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Bandwidth.com noticed the circuit was dead and tried to email me on the mail server which is down. Tech Support was probably active all weekend long, had I not been trying to call Broadband.com. Some of our clients are already calling me because they cannot access their email or web pages, and I gave them Tony's contact information because they're trying to verify that there is still power to the equipment. Tony is back in the local area and will have to scratch together the $482 to fill his tank to drive to Grand Prairie I'm afraid. The tech is out of the office currently but will call Tony on his return, and call me if he cannot get a hold of Tony. I gave them permission to do intrusive testing and gave them the IP addresses of two boxes which we have assigned.
My little power ranger likes to 'Power Up' before riding his electric 4-wheeler all over the property. I feel safer knowing he's out there battling evil.
Concerning the subject of this post, I feel like I've moved in and am fleecing this town. Wife has a library card with a limit of 8 music CD's you can check out daily. I've already ripped my first 8 and am going back today. My only begrudgement is that they are closed during the holiday.
Yes, teh max0r is set up and running in Wichita, but not without a few surprises. First of all, I used the 17" monitor because I was under the impression that teh max0r had a maximum resolution of 1280x1024. Deciding to watch Sin City last night night on the 22" monitor and Bose MediaMate speakers over the exisiting setup at the house, I attached the larger monitor. Apparently, Tony's 17" LCD only has the capacity to display 1280x1024, because teh max0r now allows me to set the resolution as high as 2048x1536! I think I'll use the 22" when I get to St. Louis.
Another surprise is the built-in 56k modem I laughed at when I first got the mini. It's what I'm using now to post to you. A bonus of using my wife's dial-up connection on the wee mac is that she's limited to 28.8 at Remote Location Alpha. Well with the wee mac, I'm getting a whopping 31.2! Booyakasha. After my 3 months with 26.4 AOL dial-up, if I don't get some broadband soon, I'm going to seriously hurt someone. And speaking of broadband...
It looks like our T1 has been terminated. All of our boxes are offline. Details are still sketchy at this point and I'm trying to confirm. At this point I'm using http://retrospective.us to host my images. Thanks Dave!
The following is a picture of my VNC session at work into my wee mac at the ADC with the desktop wallpaper set to a screen shot of work's computer desktop manager. I'm so sneaky!
The gallery2 troubleshooting forum has 72 billion entries, and no search function.
LDAP on Solaris 8 is even more gay than LDAP on Solairs 9 or 10.
My wife is gorgeous. I miss her.
Troubleshooting an entire network migration remotely is retarded. I want to scream. I am the sole Solaris administrator for the D.C. office as well. Grrrrr. Oooh! Best part? I sent them written instructions on exactly the steps they needed for migration, but they thought it might be wrong, so they changed some stuff. Better yet, despite my specific instructions to ONLY migrate one box at a time, they managed to render unbootable both the NIS master, and the NIS slave! They called me when they couldn't get their boxes to come up. Nice, huh?
So I'm thinking of implementing LDAP on my servers at home. Why? To learn. Of course I'm considering using openldap, not this Sun ONE iPlanet hack. You see, you've got some kid running linux in his mother's basement. Will that get him a job? Maybe. But will this kid be able to set up a multi-terabyte filesystem on an Enterprise distro of linux? Who knows. But take a home Solaris user who's set up iPlanet LDAP and openldap and now you've got some real world experience. Enterprise LDAP is just larger. My thoughts for the day anyway.
Oh, and the guy in DC? I opened up his netmask, deleted /etc/defaultdomain and got him back up. Now we're just running ypinit -m ;)
quark has been up for 80 days. Not too bad considering all he's been through, the move and all, and the rebuild. I taught myself minimal Solaris loading on quark. Which is why I brought him down...it's patching time! This could take awhile, I'm not sure. He's probably only three rev's back, and he's got probably twice the throughput of those Ass Blade's at work. I don't know where quark will go, or what I'm going to do with him, but I'm sure I'll figure something out.
I started dismantling unused servers at the ADC today. Of course the trash was in the way, so I bundled up all that and took it out. Then I got hungry and had to hunt some food. After that my headache was worse, so I made a pot of coffee. Sat down to drink the cup and starting adding album art to iTunes. Needless to say, I haven't actually dismantled anything yet.
David came over last night and we played a few rounds of Holomatch before organizing the pictures of his last 3 years at the Star Trek convention in Vegas. while I cleaned out my desk. I used to like the one-on-one hunt, but we've been playing massive maps against as many bots as I can fit in. It's been a lot of fun.
...
All patches run and blastwave packages updated. quark is back online! I also managed to stack some unused boxes for relocation.
