What I Learned Today

FSMO roles

2006-08-26T10:36:00.000-05:00

netdom query fsmo

gives you a list of all the fsmo role holders in your domain.

SMTP - QMAIL - SENDMAIL - POSTFIX

2006-04-27T14:37:00.000-05:00

i don't understand quite what is going on with our cvs server's mail config - seems that both sendmail and qmail are installed. Both Qmail and SendMail are logging info into the syslog, a majority of it being sendmail info.

**************
Testing an SMTP server via the command line

telnet smtp.smtpdomain.com 25

ehlo somedomain.com

mail to:someuser@smtpdomain.com
rcpt to:someuser@somedomain.com
data
subject some subject

CTRL D CTRL D

quit

*************

Tuesday

2006-04-25T23:07:00.000-05:00

1. I had to setup our Knowledge base to work externally as well as internally and I completely forgot that I needed to setup a listener on port 80 on the firewall for the IP address that is associated with the DNS name. I had setup the destination set and the web publishing rule but not the listener. Once I turned that on, all is well.

Friday

2006-04-21T23:48:00.000-05:00

1. More AS/400 fun - I finally replaced the bad disk tonight using the handy dandy - AS/400e Server 170 and 250 Problem, Analysis, Repair and Parts guide. its a 600 page book. i only needed about 5 pages though and it was fairly straight forward. So for $50 for the replacement hard drive, I was able to get the system back up to full strength. But now it is complaining about auxillary storage shortage... so i'm not sure what all is going on.

Wednesday

2006-04-12T07:40:00.000-05:00

i'm a bad bad blogger... how am i going to remember what I learned if I don't write it down.

1. Still dealing with the AS400 and the bad disk. I decided I should do a full backup of the entire system that way if I end up destroying data when I remove the bad disk (despite the OSs reassurance that I won't) I can atleast attempt to restore from a full backup. Turns out a full backup is a pretty big deal and requires shutting down all the subssystems. I ran the backup on Thursday before I left at 4:30. I was out of the office next day and naively assumed the system would bring it self back online after it completed the backup. I was wrong. Since I was en route to KY on Friday, I was stuck on the phone trying to walk poor Mo through bringing the system back up. It never did come back online so it was waiting for me on monday. It wasn't a big deal to bring it back it up, it seems it was in "attended" IPL mode. Once the system was online, all was well. Every Monday night the machine automagically IPL's itself. Which has never been a problem before, except that I have to mount the NFS shares on Tuesday morning. Well yesterday, i went to mount the shares, but the system wasn't up. It seems the system was waiting for assistance and also was in "attended" IPL mode. I'm not sure if this has to do with the bad disk, or something that happened with the back or something that Mo inadvertantly did.. but its rather annoying. The plan is to now replace the disk on thursday evening (we are off on Fri).

2. Currently I am using backup exec for the backup of all my dev systems. This works ok, but using a single DLT drive is a pain and it is not part of the weekly offsite tape rotation. Everyone keeps saying how amazing rsync is.. so I figured I would set something up using this little tool. I need to backup everything but the NFS mounts, so I'm doing something like this...

rsync --single-file-system -aRv / /usr /var /tmp helios:/nas/qaroot/software/images/nobackup/'hostname'

yes i'm using .. cringe .. rsh .. but I have my reasons.. mainly. i'm lazy.

3. I have still not figured out my mac issues.. nor why my new NIS slave doesn't seem to be working quite right..

4. There is a big buzz about Apple's bootcamp -- its pretty slick allowing you to boot windows on an intel mac. There is also virtualization software out there that will let you run windows simultaneously with OSX. What would be interesting to me would be software that would allow you to buy a mac box, load with windows, then run OSX in a window...

5. Beth is so good at documenting my travels... she is pretty creative too , she used the camcorder to record the radio broadcast and that made it easy for me to transfer it to the computer. Here is a pic from inside the big empty, black ride...

Thursday

2006-03-31T00:53:00.000-06:00

1. I'm learning more then I ever wanted to know about the as/400... We need a new one. So I went down the normal route of using IBM's developer program to get us a new box with a discount - but that ended up costing about $75K ... and considering we have about 2 customers on the platform, it doesnt make sense to spend that much on the hardware. So I went down the used route and found some of the old school (ie not a pseries) hardware for incrediably cheap. Currently we have a 170-2292 ( 220 cpw / 30 cpw interactive) and I'm looking at buying a 270-2434/1516(2350 cpw/ 70 cpw interactive). What I haven't figured out yet is if the extra horse power is going to help us at all. We only have two developers at most working on the system and they use it for interactive compiles our of product and they also use it for interactive compiles of our sample applications that use our product. There is no other work being done on the machine. I looked in the QSYSOPR message queue and didnt' find that we were running out of interactive cpw so I am unsure if we are even processor bound on the machine. If we aren't then I should probably spend the money on additional RAM and disk space as opposed to interactive cpw.

2. I also learned that we have a disk problem on our existing 400.. I was looking in the QSYSOPR message queue for any indication of interactive cpw issues and found a boat load of disk error messages. It seems that I have disk in the array that has died.. oh joy.

3. Last monday I found out that our building is killing the power on sunday morning (tomorrow) for eight hours ! Eight Hours ! Who has a battery powered UPS that can last for eight hours??
Since our website is actually located in my server room I was able to transfer it over to our ISP's hosting service and then get the DNS records updated for the weekend so that people will end up there instead trying to access my powerless "data center" (i use the term loosely). Our ISP also has an mx record for our domain so they will hang onto the incoming email while the exchange box is powerless. So all that is left for me to do is gracefully shut down the 25 development servers and 17 infrastructure servers, NAS, phone system, security system, and then go in Sunday afternoon and turn them all back on. Lucky Me !

