Wow - quite a storm last night. Not only did it put the office on generator power for several hours, it knocked out over half the traffic signals in the county. Lovely. Going home yesterday was an experience - the generous nature of the residents hereabouts was exposed for the selfish, me-first attitude that REALLY underlies all the lovely words and speech. When nobody yields right-of-way at a major intersection, it leads to extremely close following (so nobody can cut in) and rear-end collisions (when someone up front was't close enough and let someone cut in) as well as huge traffic jams caused by the aforementioned behaviors. I hope they get the signals going again soon, as these children cannot play nice and need adult supervision in their driving.

Either the storm or the evils of chance killed my cable modem last night - no lights, not even the blinking light indicating no signal. Nada. Several outlets that otherwise worked produced the same lack of lights on my poor modem. Today Patty takes it back for (hopefully) a full in-warranty exchange. Best Buy. If they refuse, and we have to go with LinkSys' tech support, I'll be a very unhappy person. But we have a Plan B. ;)
posted by MikeM at 8:15 AM    

 
Yesterday at work we made some progress on getting the primary application units upgraded to the latest version of the client - very nice gui now, with several options that make the upgrade well worth the trouble! We also backed up the settings for all the switches and configured them to automatically load the correct settings when reset.

At home last night we ate some salad-bar fixings that we had gotten Sunday at the grocery store, and Patty was feeling extremely sick in just a few minutes. I was a little bit out of sorts, but she got it bad. Perhaps the egg? We ended up watching episode 16 & 17 of the 3rd season of Buffy - where Faith joins the Mayor and then the evil vampire Willow gets brought over into the normal Buffy universe to cause a wee bit o' havoc. Evil Willow is just soooo hot.
posted by MikeM at 7:50 AM    

 
Sunday was a day of relaxation - we went to see 'The Medallion' - good movie - lots of action and jackie-chan-style fighting, but a very thin plotline - suspension of disbelief is required to a higher degree than most Chan movies. Afterwards, we came home, made a huge pot of spaghetti and meatballs, and watched "Daredevil' again on DVD. I like Daredevil better than 'the Medallion', quite frankly - better plot.
posted by MikeM at 7:45 AM    

 
Oh yeah! Friday we closed on our refinance, and were able to roll the equity loan into the house loan! Our payments will actually be lower! We borrowed 35k more than before, dropped our interest from 7.5 to 5.85, and kept the payments less than previous! All is good!
posted by MikeM at 9:12 PM    

 
We just got internet access back, and wow - what a journey. Luckily these last two guys were on the ball - got me all figured out, even if they went through a lot of hoops.

From the top : 7:30pm 8/20 (Wed) we lost internet access. No server connection, no net. Called, they said they would send a tech out the next day. When asked for a range - they said between 9am and 8pm. Lovely. House arrest for Patty. Of course, at 8:15 sharp a technician arrived, tested the line at the cable modem. very very low signal. Traced it back through the house to the outside line, also low signal. But since it was good at the street, she assumed it would be fixed by a new line from street to house. And promised to be back early in the morning and have the new line run by noon if only I would sign this paper 'here' and 'here'. Stupid me signed it.

Friday passed. No tech. We called Friday evening, were promised that a supervisor would call back. No call.

Saturday am - around 9am - I call, explain this to their call center, and get told that Monday evening would be the first appt - I went nuclear on her, explained all about promises and lack of service and how they aren't the only cable and internet sources in town. (They damn near are, though) She promised a tech would be here by 8pm.

*sigh*

We wait - house arrest once more.

7:59 pm - Knock Knock.

These guys listen while I explain the problem, then without any more testing run a temp line across the yard. Test the line, GOOD. Hook it up, no net. Test the line at the modem, dead. Hmmm... Test the line in the closet - dead. Outside, test the new line again - GOOD. Must be the line through the house. New hole, take 2 weeks.

AIII! I asked them very nicely to check the output side of the new 'Y' splitter the previous tech had installed. Hmmm... The tech tells me I am an official 'Cable Guy'. The 'Y' is bad.

They swap the splitter, I have cable now! Of course, the line drops when I check email for some reason. Sheesh. I hope its just the dhcp server doing its thing after being screwed up for so long.

So, since they cut the existing line up when they dropped the new line, we get to wait a week or so for the line-install crew to come by and put in the underground line from the street to the house, and we need to leave the back gate open when they come... Sheesh. I hope they call first.

At least we have internet again. Mostly.
posted by MikeM at 9:10 PM    

 
Well, since I have in the last few weeks gotten two comments on an old post - August 28, 2002 :

Yesterday was fun - has anyone else seen Norton Anti-Virus corrupt itself to the point where a full uninstall/reinstall fails? The online tech support points to a registry problem, but it all looks fine. I'm building a spare system to replace the flaky one with.

