What I Learned Today

Well i thought i would try a "regular blog " today --

So I woke up this morning and got ready for work. Noah decided he wanted to join me so he got up as well. I decided to drive in so that Beth could get her sleep. I ended up leaving for work around nine. The car seems to being running fine, albeit rather loudly. Traffic isn't so bad that late in the morning so I was able to pull into the parking garage at 9:52 so I got the "early bird special" and only had to pay $18 to park. While in the elevator in the garage a gentleman asked me if my car had a diesel engine. When I replied, no - he said "wow- i think something is wrong with it.. you'd better get it checked out." ---Great--- I got to work and immediately went into the server room and printed out the weekly tape report and pulled the tapes out of the library that needed to go off site. I checked my email and saw the AS400 did not come back online after its weekly IPL. I looked at the green screen and everything seem to be functioning normally, but the TCP/IP service wasn't running. Since i really dont know much about the 400, I just IPL'd it again to fix the issue. Also in my email, i was notified that a server running FreeBSD was down and requested that investigate. I'm not responsible for this server, but its in my server room so I do try to help out where I can. Turns out that the server lost contact with its storage and hung. A reboot brought it back to life but I warned the admin that he might need to replace the array card. Then I received another email asking me to mount the NFS shares on the 400. Again, if i knew anything about the 400 I could get it to automagically mount the shares upon IPL, but I don't so I'm stuck manually doing it. I brought the tape case up to reception just as the tape guy arrived to take the tapes to the storage site. As I started to walk back to the server room I was stopped by the support manager and a developer who requested my presence in one of the conference rooms. I went along and they started asking our webserver and if they can see error logs from this morning. Turns out a customer was getting a 405 error when attempting to use one of our products on the site. So I had to delve into the logs and extract the correct entries, which is always a treat. Next, I get an email request to logon to our SuSe 9 box, which happens to share hardware with one of the Redhat boxes. When I initially set the Redhat and Suse instances up, neither were very important and it was logical that we could just shut one off so that we could use the other. As time passed, the redhat box that has become an important in the build environment, so I can't just shut it off for a while someone works on the Suse instance. So the answer is to setup another Suse9 instance somewhere - the obvious choice is use VMWare. I have VMWare v4 workstation running on a nice 4 way xeon box with some iSCSI storage. Only problem is that SuSe9 doesn't work with VMware4. I have another box running VMware server beta that does support Suse 9. As I start the install, I get another email saying that they want the new suse setup to be Suse 8.1 not Suse 9. Awesome. Turns out Suse didn't issue .ISO files for Suse 8, but they did allow FTP based installs. So I find the boot cd and load it up, then it prompts me for the IP address of the FTP server to download from. Oh bother, I don't know where I'm going to find a mirror that has that old version of Suse. So I start googling around and all the mirrors I see only have Suse9 and 10. After a long time i finally stumbled on to the ftp://ftp.suse.com site. Duh. Should have looked there first.. they have a folder named discontinued and in there is the 8.1 distro. So I point the install to the ftp site and after a little while, it bombs out. It says the ftp session was terminated. So I'll get back to that. I looked at my FC4 install that I'm trying to setup on a DL320 G3. It completed the install, but won't boot the OS, it just goes to a GRUB command prompt. Weird. So I re-run the install and this time just use a normal Ext3 file system and no fancy volume groups or anything, perhaps it will work. Then I get an email from a friend who was having scanner issues, so I call her to try to help out and as I 'm talking I remember that I need to send out a CD to my company's owner's wife out in Colorado. Her computer isn't working and I need to fix it so I am sending her a tools cd that will hopefully do the trick. So after I get off the phone I create the cd and walk to mailboxes etc to mail the package. $27 to get it to Colorado sometime tomorrow. At this point I eat some lunch. in the middle of lunch some people stop by and ask me if I've done something to one of the common area machines, as some of the folders are missing. Of course I hadn't touched it but it immediately becomes my responsibility to find out what happened. After a good bit of time it was determined that the missing files were in the Recycle bin as someone had been trying to rid the computer of all traces of a particular program for a test. Luckily that person hadn't emptied the bin and we recovered the files easily. I finish my lunch and then I tried using the suse FTP site with my web browser just to make sure that the connection was good. It kept timing out. Back to that later. Someone stops by and wants help with the 4o5 error received earlier in the day by the customer. The customer gets the error message when trying to print to a network printer, printing to a local printer works just fine. So I setup a new printer queue for the test and setup tighter security on the Queue to try to re-create the issue. Nothing for it, it still works. Then I remembered I needed to order a product manager a new laptop so I go out to my trusty CDW site and grab my standard laptop, memory and docking station config, then I try to remember what other sorts of things I need. I have about 10 on the order form so far, but I can't think of any more, I'll save that for later. Back to Suse, since the web browser didn't work , I tried logging in via a dos prompt. It worked for a lil bit but then timed out as well. So i figured that perhaps it was something with my internal network so I take the vmware machine and physically move it and attach it to my DSL line that is external to my production network. I try the setup there... it didn't time out but it didn't look like it was doing much. Well its quitting time so I leave the office at 5 -- the car starts fine and runs rather loudly all the way home, not much traffic and pulled in to the garage at 6:10.

Beth had a wonderful dinner ready and it was delicious. Then I took Noah and Anna to Jewel for a lil shopping excursion. I get the kids loaded up into the jewel "firetruck" and then realize what I thought was the shopping list in my coat pocket was actually the shopping the list from the last time I went shopping. Oh well. I will just try to remember what we needed. The kids were great and Anna proceeded to say "Hi, whats your name" to every person in the store. Back at the van, I found the real shopping list and saw that the only things I had forgot were 6 cans of green beans and low fat bread. So I figured we would go to the other supermarket down the street. After we finish shopping there I put the cart behind the van and put the kids in their car seats and get in the car and start to pull out-- then i hear an awful crash. Oh snap.. i forgot to move the cart from behind the van.. So i go back out there and see the huge Nascar looking shopping cart on its side with the groceries spilled all over the ground. Luckily it was just the beans and bread .. it could have been worse. The shopping cart fared well and was not damaged either. I survey the scene to see how many people got to witness my mishap and i lucked out as there wasn't a soul to be seen in the parking lot.. so i picked the cart back up and ran it into the nearest cart corral and took off. Once we got home Beth was still on her conference call so I gave the kids a bath. They have gotten much better in there now and most of the water actually stays in the tub as opposed to being splashed all over the bathroom. After bath time beth was still on her conference call so I got Noah dressed and let Anna dress herself, she did an excellent job and picked her own pjs out and put them on herself with no issues. After a snack and some milk it was bedtime for the kids. Once the kids were in bed we watched American Idol.. i agreed with simon on all his assessments and found miss Pickler particularly amusing. Then I started writing this thing and now its really late... So ya I'm blogged out.

Oh and to clarify - no way I am going to spend $1100 on 7" screens for the headrests ! .. my solution is to strap the laptop to the $25 case that is suspended between the seats. I think one 15" screen in the middle is better then two 7" screens on the side any ways :) Once the kids get older and we get a different van we will look into the integrated DVD thing..