Saturday

2006-03-25T10:42:00.000-06:00

1. I've move from interop hell to solaris patch help -- we have a customer that wants us to port our app to Solaris 64-bit w/SunStudio 10. Of course SunStudio 10 costs 3K even though SunStudio 11 is free. Anyway - I get the eval version of the product and install in on the our Sol 8 box. The developer runs into problems immediately and asks if all the compiler patches have been applied. So I checked the download page and there was no mention of additional patches available... curious. So I search the site and find the patch page for Studio 11.. but not ten. Turns out the magic search phrase was Sun Studio 10 patch page That lead me to a page that contained links to patches for all the Sun Studio products. This is where patching for Solaris / Sun studio starts to stink pretty badly -- compared to AIX and HP-UX.. and even red hat for that matter. I found a grocery list of patches that can be applied, each for my individual downloading and installing pleasure. There is no ability to bundle the patches, you simply must download the .zip file and copy to the machine and install it. So I start downloading the 15 or so patches that were recommended. Here is how I was able to "batch" install the patches

1. download patches to NFS mount
2. cp *.zip /tmp/patch ; cd /tmp/patch
3. unzip \*.zip ( the \ is required when using a wildcard for unzip ... doesn't work otherwise.)
4. ls > patches (unziping the patches creates a directory with the patch name for each patch, kicking those directory names into a file creates the list of patches we want to install for the next step)
5. patchadd -M /tmp/patch patches

its not pretty but it works --

2. I was thinking about my Mac interop problems and maybe I don't need OD at all. I was thinking I could just leave the user profiles local to the machine. So that way i wouldn't need "managed options" or whatever those mac fellas call it. As it stands now... the Xserv is still hosed up though - when i attempt to connect to an smb share on the box with a windows machine, I get "The account is not authorized to log in from this station" and when i try to connect via smb to the share with a mac client I get "invalid user name and password" . However, I can logon to the Xserv with my windows user name and password, so i know it is bound to the directory correctly its seems to be more of a samba issue.

Thursday

2006-03-23T21:52:00.000-06:00

1. I've been in interop hell... I really want a single directory for all the linuxes - unixes - windows and macs. Is that so much to ask ?

I bought an Xserv running Panther about a year and a half ago with the intention of consolidating all the random windows boxes running AFP as well as a few solaris boxes and putting all the storage on the Xserv. I want to have some security on the files so I need the xserv to be hooked into either the NIS or AD. Something that it is supposedly capable of. I ran into issues on both sides and just shelved the project. But now I find myself revisiting the project because I want to decommison an old Sol 7 box that happens to be running an AFP server (it is also running cvs, samba, ntp and nis). So I need to get the Xserv working. I heard that Tiger had better interop with AD -- so I thought I would upgrade to 10.4 -- wrong -- no upgrades to 10.4 so i need to spend another $1000 on a tiger license even though I never used the panther license... so lame. Anyway - I found a good Tutorial on setting something similar up on www.afp548.com but they want you to have two Xserv's one running Open Directory and the other acting as the fileserver. There is no way I'm going to buy another xserv. They say that 10.3 doesn't play well when it is the OD master and a member of the AD. So maybe I should just buy the dumb 10.4 license. On the NIS side of things I would love to have AD run as the NIS master, so then we could use LDAP for the linuxes that support it and use NIS for the older unixes that don't.

2. Oh yea.. when I rebooted my FC4 box that I setup as the nis slave.. ypserv didn't start automatically -- because the domain name wasn't set, despite the presence of the /etc/defaultdomain file. Turns out FC4 looks at /etc/sysconfig/network for the domain name so I had to add NISDOMAIN="dlogics.com" to get the domainname set correctly.

Wednesday

2006-03-15T11:43:00.001-06:00

1. Setting up NIS on Fedora Core4

When i set the server up i swore that I selected server tools which included the ypserv package. However, after teh server was running, i serached and serached for ypinit and could not find it. So I hearde that these fancy new linuxes use somethign called YUM to manage software. So I do a yum search NIS command which yields a ton of results since "NIS" is part of "administrator" so I had to use VI to find teh pertainent info.I discovered that the package was called ypserv.i386. So i ran yum install ypserv.i386 It did some fancy things and a few seconds later it said it was installed. So i do a search on ypinit and find it in /usr/lib/yp /ypinit.

first i updated ypservers on the NIS master with name of the new slave.

ypcat -k ypservers > /tmp/ypservers
vi /tmp/ypservers
cd /var/yp
cat /tmp/ypservers makedbm - /var/yp/`domainname`/ypservers

then on the new server
set my domainname in /etc/defaultdomain
domainname dlogics.com
domainname > /etc/defaultdomain
then i turned ypbind on

service ypbind start

then i edited /etc/nsswitch.conf and added nis to the list

Then i ran

/usr/lib/yp/ypinit -s helios

then i started the ypserv

service ypserv start

then i created a new user on the master and ran make to propagate the map. then i went to one of my unix clients and edited /etc/yp.conf and changed the nis server to hera, the new server. tehn i restarted the ypbin service and logged out. then logged back in as the test user i just created. Viola! it seems to work.

2. i learned this last week but thought i would put it in here to remind myself.. regular blogs are time consuming !!

Tuesday

2006-03-07T21:46:00.000-06:00

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..

Sunday

2006-03-05T23:23:00.000-06:00

1. It costs $1100 to have a two 7" screens installed in headrests in your car and that doesn't include installation in the vehicle or a dvd player...

2. It costs $25 for a carrying case that will attach between the two seats so that you can place a laptop or dvd player on it and both people in the back can watch.

3. It costs $45 for a power invertor to run ac power to one of my extra laptops that now sits on the carrying case.

Friday

2006-03-03T12:35:00.000-06:00

1. When removing the default password complexity requirements in a Windows 2003 domain, you must leave the options "defined" and "disabled" -- not "undefined" - If you set it to "undefined" you will end up re-enabling the requirements. How lame.

