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Looking For Quacks In The Pavement

Month: April 2004

  • Not much changes, really.

    The email server crashed again today… which pretty much sums up Monday at work in a nutshell. I did, however, get to do lunch with Lil’ and Lyse. Can’t go wrong there, eh? Much blushing and teasing to go around, like usual.

    As for the weekend, I spent Saturday afternoon and evening at the kids’ place, and Sunday goofing off at home. Again, same old same old. Maybe I really am a creature of habit.

    Look for a big break in the routine this week, though: I’m going to Sakura-Con on Thursday, and I’ll not be home until Monday night. Woo!

  • That Elusive… Spark (test, that is)

    Because he and she and she did ‘em, I did ‘em too.

    The Pickup Test

    You have achieved the Golden Mean! You are
    35% pickup-able!

    You’re like Jen. Do you know my friend Jen? You’re just like her””she’s like this cool girl who’s attractive and funny. I should call Jen. Or maybe you’re like my friend Steve. Regardless, you like to flirt, but not with ugly people. And when you lock eyes with the right person, you know how to turn the sparks into a towering inferno. But sometimes you won’t give people the time of day, which is mean when they really just need to know what time it is. In general, make sure you smell good.

    Dumb question moment: How can all of us have achieved a Golden Mean when our scores vary from my low 37% to Lil’s 62%? Whatever…

    Are You Dateable Test

    Damn, Rico! You are… 74% dateable!

    Attractive and confident, witty and charming, a healthy ambrosia-based diet… you’re wanted in the 48 contiguous states, you slayer. Call me. Seduce me. Make me a woman (or man.) Not only do you know how to turn a girl’s (or guy’s) engines on, but you also know how to oil, lube and rotate it. You put the “elation” back into “relationship,” and the “night” back into “one-night stand.”

    …which puts me within a couple percentage points of the other three. Personally I think The Spark gave me more credit than I really deserve, but what the hey.

  • The Ballad of— AUGH!

    Matt went hunting for music based on or inspired by the writings of Tolkien, and found more than he bargained for.

    And I quote: “I’ll likely have recurring nightmares about THIS. Why are the dancers wearing plastic Vulcan ears?!”

    (Note: Quicktime plugin required to fully, er, appreciate the content of the following website.)

    Ballad of Bilbo Baggins

  • Sweet Jesus!

    (Sort of) via Stavros the Wonder Chicken, this bit o’ funny from Davezilla…

    …because I’m way, way too wiped out to actually write anything. Sorry. It’s been that kind of week.

    Sweet Jesus

  • Not one of my better days.

    I was dreading Monday all night last night, for various reasons… one of which actually did come to pass. But I’m not here to talk about the personal stuff… not today anyway.

    My workday was deceptively mild for a Monday, until midafternoon. Then I got a call from one of the salesdudes who fancies himself something of a computer expert. He took his usual pleasure in informing me that the email server seemed to have “taken a crap,” in his pithy phrasing. Unfortunately he was right, but it was kinda weird: The server itself was ticking along as fine as you please, no indication given whatsoever that anything was even the slightest bit out of the ordinary. But since nobody could connect to it, a rebooting was in order nonetheless. Even afterward I couldn’t determine what had gone wrong.

    But that wasn’t the worst of things, not by half. The last of the three “events” of my day landed just a few minutes before five o’clock… the main fileserver fell over.

    Yes, that’s a technical term. Go look it up if you must.

    I spent three solid hours of intense frustration fighting to get that machine back online. The alternative was to wipe the machine clear and start over… with no backup of the valuable metadata that actually makes my network run. You know, little things like user accounts, passwords, groups, print queues, application objects, permissions. Who needs all that nonsense, right? *cough*

    Historically speaking, I’ve experienced great results by searching Novell’s support site when I have problems with one of their products. Not this time, though. While I learned to work around some of the symptoms, I couldn’t find a cure. Until, of course, I turned back to good old Google. In the past, Google searches usually found me a bunch of Usenet posts along the lines of, “What are you doing here, moron? Go to Novell’s support site!” This time, I found the one vital piece of information needed to bring everything back online with one changed setting.

    See, unbeknownst to me an important SLP setting was at its default of 2 when it should have been changed to 4.

    It was that simple. The scary part is that nobody seems to know what the “2” and “4” settings do. It just works that way.

    I know my job involves what most folks think of as arcane gibberish, but please! I like to actually understand the settings I’m changing! Is that so wrong? Is it?

    Oh well. I came home, went shopping for lunch stuffs and also snagged some comfort food to make my night go better. Tomorrow had better damned well be a better day that this was. Bleah.

  • GXP II

    One of those little side projects I’ve been working on in my spare moments for, oh, the last three months is a replacement for the server formerly known as Mihoshi. She’d been in service longer than four years, actually, originally built to be the chat server for KNRK. She took on other duties in time, and with the demise (twice over the course of three years) of the chat room her primary function became that of a file transfer depot and Cacti host.

    Problem is, she was getting old and slow. Big (physically, not in terms of capacity) old slow hard drives and a puny old processor were impeding her ability to take on new tasks, and I have a slew of new functions I want to use that box for. So I started prepping Mihoshi’s replacement, known as GXP. (For the record, ever since we lost the ability to use kgon.com for in-building subdomains Mihoshi has been known to the outside world as GXP… but that was just an emergency stopgap name change.)

    And because I’m an insane dork who can’t just do things the easy way, I built the new machine around a Linux distribution I’d never seriously tried before: Debian.

    I will say this: The apt-get system is the cat’s pajamas. Hell, half of why I tried Debian is because of how much I’ve recently enjoyed using apt-rpm on my Fedora installs. I was able to apt-get everything I needed to make GXP happy, including Cacti itself. Now that’s impressive. For the first time I haven’t felt the need to hand-roll Apache, PHP, MySQL or any of the library dependencies just to satisfy my obscure requirements. Damned nifty, that.

    Yesterday it came down to crunch time. Corporate wanted a special new project, and I was the logical guy to implement it… but the machine I wanted to implement it on wasn’t ready yet. So I made it ready and flipped the switch. Oddly enough, almost everything transferred with complete ease. I didn’t drop any data, lose any configurations or piss off anybody who uses that machine for vital business purposes. (This doesn’t count Cacti, which I’d been wanting to reimplement from scratch anyway. And yes, it is working better on the new box.)

    I even got to learn how to implement and administer phpBB, which is most assuredly quite the nifty message board system. It has some minor quirks, but generally it’s quite straightforward from the administrative side. Very nice.

    Not all eleven-hour workdays are bad, see?

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