Did you ever watch the Smurfs as a kid? Remember how they always used some varient of the word “Smurf” as a generic adjective/adverb/verb/whatever?
Are you familiar with Murphy’s Law? Good.
I am having an absolutely murphtastic day.
Tag: work Page 3 of 4
That’s what I seem to have done this month. I had mean to write a bit about the family reunion back on July 4th, and about playing City Of Heroes and about myriad other things that have been going on, but I really just have been in “avoidance” mode lately, and I’m not sure why.
Not just avoiding here, either. I was politely informed by a mutual friend that someone I love deeply thought I was neglecting her becuase I had been so out of touch. The last two weeks, especially, I’ve been in a bit of a funk, and mostly being antisocial.
So, apologies on the absense. I’ll try and be here more.
Yesterday turned into an unexpectedly busy day. I was on my way back from our data centre where I was reinstalling the OS on a server, when I got a call from kitanzi indicating that she found out if we wanted to get married next friday at the courthouse, we had to have our license arranged at least 24 hours *before*. So I took a long lunch and we ran down to the courthouse to file for that. We now have a marriage license, and on August 6th, at approximately 2:30pm, we will officially be married.
Picked up telynor from the train station after work, and got her safely to our home. We’ll have her as a guest for a few days. It’s really lovely to see her.
I started this entry with a notion to say something or another, but I appear to just be rambling, so I’ll sign off now. Hope all of you are wonderful!
You know how the Chinese give names to their years. Like, the Year of the Dragon, and the Year of the Monkey, and so forth?
This is the week of the Raid Failure.
Got a page this morning, waking me from what had been a fairly restless night, so I was none to happy at being dragged out of bed half an hour before I was due to get up. It was one of the network engineers, who wanted me to know that the server on my workbench was beeping loudly and was there anyway to make it stop. I had him log in on the console and shut the box down, as it’s not in production and could stand to be switched off until I got to the office.
After my morning meeting, I came back to my desk and fired it up to see what was up. As soon as it got to the SCSI initialization phase, it started wailing. I had a sinking feeling I know what that meant, so I escaped into the RAID controller’s config screen to see. Yep, there’s a bad disk. This box only has three drives, so it actually has no spare to pull in in case of disk failure; when you lose one, it is automatically in degraded mode.
I started a rebuild, and will now have to see about getting a replacement drive before I can wrap this project up. My only consolation is that at least it failed today, rather than this time next week after I had shipped it to the customer’s site in Kentucky.
Apologies for all the work stuff this week, but it’s what’s consuming most of my attention the last few days. (Well, there’s some non-work stuff, but I’m not ready to talk about that yet. <G>)
Ever since I officially got promoted to a more managerial position at work, it’s has become painfully obvious to me that I needed some sort of external brain to keep track of all the things I need to be tracking. I can keep notes on paper, but its hard to keep everything organized, and my PC is easy to keep organized, but not portable. The solution was obviously to replace my long-abandoned Palm Pilot.
Back in 2001, i got a free Palm m100 when I bought my cell phone. It was a Best Buy promotion, and it was attached the phone I had already researched and wanted to buy anyway, so I regarded it as a curiosity. It was a useful address book and calender, but with only 2mb of memory it really couldn’t do much. It was also large and bulky, and I eventually stopped carrying it around. Eventually, I gave it to telynor, but soon after that it stopped syncing up and became officially useless.
kitanzi and I had decided to get telynor a replacement Palm for her birthday in time for her to take it to London with her, so I had already done a significant amount of research on what was available, and I ended up buying for myself the same one I selected for her: a Tungsten E. The T-E really does have the best price/performance ratio of any of the units out there. (If the Zire 72 had Wi-Fi in addition to it’s 1.3 mp camera, it might have been worth the extra $100. But at $200, the T-E is hard to beat.)
I had everything working beautifully at home, but at work I had a small problem: I don’t run Windows, and Palm doesn’t officially support Linux. But all I really need to have working here is the Calender and Tasklist, and Evolution will do that. All I had to do was get my Debian Linux box to talk to the Palm, and I should be in good shape.
Step one was finding out that my current installation had no USB support. I still had the kernel source from when I had to recompile it to enable multi-processor support, so I figured it’d be a fairly simple process. (Especially since I had great instructions from fleetfootmike on how to accomplish that). Unfortunately, the newest version of gcc appears to not like the 2.2.20 kernel source.