2. When using the BACKUP command in VMS to transfer files from one located to another, you can't use a wildcard in the beginning of the location.. unless you don't mind losing all the security information. the command should look like this

BACKUP/LOG/VERIFY SHIVA$DKA400:[000000...]*.*;* BOPP$DKB200:[user5...]*.*;*

3. If you are looking to upgrade an existing 2003 server with SP1 already installed to vR2, then you only need the second disk. However I dont currently have a volume license key for R2, so if i wanted to upgrade to R2, I would need to re-install 2k3 w/SP1 from the first disk and use my MSDN key.

Sunday, Monday, Tuesday

2006-02-28T21:37:00.000-06:00

1. Evansville and Madisonville are on the same time as Chesterton in February.

2. The cavalier is back home, but I am out $500.

saturday

2006-02-25T11:28:00.000-06:00

1. So here we go. Beth asked to get "skin" by madonna on her page. So I will fill you in on how that is done.

The easy way --- there are sites out that the will provide the html code for you to add videos and music to your site. Two I found are www.discoverclips.com and www.musicvideofun.com Be careful at these sites though as there are a ton of pop ups and shady sort of things going on .. so make sure you click "No" or "don't install" to any prompts you receive. Once at the site, find the video you want and copy the code from the box and then paste it into your blogspot template under the " !-- End of Profile --> "line, then republish the blog an you will have the video show up on your side bar. You might need to adjust the width of the video so that it fits properly , this can be down by lowering the number that is indicated after "width" in the html code you copied from the website.

The more challenging way..

First - the music that you hear when you go to a blogspot page is not actually stored on the blogspot webserver. The music file is "hosted" somewhere else and you put a link to the song on your blogspot page, so that when your page is visited by a user, their webbrowser goes out to the location that the song is hosted and downloads it to their machine. So that means that every time someone visits your site they will download the song to their machine. This is not always the case depending on some factors, but it is good to keep in mind.

So there are two ways to host the music file you want use on your webpage. The easiest way is to just find someone else who has hosted the file you want to use. The other way would be to sign up for an account somewhere and put the file up there yourself.

You might be thinking - I have the music file on my machine, why can't i just "host" it from here ? Most of us have consumer level broadband accounts, with limited upload speeds and restricted inbound ports. So it would be a big pain in the butt to get it to work -- not mention you could potentially irritate your ISP, which is never a good thing.

For beth's song we will go with the first option, just finding it out on the web somewhere and linking to it.

A great place to find publicly hosted files is www.altavista.com, then select MP3/Audio and type the name of the song and artist you want to use. The search yielded the following site.
http://www.coachb.net/goldengirl.htm

If you go to this site you will see that the song skin plays - so we have hit the jackpot. Now we need to extract the HTML code used so that we can use it on the blogspot page. You can do this by clicking "View" From the top of your Internet Explorer menu bar then select view source. Most likely notepad will open with all the source code from the page. Hit ctrl+F to open a find window and try typing in the song name, if "Search string not found" pops up, try searching on "embed" that should yield the beginning of the code that you need. Of course if this particular website has mulitple songs linked on it then you need to make sure that the the "Embed" tag that you find is actually the right one for the song you want. Then highlight and copy a few lines of code until the code looks like it talking about something else. I copied the following code out of the source of the site that links the "skin" song that beth wants.

EMBED SRC="music/skin.wav" WIDTH="256" HEIGHT="111" ALIGN="BOTTOM"

SRC is the location where the file lives. In this example, its a relative path which means that the entire path to the file is not listed. So I'm guessing that the path is http://www.coachb.net/music/skin.wav If you click that link you will see that the song just plays in your broswer (depending on your browser settings). So will need to use the absolute path (the full path listed above) when we reference it in our Blogspot code.

So now that we know where the song is, we can drop it into the blogspot page. After logging into beth's site, I click "configure site settings" and clicked on "Template" Then I hit ctrl + F and searched for " !-- End of Profile --> " Directly beneath that line I pasted the link code. I had to adjust the "Width" tag to a smaller number so that it would fit on the side bar of the page. Save the template and republish the blog and there you go.

However - heres the problem. Most hosting sites have a limit to how much you can download from your site each month or they charge you more. So if you link your page to someone else's hosted file, and then your page gets a lot of traffic, you might end up costing the person who is hosting the file some money. So its always a good idea to get permission to link to a file on someone else 's site.

If you are ambitious and want to open an account with a free web hosting service, you can do that too, then you can upload whatever music you want and link it to your site. I opened an account with www.freewebs.com and uploaded a music file , however I got the following error message :

FreeWebs accounts newer than 7 days are provisional and can only upload files up to 750K. Provisional users also can not upload .exe files. You can remove this provision immediately by signing up for a premium service

So I can't try the whole hosting thing for another week.

Also - Its not exactly legal to host copyrighted music for everyone to download for free. Am I worried about that ? Not really as long as you are doing like one song and not a whole album. You do run the risk of your files being deleted on the hosted site if they find out you have put copyrighted music up there.

So there you have it.. there are a ton of different ways to get music on your page, it just depends on how obscure the song is that you want to use.

Also, you can add a lot more then just music and videos, there are codes out there for games, polls, counters, etc..

Friday

2006-02-24T23:25:00.000-06:00

1. Long week. I dont think i really learned anything worth typing. Well I am messing with adding crap to the blog..

Sunday

2006-02-19T15:24:00.000-06:00

1. The closets are truely 47 inches deep. Not 48. Which meant I had to cut an inch off the shelving I bought. Not cool. Not to mention that I couldnt' use my 48" level. Who makes 47 inch deep closets ?

