Weekend wrap-up

Well, it's been a pretty productive weekend, although not at all the way I'd planned it. Having to take the server rack down to install the new UPS after Saturday's power glitches, combined with the DSL modem going down, gave me an excellent excuse to do some long-needed maintenance.

My new gateway is up and the user home directories moved over; web, DHCP, and DNS still need to be moved over, but at least everyone in the house should have a good net connection now. The "new interim" gateway is up on the old DSL line; hopefully that will go away soon, but I can't get rid of it until I figure out a good solution for email.

The new gateway has a 200GB disk now; it was going to have flash, but the CF-card-to-IDE adapter I was going to use seems to be broken. That's OK: I was going to have the big disk on it anyway. I'll have to replace it in a year or less, since it already has a year or two's use on it -- it came out of my main fileserver as part of last May's disk upgrade. But it'll let me move the Debian mirror, which will free up over 100GB on the fileserver. Which I'm going to need for recording -- the fileserver's 80% full right now.

Spent several hours last night trying to get two of the Windows boxen to recognize my networked HP printer. No dice - the driver install hangs. I HATE Windows -- configuring a networked printer is a 2-minute job on Linux.

No recording this weekend. Grumble. And I'll probably spend most of the next two weeks doing data entry for sales taxes, which are due the 31st -- the day after I get back from Seattle. So they'd damn well better be done before I leave. Grumble.

Annoyances

It seems some SATA drives have a tendency to spin down and not come back to life quickly enough to suit the drivers -- or even the BIOS. My fileserver, which has a pair of 400GB Seagates, seems to be afflicted. Twice, recently, I've come home and found it hung, and when I power-cycled the thing it took no less than two resets before the drives were happy. This does not make me happy.

As far as I can tell, every damned one of my four SATA drives has this problem, in varying degrees. Grrr. I seem to have it most often with drives that are left unused for a long time -- it mostly seems to hit the backup drives (though not always). For now I'm enabling swap on my mirror drive; I don't think it was this bad back before I disabled it to save wear and tear on the drive.

But I'm seriously considering sticking them in a RAID box where they'll get plenty of exercise, and replacing them with IDE drives. Not what I was planning to spend money on, though.

Meanwhile, I've been spending the last hour or so running malware scans on the flower_cat's stupid Windows machine. And disabling the virus scanner, which seems to be causing a host of problems all by itself. Did I mention that I *HATE* Windows?

22:19 Did I mention that I'm an idiot? Seems the fileserver's bootloader menu is a mix of various and sundry old bits that don't go together anymore. No, I do not want to boot from the swap partition! Nor do I want the year-old multimedia kernel that seems to have stuck itself in for the hell of it. That's the problem with not rebooting for a long time...

... and sometimes you get it right

After a somewhat frustrating evening of Windows malware, misconfigured servers and misbehaving hard drives, it's kind of nice to sit down with a guitar and nail five songs in a row from memory. ("The Owl and the Pussycat", "The World Inside the Crystal", "Cicero in the 21st Century", "Ship of Stone", and "The Mary Ellen Carter", if you want to know.)

Have to get back in practice between now and Conflikt...