris 8 box. We must have the capability to back up Informix databases in their native (raw) state on a remote (also Solaris 8) server across the network. Fun fun fun. Note that we must be able to back up in excess of 1,000,000 files across 4 drives in under 12 hours.
posted by MikeM at 8:28 AM    

 
Imagine my delight at hearing that we were going to implement BrightStor in a mission-critical continual backup role! Now not only would it be backing up the servers and such, but we were going to trust it to run continual backups of log files, and it for some reason the log file backups stopped or failed, not only would we not be able to recover, but the application that generated the logs would just stop dead. We can't even get this package to make reliable backups of W2K systems, and now the primary application for the office will rely on it. Oh, the cruel barbs of fate.

Patty and I are doing great! Being married is awesome - I recommend it to my friends.

I really should do our taxes. I suppose I'm procrastinating, as I have had the software on my desk for a month, and haven't even installed it. *sigh* I suppose I'll try to do that tonight. The worst part is that we will be getting money back! I'm trying to save $250 by doing them myself, and this will be the first attempt since buying our home. Next year we can file jointly, which will hopefully be simpler but on the down side will also not get us as much of a refund.

Patty's website is shaping up nicely. She is busy making things and taking pictures, and I'm putting them on the web.
posted by MikeM at 8:09 AM