2. I forgot to mention that while ColdPlay is no good on the treadmill it is good for stretching.

Friday , Saturday

2006-02-19T09:46:00.000-06:00

1. I need to post a sign above the thermostat in my server room. It should say "This thermostat controls only the temperature in this room. It does not control any of the private offices on the floor." I learned that I need this sign because when I walked into the server room on Friday some brainiac had pushed both units all the way to 90 degrees. I later learned it was the Chairman of the Board who was having cooling issues in his office and decided to adjust "any thermostat he could find" The thermostat had been adjusted for about 30 minutes before I walked in and the temp had already reached 80 degrees, and my VMS cluster had shutdown from the heat. Luckily no one was using the cluster on Friday, as when I brought it back online one of the disks would not mount. So I let the whole thing rest this weekend. Hopefully it will come to life on Monday morning.

2. If you change the password on the anonymous IIS user, it is wise to remember to change it on all of your sites that use anonymous access... if you don't .. the sites will no longer work !

Thursday

2006-02-16T23:13:00.001-06:00

1. It is possible to eat bread sticks at the Olive Garden w/out Alfredo sauce. I had no idea.

2. Despite the fact that my Dl320 G3 has a weak array controller - it still works, sort of, manually 0f course. Meaning if a drive fails I have to shut the machine off and flip disks, then power back up. If the server I'm building wasn't so critical maybe that would suffice. But it is very critical so I can't settle for a half way cooked RAID1 array. I think I am going to buy a new server with a real SMART Array controller.

Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday

2006-02-15T23:54:00.000-06:00

1. I'm a bad, bad blogger.

2. Turns out that my inital fears were correct and they will have to remove and possibly replace the head on my cavailer.

3. I restarted the DHCP Client service on my mail server ( the machine whose DNS A record was magically disappearing). I haven't had any trouble since.

4. Rosetta is not emulation.

5. The raid card in my DL320 G3 is kinda crappy - it looks like it needs software drivers to work correctly. I'm trying to setup Fedora Core 4 on it and it is seeing 2 hard drives even though they are technically in a RAID1 config.

6. My Dad's computer is pretty well hosed. It won't allow me to create a page file. I went into the registry and specified the page file size etc and the machine booted properly ... once. After that it takes about 20 minutes to logon. So I'm going scorched earth on it.

Sunday

2006-02-12T11:17:00.000-06:00

1. I forgot to mention on Friday - that I learned that Coldplay is terrible treadmill music. Not that I expected them to be good.. They work much better when walking to and from the train as sort of "cool down" music. The White Stripes worked much better on the treadmill.

2. I had to LOL at Tracy's comment on Friday's post.

3. I talked to my neice's dad who happens to own a car shop and he said that removing the spark plug shouldn't be too expensive since it is very accessible. (its in the very front of the engine.) So I will have it towed there tomorrow.

Saturday

2006-02-11T21:53:00.000-06:00

1. It is very possible to "break" a spark plug when removing it. I have the Chilton guide on my cavalier and I read the section on replacing the spark plugs. It said to never use a flexible extension as you might end up putting direct pressure on the plug and cause it to break, which would end up in "frustrating and costly repairs". I figured I had no problem since I did not have a flexible extension, my extension was steel alloy. I got the first three plugs out without a whole lot of effort. The fourth plug wouldn't budge. So I pulled a little harder. Then it snapped. Without knowing for sure , I am guessing that removing the head and having the plug removed is going to cost more then the car is worth. So frustrating as the car was working just dandy this morning, but I was trying to get to the bottom of the whole "not starting when it is wet" thing.

Friday

2006-02-10T23:18:00.000-06:00

1. Never try to run on the treadmill in 3 yr old shoes (unless you really like blisters)

2. Beth is the best to go shoe shopping with.

3. I was correct to be wary about rebooting my machine as it did not properly detect my IDE devices upon reboot. I had to leave it sit all day and try it again. Viola. Works fine. Also ports 25 and 110 are working again so all the spam to my inbox is coming in properly.

4. Somehow I talked myself into giving a presentation next week on SharePoint. I should probably learn how to use it soon.

5. I also have to give a presentation on those fancy new Intel iMacs. Probably should turn one on soon....

Thursday

2006-02-09T15:44:00.000-06:00

1. Today I learned that in order to view an .ini file via IIS6 I need to Open the Virtual Directory properties, click configuration in the application area and point the .ini extension to C:\windows\system32\netserv\asp.dll. When viewing the file with the web server, 's seem to be ignored, but we will worry about that later.

2. Jack Stands for my car only cost like 10 bucks.

Wednesday

2006-02-08T23:28:00.000-06:00

1. You must respect the UNIX command line . You can do some pretty sweet / dangerous stuff there. Today I used # find /$PATHTOCHANGE -type d -exec chmod g+s {} \; to traverse a directory structure that I needed to set the special bit on the group perms so that all files created in the directory structure will be owned by the group that owns the directory.

2. In the training room the DNS server was in a fuzzy state - meaning it would resolve for all domains except one, I cleared the cache to no avail and then restarted the service, that did the trick.

3. I can't send or receive emails on my desktop at home. Outbound TCP Ports 110 and 25 are being blocked locally by my machine some how. All other machines on my home network have no issues with these ports and I can not telnet to the usual servers via these ports on my desktop which leads me to believe they are being blocked locally. As far as I know the Windows Firewall is inbound only so I dont' think its a windows thing - it should be a third party app thing.. I think a reboot might fix it , but I don't want to reboot. I'm looking into the norton antivirus as a possible culprit...

Tuesday - Happy Birthday Beth !!

2006-02-07T23:47:00.000-06:00

1. Its not a good idea to suggest that someone go to the BMV on their birthday. While I had a pleasant experience in January, poor Bethie did not fair so well today.