Ok, so I admit it's sometimes hard for me to delete entire soundtracks that are in my iTunes database. But there I was, innocently listening to music and updating album art, information, etc, when I run across "All About the Benjamins" <-- the entire album! So I think, "WTF?" Now, I must admit that I had already assumed what type of music was going to be there, and as I previewed each song, I had to admit it wasn't as bad as I thought it was going to be, but I had to ask myself, "Will I EVER sit and listen to this crap?" So I deleted it. I'd rather listen to Tony's entire collection of Blood Hound Gang than spare the disk sectors on...oh who am I kidding. I'd keep 50 copies of "All About the Benjamins" on spinning disc before I listened to any BHG.
I started dismantling unused servers at the ADC today. Of course the trash was in the way, so I bundled up all that and took it out. Then I got hungry and had to hunt some food. After that my headache was worse, so I made a pot of coffee. Sat down to drink the cup and starting adding album art to iTunes. Needless to say, I haven't actually dismantled anything yet.
David came over last night and we played a few rounds of Holomatch before organizing the pictures of his last 3 years at the Star Trek convention in Vegas. while I cleaned out my desk. I used to like the one-on-one hunt, but we've been playing massive maps against as many bots as I can fit in. It's been a lot of fun.
...
All patches run and blastwave packages updated. quark is back online! I also managed to stack some unused boxes for relocation.
Ok, so I admit it's sometimes hard for me to delete entire soundtracks that are in my iTunes database. But there I was, innocently listening to music and updating album art, information, etc, when I run across "All About the Benjamins" <-- the entire album! So I think, "WTF?" Now, I must admit that I had already assumed what type of music was going to be there, and as I previewed each song, I had to admit it wasn't as bad as I thought it was going to be, but I had to ask myself, "Will I EVER sit and listen to this crap?" So I deleted it. I'd rather listen to Tony's entire collection of Blood Hound Gang than spare the disk sectors on...oh who am I kidding. I'd keep 50 copies of "All About the Benjamins" on spinning disc before I listened to any BHG.
It was a beautiful spring morning. Tony was still at work from working overnight when I arrived at the office. We went to the caff and had Richard make us some fantastic omlettes, came back to our desk, Tony put on a little Ella, I was dancing in my chair. This stunted prick 7 cubes down races to Tony's cube and loudly announces, "DON'T YOU HAVE HEADPHONES?"
What Tony said: "Uh....yeah."
Leave a comment of what Tony would have liked to have said!
Yesterday morning I grabbed the 2.2 litre polycarbonate water bottle my wife gave me to ensure I drink plenty of water at work and began my trek to one of the further water fountains, as it is the coolest, and has the highest arc - required for filling bottles! As I was 3/4 done this largish woman stands behind me with an empty glass in her hand. I say, "2.2 liters, 70 second to fill, and I'm 75% done." She replies, "You know, there is a sink down the hall."
What I said: "Thank you."
Leave a comment of what I should have said!
There was an accident in Fort Worth at approximately 2200 last night. The driver apparently hit, or caused to be knocked down, a pole. This particular pole was a power pole and knocked power out of more than a block. Our building lost power. Our generator kicked in as it was supposed to, but the battery the generator feeds, failed. Every server went down. I've been bringing them up one at a time. I got here late today, even. My boss had most of the important ones up bright and early. "Monitor every box we back up!" He tells me. So....some workstations on users desks are powered off and they're gone for the holiday weekend and the doors are locked. You're thinking, "Brilliant," right? What a pain in my balls this is:
Added bb start script to v480e, launched blade11, couldn't get access to blade1 so removed it from monitoring, fixed blade31, fixed callie, fsck'd blade9, fixed top on ncgcasm01, added bb startup to blade2502, updated vmewdevweb's bb start script...
Leaving for Kansas in three hours. It looks like a stormfront is going to cover I-35 from Dallas to Wichita. Fantastic.
Updated every package on my primary Solaris box at the ADC, quark.xirr.com <-- this took forever too!
docs.sun.com: If a system fails power-on diagnostics, then auto-boot? is ignored and the system does not boot unless the user does it manually. This behavior is obviously not acceptable for a degraded boot scenario, so the Enterprise 250 OBP provides a second NVRAM‐controlled switch called auto-boot-on-error?. This switch controls whether the system will attempt a degraded boot when a subsystem failure is detected. Both the auto-boot? and auto-boot-on-error? switches must be set to true to enable a degraded boot.