"Error: 1606 Could not access network location \Symantec\Norton AntiVirus Corporate Edition\7.5"

We ended up uninstalling MSIE, then reinstalling it and applying all patches and SPs as needed. Then NAV worked fine!

It appears (from other sources) that NAV requires the Microsoft Update program to be working perfectly to allow NAV to install. I don't understand it, but there it is. The MU program is installed with MSIE 6 and better, so if you don't have 6, upgrade, and if you do, reinstall.
posted by MikeM at 9:00 PM    

 
Yesterday went well - so far everything is coming together nicely! We are working on various schemes to get more of the custom functionalities that we had at the old site moved to the new site, and so far I think we have arrived at a good plan. The new backup routines worked nicely, and I managed to get ghost images of the two main units today, so I can clone more of them as needed and have them implemented with only IP and system name changes!

Last night we watched 'A Muppet Christmas Carol' - an old favorite of ours, always guaranteed to be good. Michael Caine as Scrooge - nice job!

Tomorrow we close on our refinance - house value went up enough so that we can pull money out to pay off the equity loan! That will save us enough money each month that perhaps I can trade in my '95 Saturn SC2 and get a new car. I'm looking at a VW Passat Wagon - GLX with full time 4WD, but we shall see. I just started looking, so anything could happen.
posted by MikeM at 4:16 PM    

 
Tuesday I installed the printer drivers on all of the computers, and changed the IP addresses of the older printers to get them working as well. I completely reconfigured the backup group/device structure, and now have five groups - the fifth one shares a drive with the first group. This allows me to allocate more tapes to the jobs that use more tapes per backup, so I now have an overall 3-4 weeks of backup tapes in the unit, where before I had 2 weeks for some, 6 weeks for others, since some jobs took one tape and some took three.
posted by MikeM at 9:24 AM    

 
Monday went well, opening day for most of the other employees, first time onsite, etc. Got most of their computers hooked up and reconfigured for this new network. Installed a few printers and tested them out. Brian got the county link up as well as the Data General link, and between us we cleaned up DNS/YP quite a bit. Still some work to do in there, however, but mostly minor stuff.
posted by MikeM at 9:21 AM    

 
What a weekend. 8+ hours both Sat and Sun, and 12 hrs Friday. Nice paycheck, but all work and no rest makes Mike a tired boy.

We have pretty much all of the computers hooked up and working correctly that need to be doing so, and interconnectivity is working as well, so the people that used to be able to edit the website can still do so, and actually have three computers to do it from as opposed to one. The application servers are speaking once more, after some domain problems - hint, LMHOSTS files are the spawn of the devil. Especially when you assume they were never used, and couldn't possibly be preventing your apps server from joining the domain. *sigh*

We just installed the new printers and fax machines, and the paging machine is working as well. I am converting workstations as I get the opportunity, but so far have only done a few of them - people tend to take laptops home on the weekend. I anticipate a Monday full of good cheer and patience as I run around reconfiguring the network IPs on all of the machines as they arrive with their owners.

On the home front, Patty and I are both doing well, other than my complete exhaustion thursday leading to a sleepless night and severe cramps and less-than-optimal performance Friday (on <3 hrs sleep). We watched Tombstone - great movie - we will watch it again tonight!
posted by MikeM at 4:26 PM    

 
Well, two 12 hr+ days and we have basic functionality of most systems, although there are issues with routing and email. Ah well. Tomorrow we tackle those. With any luck, by Monday morning we will have everything relocated except the secondary systems that require major antenna/telco/other installations, and those should be done within a month or so. We are even going through the old office and disconnecting all of the added power taps and such so that the new tenants won't be drawing off of our battery backup units - we will need those to power the remaining critical systems in case of a power failure.
posted by MikeM at 10:16 PM    

 
All the main servers are unmounted and ready for transport. So far so good! The new site is prepped and ready, and the preliminary homework has all been done (we hope). Once we get everything remounted and fired up, we will know whether or not we thought of everything...
posted by MikeM at 12:02 PM    

 
Still preparing to move all the servers and such. Looks like we start Thursday instead of Saturday. This is likely a Good Thing, as it might actually mean we won't have to move things this weekend, or at least not as long this weekend.

Oh yeah, this DCOM RPC worm that is blasting around the net messing things up...

If you have a connection to the internet, even a modem, you had better patch your system. Regardless of what people might have told you, PATCH YOUR SYSTEM. All the way. Whatever Microsoft says you need, PATCH IT. This applies to all of the security patches, critical patches, service packs, and such. The W2K patches are usually a good idea as well. The only W2K patch I haven't applied is the one that installs .NET on your system. I don't see a need for that one.

Of course, if you don't run Windows, disregard. But I see that Red Hat has just released a raft of patches and new downloads for RH9, so MS isn't the only company running around patching holes.