Friday, Saturday, Sunday and Monday

2006-02-06T23:59:00.000-06:00

1. There was a rodent nest in the engine of my car. The white stuff on top of the engine isn't snow, its the insides of some unknown object that the mice or whatever ripped up and used as a nest. It doesn't look like they did any damage, but the car still doesn't start when its wet.

2. Replacing the wires on a 97 cavalier isn't easy. The spark plugs are right there in the front, but the ignition coil is underneath the intake manifold on the back of the engine. So I would need to get under the car to do it.

3. On the As/400 it is possible to create a library such that no one, not even QSECOFR can edit its members. In such a case you can rename said library, then create a new library and copy all the objects from the original library into the new library and then will be able to edit the objects.

Thursday

2006-02-02T23:14:00.000-06:00

1. Well it worked like a Champ for 2 years, but the VOIP card in the Inter-Tel phone system has really been causing headaches lately. We now have 5 users on it so whenever it has problems, the emails start flooding in. Since its still under warranty Inter-Tel replaced it in December, but with a refurbished card; which until today was working alright. But it was sporadically disconnecting today so we have ordered a new card. Hopefully this will do the trick and bring VOIP (and me) back into everyone's good graces.

Wednesday

2006-02-01T11:35:00.000-06:00

1. VMS Part II - so we finally got the cluster master to come online w/out it trying to mount the dead disk. The other cluster member was still trying to mount the dead drive though. So I had to go into a conversational boot. Luckily I noticed the conversational boot flag for the Alpha 4100 is -flags 0,1 so in order to boot our machine I did boot -flags 0,1 dkb0 then we went in and tried to find the disk_names.dat file that the Alpha used when booting. After locating the file we found that we couldn't edit very well due to the terminal type setting, Nothing we tried worked so we ended up using edit/edt and just deleting the line in question. The cluster is back online but minus the broken disk.

2.I learned that I have no idea where the permissions are defined for access to CIFS shares on the AS/400. I also learned that iAccess isn't working on our NT4 system that is running on a card inside the 400.

3. I forgot that on Monday I learned I'm offically at 20/20 vision ! My left eye is definitely weaker then the right, but hopefully it will catch up soon !

Tuesday

2006-01-31T23:35:00.000-06:00

1. Frickin VMS - looks like we lost a disk in the vms cluster. So all I wanted to do was go in and remove the automount command for said disk. I consulted some manuals, all of which said - "set the boot flags to get into a conversational boot" sounds easy enough, and then it said that each type of console had its own boot flags. Ok. I've got a MicroVax 3100/95. I think the manuals for that box have already decomposed. Anyway.. The boot flags for the MicroVax to get into a conversational boot are boot /R5:0000001 DKA300: Then you get a nice prompt called sysboot> at that point you can modify the default startup parameters so i did a set startup_P1 "MIN" so that way the machine would boot with minimal services and would allow me to edit the systartup_vms.com file. So I finally get in there and edit/edt didn't work so I had to set the terminal type first. So I get into the file and see that it actually calls mount.com to do the mounts, so I go into mount.com and see that it refers to a file named disk_names.dat and it goes on and on. Still haven't fully stopped it from trying to mount the drive on all the machines in the cluster.

2. So Comcast's new thing is that if you dont pay your bill they will try to force you to download their crappy "enhancements" and then enter your account number. Then they will tell you that your account needs "Servicing". You can grab an IP address and you can ping your local gateway but you can't get past it and no inbound ports work either.

Monday

2006-01-30T23:22:00.000-06:00

1. Today I learned or perhaps was strongly reminded of the fragility of life.

2. When driving into work I forgot my toll money and my atm card. So I had to take the long way. I was running late for the eye doctor so I called to tell them so. I missed my exit and ended up on a different interstate, which was under major construction. I then ended up on the express side as opposed to the local side, meaning that it would be that much longer before I could get off the interstate and either turn around or try to muddle my way through the city. Anyway - I found that at the place where the local and express merge, I could drive straight across the local lanes and catch an exit. Lucky for me, there wasn't much traffic so I made a 90 degree turn across 6 lanes of highway and made to the exit. (IL 1 - North Halsted) I was then able to turn on 156th street and make my way back to I-94.

2. Twin Beds are really expensive -- when walked into the mattress place and I saw the $279 price tag on the bed, I was like, ok thats a lil more then I wanted to spend, but I can handle then. It took me a few minutes to realize that was only for the head board and the footboard. The mattress and box spring were an addittonal $399.

Sunday

2006-01-29T23:06:00.000-06:00

1. seems like comcast is doing something different when you dont' pay the bill for a few months. Before they would just stop the modem from grabbing an IP address. Now it seems like they delete modem's registration information. Will have to find out more - neice's computer is still having issues, so I think she just needs to pay the bill.

Saturday

2006-01-28T23:35:00.000-06:00

1. Birthday parties are very tiring !

2. Though I never would have believed it when I was younger, there is such a thing as too many toys !

3. Audio Mapping is disabled by default on Windows 2003 server. This means that a remote connected client cannot use sound.

Friday

2006-01-27T23:56:00.000-06:00

1. Our new Intel based Imacs arrived today. i have to admit I'm impressed. They even have an Ipod-shuffle looking remote control that smartly attaches to the side of the LCD so it doesn't get lost when its not being used.

2. I learned that we haven't figured out how to get a projector to work with an HP NC6000 running Windows 2003 server. Works fine with Xp,.. and we tried applying the XP driver to the 2003 machine, and the driver installs succesfully but refuses to send the image to the projector. I am going to have to look at this myself on Monday.

3. looks like we are getting a new platform to port one of the products to. Solaris x64 here we come ! Amazingly not only is Solaris 10 free but the Sun Studio 11 is free too. I paid $1,000 for it last year (version 8 command line edition) - how irritating! Could be worse I suppose, I could have bought 10 power pc based macs 2 weeks before the intel announcement...