So on my last system, a v100, I get the error, "bad inode number 0 to ginode" when I fsck. Same error when I do a superblock fsck. Sun says, "Contact your service provider or another qualified person." WTF? It appears irreparably damaged. So I call a qualified person, Steve Price who, after laughing, explains that I have to low-level format this ATA drive, replace the standard Sun cable with an 80-pin, and restore the data. Fortunately, it's mirrored, so after I pull the drive to format it, I'll whing-ding the sync and may still get outta here on time! Thanks Steve. Still, I don't understand if its a missing inode on a mirrored filesystem, which drive do I pull...and how is resyncing going to fix it? I think I'll just start pulling drives.
Grrrrr.
What Tony said: "Uh....yeah."
Leave a comment of what Tony would have liked to have said!
Yesterday morning I grabbed the 2.2 litre polycarbonate water bottle my wife gave me to ensure I drink plenty of water at work and began my trek to one of the further water fountains, as it is the coolest, and has the highest arc - required for filling bottles! As I was 3/4 done this largish woman stands behind me with an empty glass in her hand. I say, "2.2 liters, 70 second to fill, and I'm 75% done." She replies, "You know, there is a sink down the hall."
What I said: "Thank you."
Leave a comment of what I should have said!
There was an accident in Fort Worth at approximately 2200 last night. The driver apparently hit, or caused to be knocked down, a pole. This particular pole was a power pole and knocked power out of more than a block. Our building lost power. Our generator kicked in as it was supposed to, but the battery the generator feeds, failed. Every server went down. I've been bringing them up one at a time. I got here late today, even. My boss had most of the important ones up bright and early. "Monitor every box we back up!" He tells me. So....some workstations on users desks are powered off and they're gone for the holiday weekend and the doors are locked. You're thinking, "Brilliant," right? What a pain in my balls this is:
Added bb start script to v480e, launched blade11, couldn't get access to blade1 so removed it from monitoring, fixed blade31, fixed callie, fsck'd blade9, fixed top on ncgcasm01, added bb startup to blade2502, updated vmewdevweb's bb start script...
Leaving for Kansas in three hours. It looks like a stormfront is going to cover I-35 from Dallas to Wichita. Fantastic.
Updated every package on my primary Solaris box at the ADC, quark.xirr.com <-- this took forever too!
docs.sun.com: If a system fails power-on diagnostics, then auto-boot? is ignored and the system does not boot unless the user does it manually. This behavior is obviously not acceptable for a degraded boot scenario, so the Enterprise 250 OBP provides a second NVRAM‐controlled switch called auto-boot-on-error?. This switch controls whether the system will attempt a degraded boot when a subsystem failure is detected. Both the auto-boot? and auto-boot-on-error? switches must be set to true to enable a degraded boot.
So on my last system, a v100, I get the error, "bad inode number 0 to ginode" when I fsck. Same error when I do a superblock fsck. Sun says, "Contact your service provider or another qualified person." WTF? It appears irreparably damaged. So I call a qualified person, Steve Price who, after laughing, explains that I have to low-level format this ATA drive, replace the standard Sun cable with an 80-pin, and restore the data. Fortunately, it's mirrored, so after I pull the drive to format it, I'll whing-ding the sync and may still get outta here on time! Thanks Steve. Still, I don't understand if its a missing inode on a mirrored filesystem, which drive do I pull...and how is resyncing going to fix it? I think I'll just start pulling drives.
Grrrrr.
The ADC is on I-30 and 360. My client location is on I-20 and I35W. I've been taking I30 to I35W to I-20. That's quick and efficient. However, here lately, I've been traveling 360 to I-20 and coming straight across. There's less traffic, and it seems quicker. But less traffic means less radar clutter to get lost in as I traverse all 3 lanes at 85mph. Its a lot like pod racing. There's 4 lanes on I20, fewer vehicles, hence I drive slower. Slower but at a more consistent speed. Further evaluation needs to be done to determine the quickest route.
Fixed my SB100 problem. Apparently the Symbios SCSI interface card could not simultaneously send LVD and SE data across both the VHCDI ports, so I added a Qlogic SCSI interface card and attached the LVD array to that and the SE DLT's to the Symbios. Problem solved. Now I'm working a samba issue on a Red Hat box. I think this is the first time I've ever logged into Red Hat. This client loves them some Red Hat on vmware. Someone apparently installed samba, but not swat, on this box, and it appears to be a install-time option. So I'm downloading a Red Hat RPM of samba. Yes, I know swat is a crutch for the smb.conf file, but these people have samba installed on every unix box here, cross mounted to every windows desktop. Someday I'm going to create ONE samba server and ONE nfs server. But not today.