Well, I’d vaguely been thinking of upgrading the kernel anyway. Not that I had a pressing need to do it, but it was something I honestly had never really done, and horizons are for seeking. So I downloaded the newest non-development kernel, 2.6.6, and set to work.
I had a few rough spots, as I kept finding stuff that I had left out that I needed, but this morning I was able to boot, and a couple of recompiles later I got back networking and serial communication. 🙂 Finally, after searching, I found a great website specifically aimed at demystifying what bits were needed to get my Palm device talking to Linux. One more recompile later and I was able to set up my Palm and sync it with Evolution. Yay!
I’m inordinately impressed with Debian’s kernel management process. The last time I had do this, it was a much less painless procedure, which is one of the reasons I’d been putting it off for so long. Yet another reason I’m glad we’re moving towards it as a platform for our work servers as well.
This was a pleasing way to start the day.
Running “apt-get upgrade” on my work box, and one of the packages it was updating was “bsdmainutils”. Somehow, I misread that as “bdsmutils” and wondered “When did I install that?”.
And what sort of bdsm tools would you want under Linux, assuming that was the sort of thing you were into anyway?
I don’t usually post about work, but this was too good not to share…
Toward the end of today, I got a message from one of my team members, asking about one of the old web servers, which had been slated for decommission..
Him: Is uuweb1 still there
Me: Uh, well, we turned it off, but it still exists
Him: Can we access it?
Me (suspicious): Why?
Well, it turns out that one of the customers who was hosted on that machine had not been properly transitioned over to the new web servers. This is an oversight, and entirely our fault, so I can understand the customer’s demand that we produce his content.
Luckily, we hadn’t yet recycled the hardware, and I drug it out of storage and set it up on my bench with the idea of temporarily putting it up on a test IP long enough to discover if the customers content was still there.
And it occurred to me…
This machine was turned off. It was off the network.
What kind of web customer doesn’t NOTICE that their website is down for two months????
Incredible.
(We were able to recover the customers data for them, so alls well that ends well, but I commented to my boss that if we didn’t have their stuff, it would serve ’em right. Sheesh!)
I seem to have gotten into a nice roll of journaling lately. Some fluff, some content. I’ll try and keep it up.
Jenna continues to adjust to living here. She spends a lot of time under the daybed in the living room, or under our bed in the bedroom, but she’s started coming out and trying to be social when the mood strikes her. Dayna still thinks she’s an intruder, but since the two cats both have the same reaction to confronting each other (that is, to run away), we’re letting them sort each other out on their own terms.
Been fairly draggy all day, due to overnight shift last night. We had to put a new Ethernet card into one of our servers so it could be hooked into the private backdoor network. As this would bring down several of our affiliates webpages who rely on the content of this server, it needed to be done at off hours. So I came home early yesterday, took a nap, and then went over to the data centre around 1am to do the work.
It went very smoothly, and maedbh7 kept me company on the phone for the trip there and back. I slept until noon this morning, then went into work for a half day. Came home and crashed out again.
See, that’s the problem with trying to journal my daily life — it’s lots of boring days like that. Heck, most of them don’t even have the “excitement” of a late night shift or anything useful like that. 🙂
Not much on tap this weekend. We’re a bit cash tight until payday next Friday, so it’ll probably be a low-key hang around the house day.
So tonight we moved our Usenet servers to our new data centre. All went pretty smoothly, aside from one stripped rackmount screw that we had to expend a good deal of effort dislodging.
Usenet was one of my first real online communities. I hung out on a few BBSes before I got on the Internet proper, and UMNews on BITNET was a sort of proto-usenet, but, really, it was on newsgroups that I first really became a PART of the online world. There was no world-wide web then. There was only e-mail, and glorious Usenet.
Which brings me to Russ Allbery’s Usenet Rant. I once had a copy of this printed out and posted over my desk. It’s a constant reminder of why I do what I do for a living, and why I do what I do in my spare time. It’s why I’ve poured my heart into sustaining projects like JediMUD and FilkNet.
Go read it. Here, there be wisdom: http://www.usenet2.org/rant.txt
Tuesday was certainly a mix of a day. On the whole, it was positive, but…