Thursday

2006-01-26T23:55:00.000-06:00

1. SGI is a pretty terrible company to do business with. As I'm sure everyone remembers I had to jump through major hoops to purchase their debugger. Our developers were still having issues and noticed that the version of the of the debugger that we are using is not the latest and greatest. The most recent patch for the debugger was released in early 2005, so it makes no sense why the software I purchased does not have the most current version. I called SGI to inquire about how to get an update to the debugger. The friendly support rep asked me if I bought a support contract when I bought the debugger, of course I didn't. He said I would have to buy the software again to get the most current version.. after beating my head against the phone I explained that I bought the software 2 weeks ago and for some reason they didn't ship me the most current version. So "out of courtesy" the rep agreed to ship me the most recent version of the software. He had no idea as to why they shipped me a version that was 3 years old !!

2. One of my faithful commentors, Christy - mentioned my car might have a distributor cap problem... unfortunately my 97' cavalier doesn't have a distributor cap :( but it is definitely something with the starting mechanism... I'm going to take it Auto-Zone for some free testing. Thanks for the suggestion and keep them coming !

3. Is it really possible that Apple offers no upgrade path from OS X Server 10.3 to 10.4 ? I really have to go out and buy a completely new license ?

Wednesday

2006-01-25T09:36:00.000-06:00

1. I learned the other day that my drivers license expired back in November. So this morning after getting donuts for Anna's birthday breakfast I thought I'd stop by the local BMV to get it renewed. To my surprise - the state has shut down the branch. This was probably the best BMV ever as there were never any lines and the ladies there were semi-friendly. I guess that led to the demise of the branch - now I have to go to stinky portage, not much further, but much busier.

2. My car starts. I hope I don't turn into a cranky old man anytime soon... Actually we think it is a condensation thing, where something in the engine gets wet that shouldn't, so the car won't start. Once it dries out, the car starts fine.

3. The Portage BMV isn't so bad. They have definintely improved their processes and are running much more efficently then I have ever seen before. It took about 8 minutes to get my new license. My new eyes passed the vision test so I got the "glasses or contacts" restriction removed from my license.

4. I learned this last week but forgot to put it down -- the salvation army donation box is in the Northwest Corner of MC's Lowe's parking lot.

Monday and Tuesday

2006-01-25T00:06:00.000-06:00

1. I have decided to omit "what I learned on" in the titles of my posts - this is more of a declaration as opposed to something actually learned, or well I guess I could say I learned I'm too lazy to type "what I learned on" in the title of each post...

2. My car still won't start. Not that I have tried anything but starting it. I keep thinking it will magically heal itself like Christine. It has done it before, honest.

3. I am listening to the Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis on CD and they have setup the discs so that each track is one chapter. Its nice because there are only about 4 chapters per disc, so only four tracks. Makes it easy to simply stop at the end of the chapter and then pick up where you left off later. However, what I learned today was that if you stop in the middle of the chapter it is very annoying to try to fast-forward through the reading to find your place. I also have the Lord of The Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien on CD and they were set up with a new track every 3 minutes, regardless of where in the chapter you were. This made for 20 - 24 tracks per CD, however it is a little easier to pick up where you left off.

4. Z/OS is not bullet-proof, well atleast the machine that my z/OS is running on isn't. We have an issue where some of the storage units seem to have magically been "erased" or perhaps "initialized" either way , they don't even contain their volume label anymore although they formatted correctly.

5. I learned that I am baffled by window's 2003 DNS scavenging. For some reason it likes to delete my mailservers A record. That causes all sorts of issues for CVS as well my savvy users who insist on Thunderbird over Outlook. The answer at the moment. Turn Scavenging back off.

6. Thanks to Oprah, I learned it is not smart to hire a stripper for your 16 yr olds bday party. It is also really not smart to allow your 14 yr old son to take explicit pictures - it is really really not smart to then take the roll of film to your neighborhood Walgreens.

7. I got the protective contacts removed yesterday and now my vision is at 20/25 - I have another appt. next week, hopefully it will keep improving. I think x-ray vision would be nice, but I doubt I'd get invited to any more FOA events .. or anywhere for that matter.

8. I received a quote from IBM for a new P-series box that would allow us to use lpars and run both AIX 5.3 and I/OS simultaneously -- only about 125K.. for a machine that between the two platforms, we have about 6 customers. Not really worth it at this point.

9. I learned that there is a lot more to do then just pick out new chairs when it comes to re-doing our current office space. I have to make the determination if we should rip our existing cat 5 cable and bump it up to cat 6 . We signed a 10 yr lease - so it seems to make sense that we should upgrade now so that we will be able to accommodate faster speeds in the future.. but I need to do some more research.

Sunday

2006-01-22T22:46:00.000-06:00

1. My car won't start

2. I'm not strong enough anymore to push it up the incline of my driveway and into the garage. ( I swear I would have been able to back in the day...)

3. The new Imacs with the Intel procs shipped yesterday, that means they should comein this week which means I'd better order that "special ram"...

4. I am in absolutely no pain and my eyes are no longer sensitive to light ! I get the protective contacts removed tomorrow morning, hopefully the vision will improve. Its good now, but I'm hoping for superman-like vision.

What I learned Thursday, Friday and Saturday

2006-01-22T00:21:00.000-06:00

1. When the eye doctor says that you will be in "slight discomfort" for a few hours after the surgery, he really means "imagine two hot stakes poking your eyes" for a few hours. Well maybe it wasn't that bad, but it hurt more then I was prepared for.