I was supposed to get a dual P4 3.0GHz *MB cache workstation to replace my aging laptop. Today the boss asks me to justify the purchase. I told him, "Forget it. You had offered it and I jumped on it." It looks like the Dell laptop POS stays. I had wanted the increased speed and memory configuration to run a varity of operating systems, possibly with a base OS of FreeBSD, but I don't need this drama in my life.
Tony crapped out on the couch last night while I watched White Chicks. I haven't laughed that much in a long time. Odd, the spell checker recognizes "Free BSD" and "Free-BSD" (which are both incorrect) but not "FreeBSD" which I believe is the correct spelling. Heh, it also suggests 'vaporware' as a replacement for 'vmware'. Funny.
Fixed my SB100 problem. Apparently the Symbios SCSI interface card could not simultaneously send LVD and SE data across both the VHCDI ports, so I added a Qlogic SCSI interface card and attached the LVD array to that and the SE DLT's to the Symbios. Problem solved. Now I'm working a samba issue on a Red Hat box. I think this is the first time I've ever logged into Red Hat. This client loves them some Red Hat on vmware. Someone apparently installed samba, but not swat, on this box, and it appears to be a install-time option. So I'm downloading a Red Hat RPM of samba. Yes, I know swat is a crutch for the smb.conf file, but these people have samba installed on every unix box here, cross mounted to every windows desktop. Someday I'm going to create ONE samba server and ONE nfs server. But not today.
I was supposed to get a dual P4 3.0GHz *MB cache workstation to replace my aging laptop. Today the boss asks me to justify the purchase. I told him, "Forget it. You had offered it and I jumped on it." It looks like the Dell laptop POS stays. I had wanted the increased speed and memory configuration to run a varity of operating systems, possibly with a base OS of FreeBSD, but I don't need this drama in my life.
Tony crapped out on the couch last night while I watched White Chicks. I haven't laughed that much in a long time. Odd, the spell checker recognizes "Free BSD" and "Free-BSD" (which are both incorrect) but not "FreeBSD" which I believe is the correct spelling. Heh, it also suggests 'vaporware' as a replacement for 'vmware'. Funny.
Taking pictures of my empty house made me sad. Not because I'm emotionally attached to the house, mind you, but because the four years I lived in this fairy-tale setting were, in a word, perfect.
That and my children are now in Kansas. Taking pictures of their empty rooms also made me sad. I'm taking these pictures to ease their transistion, so they can see where Daisy, Mleko and Speedbump are staying temporarily, and pictures of the house now that it is empty as well as pictures of Grammie and Papa-Daddy.
So because the house was empty, and I was sad, and my folks weren't home, I drove to the ADC and started drinking Tony's beer.
That and my children are now in Kansas. Taking pictures of their empty rooms also made me sad. I'm taking these pictures to ease their transistion, so they can see where Daisy, Mleko and Speedbump are staying temporarily, and pictures of the house now that it is empty as well as pictures of Grammie and Papa-Daddy.
So because the house was empty, and I was sad, and my folks weren't home, I drove to the ADC and started drinking Tony's beer.
Migration to the T1 on various servers in the ADC is going slowly. This is mostly due to the fact we have no air conditioning, and I'm going to have to do them one at a time, then power them off. Tony considers everything other than his server low-priority. That isn't helping much either. I have moved my home computer out of the house, as well as the mud server, and will be cancelling ADSL tomorrow. The only thing in my house at this point is a cot, the TV, and the DVD player. So I watch ROTS over and over.
The StorageTek guy is here for 2 days to chit-chat about ASM, DR, and knowledge transfer of this unwieldy shared-filesystem we're using here. What a pain in the ass. All this while I migrate one POS SB100 for another POS SB100 which is being used as a server attached to a SCSI-to-IDE Promise array containg 1TB of slow-ass 4200 rpm ATA drives. Nice.
Driving to Kansas and back this weekend to see the kids and deposit the wife until we're ready to start building our new house. At least I'll get a lot of hours in at the ADC. And playing Dungeon Siege with David until DSII is released.
I'm looking into acquiring a smallish nVidia graphics card to add another head to my home computer. Yes, Tony, I know this is not the best solution, but it is probably the most cost-effective.
In other news, I have a cold sore, and asked the wife for something to clear it up. She gave me some Oragel which leaked onto my tongue during the application process while I was driving to work this morning. My tongue went numb like Jar-Jar when he ran his massive lips into Anikin's podracer. It's not medicine, its gelatinous novocaine!
Sun Microsystems to Acquire StorageTek for $4.1 Billion, Creating a Global Leader in Network Computing and Data Management
The StorageTek guy is here for 2 days to chit-chat about ASM, DR, and knowledge transfer of this unwieldy shared-filesystem we're using here. What a pain in the ass. All this while I migrate one POS SB100 for another POS SB100 which is being used as a server attached to a SCSI-to-IDE Promise array containg 1TB of slow-ass 4200 rpm ATA drives. Nice.