Anyway, back to this RPC worm - this is a bad one, it does not require any email or other user intervention, it literally can take over your box without you doing anything at all. If it is connected to the internet, and vulnerable to the worm (meaning you haven't put the MS patches on it), then it automatically takes control of your computer and loads several bad things on it, then uses it to attack other people as well as launches an attack on Microsoft in an attempt to keep other people from patching their machines. Once your machine is infected with this thing, it configures itself to load automatically on boot, then reboots itself to take complete control. You would either notice that your box had rebooted, or perhaps if you were sitting in front of it when you got hacked, you would see a window pop up announcing that your machine would reboot in 60 sec.

By the way, if you see this, disconnect from the internet and seek professional help immediately.

Other than these problems, I'm having an OK day! The new site looks good, the networking and cabling looks good, and everyone has furniture except me.
posted by MikeM at 2:50 PM    

 
Today - Car is in the shop. Guess how much they want to fix the 'rails and blocks' that apparently need fixing to get my sunroof to work again. Go on. Guess.

$720.

Holy Hannah and Jumping Jehosaphat.

*sigh*

"No sir, we can't just bolt it shut, the rails and blocks hold it in the closed position, so we need to replace those to ensure a watertight fit."

*sigh*

VISA.

Next car = no sunroof. Well, we'll see. Plenty POed right now. I was hoping on trading this monster in sometime in the next few months, now I have to keep it just to defray the costs of this damn sunroof. Unless something else goes wrong. Maybe I should just fix it, then trade it as soon as I can. ;) I have some fluttery feelings in my gut about the transmission also...
posted by MikeM at 2:36 PM    

 
Monday - back to the moving prep at work. Noted in the morning that the sunroof in my car was not working. Opens fine, won't close. Overall, a Bad Thing. I can manually push it forward to a more-or-less closed position, but to make it close down (and seat in a waterproof way) I have to release two side catches covered in grease and then push it closed manually from the outside.
posted by MikeM at 2:32 PM    

 
Sunday - relaxed, had a great game, and watched 'The Bourne Identity' when I got home. Liked it, good action, decent plot, not bad overall. A good way to spend $4.50 on a DVD rental.
posted by MikeM at 2:32 PM    

 
Yesterday at work was a milestone day - we wired up most of the patch panel to the new switches, got the fiber links working between sections, and got a good link between an office network plug at the new building to the old network in the old building! Very nice!

Today was a good day as well, we went out to Baja Fresh for lunch, then went by the new office where I gave Patty the grand tour. After that we went home, let the dogs out for a bit, then left again and went to Borders to get some light shopping done (I got the Styx Greatest Hits CD I wanted) and then home again. We swam some, then went out yet again for chinese. Just got home and I think we will be watching "The Bourne Identity" and then getting off to bed.

Tomorrow is a gaming weekend, the third in as many weeks, so today was Patty's Day. (Although I enjoyed myself as well!)

It looks like due to scheduling difficulties there may not be any gaming over the next three weekends, so this works out well. ;)

Next weekend I work all weekend, that is the 'move the servers' weekend at work, and I think I'll be there all weekend.
The one after that one of the other players in the gaming group has plans, and the one after that I have family coming in to spend the long weekend with us! We are so happy to have my mother, brother, and his son here! I only wish they could stay longer. :(
posted by MikeM at 8:36 PM    

 
Today I started experimenting with the new Dell Axims that came in. So far, I like them. I have had a problem with the SanDisk CF cards, however - the Dazzle readers we got work either not at all or very slowly with the CF cards, and the Dells will read them, but if you write to it you stand a good chance of corrupting everything on the card. I am able to write to the card using the activesync program, but if the Dell tries to do it internally, using the backup utility for instance, the data is corrupted. Not good. From what I have seen on the Axim forums, this is not a rare problem with Axim and SanDisk. So why does Dell ship the Axim with SanDisk CF cards?
posted by MikeM at 12:10 PM    

 
Wednesday was a good day, we figured out how to do several little networking issues we had been putting off, and I believe Brian got the secondary fiber link going, so we should now have two different fiber routes to the new site. Redundancy is a good thing.

On the down side, the database was acting up early yesterday morning, and the only onsite person that really knew it is on vacation. But between Brian and I and the database tech in Texas, we got it politely disconnected and restarted, and everything seems to be working fine now. Seems that the particular database we use has some 'issues' with memory leakage... 2.5 gb of memory is a heckuva 'leak'.
posted by MikeM at 7:44 AM    

 
Tuesday evening we rented "Eight Legged Freaks". While this was a silly movie, it was very entertaining and the effects were actually done pretty well. There were only one or two spots where you could spot the miniature work and other effects. Oh, by the way, if you are at all afraid of spiders - Just Say No.