2. With PRK things start off good then get worse then get better. I knew that going into the surgery but didn't realize to what extreme. I felt great about 18 hrs after the surgery, I could see fine and my eyes didnt hurt. I took a nap about 24 hrs after the surgery and when I woke up , my eyes were very sensitive to the light and hurt quite a bit. My vision was also very blurry compared to earlier in the day. I slept alright last night, but this morning my eyes continued to be extremely sensitive. When I woke up from my afternoon nap (approx. 50 hrs after the surgery) things were much better, my eyes were not as sensitive to the light and I could actually look at the computer screen. I'm looking forward to Monday morning when they take the protective contacts out of my eyes and my vision should improve quite abit, although it can take up to 3 weeks to get my "best vision"

3. I have managed to go for about 48 hrs without logging on to my work email and surveying the damage that occurred during my absence. That might be the longest I've gone in about 3 yrs.

What I learned on Wednesday

2006-01-18T13:56:00.000-06:00

1. Despite the fact that is not listed - OpenSSL is a prereq for Curl on Solaris.

2. This will be my last blog for a few days until I can see again - unaided I hope !! The big surgery is tomorrow and today they verified that they are doing PRK not LASIK, because of my thin corneas. I have my Chronicles of Narnia books on CD and my Lord of the Rings on CD to keep me busy while I am unable to look at a computer for the next couple days..

3. Thanks to my faithful commenters. the FOA girls - I hope you guys will be alright without my blog for a couple days ! :)

4. Lastly - It is incredibly easy to setup windows 2003 server as a Pop3 email server. I just installed the Pop3 service via add/remove programs -> windows components then I defined the domain and mailboxes within the Pop3 mmc snapin. The only gotcha in the whole process is that the domain can not already exist on the SMTP server - it has to be created via the POP3 server. Also - in order to get "local user" authentication to work I needed to enable SPA on both the server and the client.

What I learned on Tuesday.

2006-01-17T15:11:00.000-06:00

1. I am capable of sticking with something for a whole week !

2. To easily convert Windows text files on a mac do a :fileformat = mac :w in VIM and then exit and open the file. This will get rid of the nasty ^M line break chars. More info here.

3. When using the Verisign site to order SSL or Code signing certs - get the amount from the website, but before you provide any information, have the PO created. They force you to put a PO number before you can submit the request and the site will time out if you leave up for more than a few minutes at the PO screen it will just time out and you will have to re-enter ALL the information.

4. I started working out again -- at Bally's in the hole under a building not too far from work. Its part of the discovery health body challenge thing .. 3 of us from work signed up for an 8week free membership. Anyway - they don't have locks on the lockers of course, so I had to find my lock from my last feeble attempt to work out and try to recall the combo. Finding the lock was easy the combo did not come back so quickly. Before thinking too hard, I figured I could probably look up the combo on line. So I go out to Master Lock's website and find the lost combo FAQ. They want a Notorized statement (with Raised Seal) that the lock is indeed yours and a picture of the lock to prove it isn't attached to anything ! Too funny. So that wasn't happening as I need the lock for tomorrow. So I stared the lock down and just started twisting the dial and sure enough i got it to work . 34 - 26-21

5. I finally got the hosts file thing working on the mac. In most unix flavors i believe there is some sort of file called nsswitch.conf that defines the order that a machine uses when looking up name info. Well the mac has to complicate things and let good old NetInfoManager take care of this, so its not as easy as just switching some services around in a flat file , you actually have to load up the lookupd order into netinfomanager and then load the hosts file that you want to use as. To top it all off , the hosts names are case sensitive. What a pain. Guess its a BSD thing.

What I learned on Monday

2006-01-16T09:53:00.000-06:00

1. When backuping up AIX with smitty you can just specify a remote directory to path such as /mounts/backups/aix/1-16-06-predator.backup. However as I found out - that file might be larger then the ulimit limit. I had to change the hard and soft limit by specifying
ulimit -H -f 2097151000
ulimit -f 2097151000

this allowed me to create larger files for this particular shell session.

2. Turns out the Intel based iMacs we are getting in return for our beta Intel boxes only have 512MB of RAM. Not just any old RAM will do, of course - its special RAM. We couldn't find it at our normal outlets but it is at RAMJET. Not a bad price either .. $250 for 2GB.

3. Its not as easy as I thought to use a local hosts file on a mac... Still looking into that.

4. The Mailbox on Indian Boundary is not in front of the UPS store -- its in front of Hallmark.

What I learned on Sunday

2006-01-16T00:01:00.000-06:00

1. Kodak EasyShare is up there on my list of annoying software, almost as high as AOL. It will not fully uninstall for me, despite the use of the "clear utility". And the new version will not come down either. This is for one of the machines that I'm looking at for my neice's boyfriend's parents...

2. Its not as hard as I thought to replace a solar sensor on a lamppost. Although I was thrown for a loop trying to determine which circuit the lamppost was on. Turns out it is on the same breaker (15) as the water heater electronics.

3. I bought a purafilter2000 furnace filter today instead of the 3M filtrete. It was 5 dollars less and had the same MERV rating (11). If you agree to give them some info they will remind you by email to replace the filter after 3 months. Although the site looks like it was writen on Notepad - it will be nice to get a reminder to change the dang filter..

What I learned on Saturday

2006-01-14T21:43:00.000-06:00

1. Ben Watson is my new hero. He ran over 100 yards to catch Champ Bailey and stop him from returning a 100 yd. Interception back for a touchdown. Back my football days, I played offensive line and whenever the QB threw an interception it was always sort of fun to hustle down field and light up some unsuspecting defender who was sleeping on the job. Mr. Watson displayed that hustle and even though the Broncos scored on the very next play it was still awesome to see him give 100% and catch that corner.