Driving to Kansas and back this weekend to see the kids and deposit the wife until we're ready to start building our new house. At least I'll get a lot of hours in at the ADC. And playing Dungeon Siege with David until DSII is released.
I'm looking into acquiring a smallish nVidia graphics card to add another head to my home computer. Yes, Tony, I know this is not the best solution, but it is probably the most cost-effective.
In other news, I have a cold sore, and asked the wife for something to clear it up. She gave me some Oragel which leaked onto my tongue during the application process while I was driving to work this morning. My tongue went numb like Jar-Jar when he ran his massive lips into Anikin's podracer. It's not medicine, its gelatinous novocaine!
Sun Microsystems to Acquire StorageTek for $4.1 Billion, Creating a Global Leader in Network Computing and Data Management
Found a 3-foot Texas Rat Snake recently, 6-inches from my parent's front door. I did not recognise it as poisonous, but the fact that all 15 species of poisonious snakes reside in Texas, it had just eaten (take a look at the size of the rat in it's belly!), it's predatory eye placement, it's triangular shaped head, and the fact that it coiled and started striking at me led me to kill it because my children were playing outisde. Sad really, I like Texas snakes, as they eat rodents and such. Needless to say, poisonous or not, I did not want them biting my kids.
In other news, I popped a floor tile today in the Data Center at work only to find the 220V outlets sitting in a quarter-inch of water. Talk about freaking out. I wanted to start shutting machines down! As it was, we called facilities and they were able to dispatch a clean-up team without disruption. An ageing Leibert "gravity fed" HVAC had become clogged and leaked it's condensation. Could have been a lot worse. Tony is out sick, so here I sit, alone.
I have two servers to build, though I doubt if I'll get them both build tonight. One, a SPARCstation 5 with 256MB RAM and the Fujistu TurboSPARC 170MHz chip will be placed at a buddies house who's got fiber installed. How exactly to implement Sun's new TCP stack into Solaris 9 9/04, I don't know, but I will find out. The second, an old 60MHz dual-processor SPARCstation 10, Tony volunteered me to build for an aspiring programmer in college who wants to learn unix. It's going to cost a fortune to mail, as they are made out of cast iron. My E250 doesn't weigh as much!
In other news, I popped a floor tile today in the Data Center at work only to find the 220V outlets sitting in a quarter-inch of water. Talk about freaking out. I wanted to start shutting machines down! As it was, we called facilities and they were able to dispatch a clean-up team without disruption. An ageing Leibert "gravity fed" HVAC had become clogged and leaked it's condensation. Could have been a lot worse. Tony is out sick, so here I sit, alone.
I have two servers to build, though I doubt if I'll get them both build tonight. One, a SPARCstation 5 with 256MB RAM and the Fujistu TurboSPARC 170MHz chip will be placed at a buddies house who's got fiber installed. How exactly to implement Sun's new TCP stack into Solaris 9 9/04, I don't know, but I will find out. The second, an old 60MHz dual-processor SPARCstation 10, Tony volunteered me to build for an aspiring programmer in college who wants to learn unix. It's going to cost a fortune to mail, as they are made out of cast iron. My E250 doesn't weigh as much!
0615: So my normal route is blocked this morning by a tractor-trailer which decided to turn upside down stopping traffic in all directions this morning. I whip around on an alternate route with nothing lost. It's not unusual for me to be behind a Cavalier with one behind me as we're passing one. They're shit cars, and there are a lot of them. But I wasn't driving my shit car, I was driving the wife's car, and what is unusual is following a Saturn LW300 in your Saturn LW300.
0700: So I trek on over to the ADC since our last remaining connection to the internet went down yesterday at 0900, and I pull across our abandoned parking lot, put the car in reverse to back into my parking space, and nearly hit a car which was right on my bumper!
0800: No cigar smoking in the wife-mobile. Arrive at work grumpy.
1415: NIS+ to LDAP in 5 minutes Flat is a lie. Solaris 10 is a lie. Java Gay Desktop is a lie.
0700: So I trek on over to the ADC since our last remaining connection to the internet went down yesterday at 0900, and I pull across our abandoned parking lot, put the car in reverse to back into my parking space, and nearly hit a car which was right on my bumper!
0800: No cigar smoking in the wife-mobile. Arrive at work grumpy.
1415: NIS+ to LDAP in 5 minutes Flat is a lie. Solaris 10 is a lie. Java Gay Desktop is a lie.