I'm only a little bit phobic - as long as they don't surprise me I usually won't make a fool of myself by screaming and such. This movie was fun, but afterwards I found myself being more careful, turning lights on, checking ceilings, worrying about hiding places, etc. Definitely NOT for kids, by the way. You could give a kid mental scars for life with this movie.
posted by MikeM at 7:41 AM    

 
Here's a good link to have if you ever wanted to learn 'Writing With Elvish Fonts'. Several Windows font packs of elvish script with instructions and tools as well.
posted by MikeM at 8:04 AM    

 
Just heads up about a new virus that is spreading in the wild as I type - you really need to make sure you have the most recent Microsoft patches on your system as well as the most recent anti-virus signatures for your anti-virus client.

SP4 for W2K is, from what I have experienced and heard around the web, fairly stable and works well in most cases. The only problem I have seen with it is where you have Norton Systemworks on your system that is older than 2002. For instance, if you have Norton 2001, you won't be able to run speeddisk anymore. Minor, really.

In other news, Sunday went well, nice day overall. Watched Zoolander again - hilarious! This makes the 4th or 5th time I've seen it, and it is still funny.

Today I hope to get my boss his gx260 so he can start moving data and customizing it to his taste. Then I'll install the ghost image on the other two and be done with the basic installs of all of the new computers. We hope to begin moving the various boxes of 'stuff' into the new site this week and next, and hopefully we will have a secure place to store the computers and such.
posted by MikeM at 9:23 AM    

 
Well, I had a big post up here and my system locked up. I hate computers. *sigh*

OK - quick recap - friday night trouble call, dialed in and recovered the servers - all is well. Got the app server and database servers talking together again.

Afterwards, Patty and I went out for a very very late dinner - 10pm, actually. Silver Diner, I had corned beef hash and eggs - very healthy! Patty and I then shared a Mile High Triple Decker Chocolate Fudge Cake. ;)

This morning, we went to see League of Extraordinary Gentlemen! Awesome, I urge all fans of classical fiction to go see it immediately! I'll be buying the DVD when it comes out. My favorite part is the Nautilus. They did a great job with the effects, and the acting is perfect.

At home afterwards, we watched Godzilla (the new one, with Matthew Broderick), and moments after the final credits (9:30pm) I got another trouble call - seems someone unplugged the racks at the new site, which killed all the servers and some of them didn't come back, because half of the operation is down. *sigh* I went into the new site, turned on the machine that didn't reboot (a gx260, as it turns out) and noticed that while it did boot, it hung during net configuration. I unplugged the fiber from the back, and replugged it, and the boot completed, but now the communication was spotty at best. I could now communicate with local servers on the same switch, but nothing across the fiber. Oh joy. Brian and Larry have been fighting this beast for weeks, and now it has risen up again. I came back home, and in a moment I will try to connect from this side, but I hold no hope for it. It seems that the self-healing card we had hoped to use is not functioning as desired. If there is any problem, it just ceases functioning. Not at all good. Maybe Brian knows a secret to fix it. :)
posted by MikeM at 12:03 AM    

 
Right now, I am performing the once a month maintenance on BrightStor - yes, the bane of my existence. BrightStor is a poorly written, cobbled together, bug-ridden horror of a program. The prune/purge for the ingres (!!!) database doesn't actually remove records from the database, thus it never becomes smaller. Noooo - it actually grows rather quickly to consume all resources and halts the box if left untended. The instructions for the True Purge require that the database be no more than 1/3rd the total disk space... Thus, if it has already grown to 1/2 or more, you might as well blow it all away and reinstall the database from scratch (as I have done many times), because the True Purge routine will fail.

Thus, about once a month I do the True Purge routine, which consists of running some arcane database instructions, then running a custom script that actually reloads the database in a new format, thus truly deleting all non-records. It just finished, and the 4gb drive went from 33% to 38% during the process, then dropped to 14% when it completed. The 9gb drive that hosts the actual application and is not supposed to have the database stored on it went from 37% to 41%, then dropped to 15%. Quite a reduction!

Now I get to stop BrightStor and its database, then restart them. Of course this will likely wreck the group configuration, so I will need to go in and manually fix that. Did I mention that I disliked BrightStor?
posted by MikeM at 8:09 AM    

 
Finished all four Precisions, all seven Latitudes, and I'm starting the build on one of three Optiplex gx260 units (the other three were custom-tailored). As far as computers go, we should be 80% done with the configs by move day. I'll have to customize each box for it's new owner, but that shouldn't take long, especially for the Precisions.

These last three GX260's I think I will made into dual-boot W2K/RH9 units. I have a ghost image from mine, so I can just restore that onto the back end, and have RH9 out there in the world if people want to test it out. As for the front end W2K, I am doing a bare-metal build. Once I get to a point where the image would be a good basic unit, I'll ghost it and put that on the other two, which will be done. Then this one I will customize for Larry - the boss. ;)
posted by MikeM at 7:56 AM