2. I really dont' like AOL. I have had bad experiences in the past with all the software that they put on the machine of a subscriber, but today was especially irritating. This machine had AOL's "Spyware protection" or whatever they call it and yet when I put Symantec Antivirus v10 and MS Anti-spyware software on it, it found multiple running processes as well a couple dlls and registry keys. I understand that one Anti-spyware product can't detect everything, but as far as I know -- AOL is the only one that has commercials touting it superiority to anything else out there. Personally I recommend JavaCool's Spyware Blaster - as a protective measure. MS' AntiSpyware and PepiMk's SpyBot Search and Destroy as both protective measures and scanners. Not to mention the fact that after I uninstalled all AOL components in Add/Remove Programs -- the Service "AOL Top Speed" still existed as well as the system Icon...

3. Thanks to a friendly reader named Chris - I learned that I can email my blog updates to this site as opposed to having to trips out to the site and do the updates. Thanks, Chris !

What I learned on Friday

2006-01-13T13:46:00.000-06:00

1. This site actually came in handy today when I needed to install J2SE w/Netbeans on a linux box. I just clicked the handy link I put in my first post. Yay me !

2. If your Blackberry device won't boot, ie it never gets past the hour glass after you turn it on, you can use a little executable called javaloader.exe to actually connect to the device and delete the entire application partition. After it is wiped, you can then use the Desktop Manager's application loader to re-install all the software.

3. After you wipe out a Blackberry 7150t and reload the applications, if you accept the defaults, the PHONE application will not be loaded ! You have to go through the apps and make sure the phone app is selected to be installed manually. It was sort of funny after I reloaded the device, got the email working and then found that it did not work as a phone at all. You couldn't make or receive calls.

4. To setup a red hat box as an NTP client from a desktop session you click system -> date and time and check the NTP box. How simple is that ? Almost windows-esque.

5. I finally got ghost to work on my Bart PE disk. After what seems like months of searching the ghost CD for the right files to add to the PE Build, I finally found that if you install the "standard tools" not the enterprise client or server, you will get the files that you need. Good old ghost.. I can remember way back when it was shareware, before norton bought it and symantec bought norton.. but I digress...

6. I started watching some of the instructional videos included in the win2k3 server resource kit. I didn't realize all the security features available in WSH 5.6 or that some of the VBScript IDE's actually had "intellisense"-like capabilites. I always just used UltraEdit.

7. The enigneer working on the Inter-Tel phone system today said that it was impossible to have a message lamp light up on two phones for the same mailbox, because a mailbox can only be assigned to one extension. The enigneer I spoke to on Wednesday (the one who told me about the hold music) said that it wouldn't be a problem to have the message lamp light up on two phones whenever there is a message in the "community" voicemail box.

What I learned on Thursday

2006-01-12T09:04:00.000-06:00

1. Some people never learn. This is an email I received this morning @ 8:45am.

I'm missing some files. How do I get them back? Our meeting is at 9 am.

2. I forgot how much I liked this site to ensure your firewall is actually doing its job. ShieldsUP!

Seems that there are alot of people that don't like Steve Gibson or his Shields up site. My personal opinion is that the site definitely has some good features and can help novice users identify some common major problems with their systems.

3. If your auto complete in Windows Explorer is not working (e.g. if you open an explorer window and type C:\prog then hit the key, and C:\program files doesn't appear) you can enable it by going into Internet Explorer, click Tools-> Internet Options , click the Content Tab then click the "Auto Complete" button. Click the "web addresses" box and click OK then OK again. Now Try It. It makes no sense to me whatsoever as what do "web addresses " and local drive paths have to do with each other ? But whatever. It works. Here is the official article.

4. Freakin DNS - I was wondering why my scavenging of stale RR's wasn't working as I had enabled it on the forward and reverse zones. Well - you actually need to enable it on the server as well, not just in the zones you want to have scavenged. Probably more on this later.

5. If you are trying to install the PDF JobReady client and server on the same machine, and you run into authentication issues, just uninstall both and then reinstall server, then the client.

6. I'm glad the FOA girls are enjoying my techno-babble - I will try my best to keep it up !

What I learned on Wednesday

2006-01-11T21:34:00.000-06:00

1. Since gdb doesn't work with pthreads on IRIX - I had to purchase the IRIX debugger. So - just go to the website and buy it from their online store... right ? Oh wait. there is no online store, you have to call their 800-number and talk to someone. So after I explain that I just want the debugger, not the compiler - because we are using gcc - they explain i need to buy the compiler to get the command line debugger. They offer the compiler to me at the rock bottom price of only $2340. They won't accept a PO and force me to use a credit card. This was back on 12/30. The CD's finally arrived today. There were about 15 discs in the package and the flexlm key on the outside expired on March 14, 2004. Weird. So I put the MIPS pro C++ disc in and looked for the command line debugger... no luck.. I put the ProDev disc in and the command line debugger was on that disc. Whatever.

2. Thanks to a helpful reader I learned that you can install J2SE via the command line if you grab the generic package as opposed to using the Installshield based installer.

3. I think I need to do this blogging at work when I actually have this stuff top of mind.

4. Our Inter-Tel phone system can only support one hold music source unless we buy an option card.

5. For some reason there about 20 LTO tapes put in "FROZEN" status (using Netbackup 5.1 Mp2) I wonder if its the media or the drive...(.There are 5 reasons media might be frozen.)

What I learned on Tuesday

2006-01-10T18:41:00.000-06:00

1. I 'm paying way too much to get Lasik surgery. (well PRK in my case) A girl at work is paying like $600 and eye..and I'm paying $2800 an eye.
2. You can't install J2Se with Netbeans via the command line.
3. Sharepoint Service "lists" are much more then just lists - however, I haven't been able to figure out how to link two lists together.
4. Intel Core Duo chips are Intel's new mobile platform and will also been seen in the desktops soon. Oh yea - they are in the new i386 based macs.