mdlbear | Entries tagged with sysadmin

The household network is likely to be unreliable, if not outright down, most of the morning and afternoon of Sunday, April 20. Consider reading a book.

Scheduled, long-overdue maintenance includes:

moving the wireless access point onto the DMZ port on the router, and hopefully fixing the perennial connection problems.
Putting Nova on its own UPS, which should improve network uptime during power outages.
Moving the mirror drive out of the external case; possibly back into Nova.
Installing ejabberd and icecast. Possibly asterisk. Adjusting the firewall to handle them.
Setting up a collaboration environment for books and CDs. This will probably also include a household calendar and address book, if I can manage them.

Note that egroupware probably will not get installed; it's having baffling setup problems with the database. There's a reason why I prefer not to use databases: they don't like me. I'll probably use TWiki instead: I understand how that works.

Mood: geeky

Stupid goddamn Windows! For some reason, Windows on the Younger Daughter's machine wasn't responding to the keyboard. Mouse worked fine, and the keyboard worked for the bootloader and Windows login, so it's not hardware. Anything I could think of to do to fix it would, of course, involve typing in a URL to find software. Nuke and pave. Takes roughly half an hour to load the install image from three CDs, and probably another two hours to install a minimally useful set of programs (Firefox, OOo, network config for the printers). Foo.

Mood: annoyed

The router/gateway machine appears to be fully functional now. Gallery turned out to be a non-problem, since I had installed it from source rather than from a package. The UPS monitor isn't working, but that's because I haven't put the box in the rack yet, so the cable isn't connected. Total time for the nuke-and-repave job was five or six hours; something like three for something that was useable enough to let me get to sleep. Would probably have been about the same if I'd had to restore it from backups rather than the old machine's disk.

Time to declare victory and go home.

Mood: accomplished

$mdlbear: blue fractal bear with text "since 2002" (Default)$

I really wasn't planning to spend from 9pm to 1am last night installing my new gateway system. Really! But somewhere in the course of trying to put a gigabit ethernet card into the fileserver, the gateway fell down and couldn't get up. I didn't notice until the flower_cat came in and complained that filk radio was broken. I went to reboot the gateway and discovered that the disk was hosed; it couldn't read anything but the boot loader, and my desktop machine and an assortment of USB adapters wouldn't even recognize that it was a disk.

Except, fortunately, for the new gateway system that I was just about to start configuring! This may be due to the fact that I had the old disk jury-rigged and dangling almost vertically from its cables. Mechanical trouble? Sticky bearings? I'll probably never know. I did a clean Sarge install, copied the old disk into the big partition where there was lots of space, and set about restoring the status quo ante. It's still not quite there yet; at least one of the websites are broken, I need to reinstall/reconfigure gallery, and the mainboard's ethernet interface is giving me an "invalid MAC address" error (the three gigabit interfaces on the daughterboard are fine, and all I need right now). But at least the network is working well enough that folks at theStarport can get things done. I'll deal with the rest this evening, maybe.

Mood: annoyed

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Entries tagged with sysadmin

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Stupid !$!@#$ Windows

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