Hardware

Ongoing Work

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Last night it looks like we got a ton of pages about 1 drive being out of space. Not sure why we didn’t get a low disk warning first. I just tested that dam warning system like a month ago. No one (myself included) woke up to the pages. that is not good.

Justin is out again. He has more dental problems than anyone I know. Keith is coming in late. he did work on our VPN last night. I don’t get him. We discussed the work, but he never asked to take some time off until the last minute. It drives me up the wall when he does that. If I knew that bit of info, I wouldn’t have said ok to the work last night. I needed people this morning since I knew justin was out. I need to teach these guys how to prioritize time. Spending an hour on a minor problem that doesn’t need to get done right away is not worth it if you can be spending that time on something else that people are waiting for results on.

All that being said, today is not starting off very well. At least the Database guys are working on the error we were getting. it doesn’t look like our sites were down, but getting errors is bad.

Yesterday I did more research into using Microsoft Operations Manager for our data-center. I like it, but I also have some issues with it. In our test, I was unable to get historical reports. I also sized the database wrong so I ran out of space. I needed to extend the db. I also don’t know if some of our new internal network security will cause the Operations Manager server to stop receiving data from our production database servers. For now this is all theoretical, but I am trying to hash out a working course of action.

On another project I ordered 2 out of the 3 servers I need for our new MSMQ system. It is a messaging system we are going to use for order processing. I need to order 1 more database server and then I will be done.

I am also trying to find time to work on ISA or a linux proxy server. No time has yet to be found.

Stuff

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Last night I got my new Firewire 200 Gig hard drive. I plugged it into my Powerbook and an icon for it came up on my desktop. That was all I needed to do in order for me to start using it. They sent a CD along with the drive, but it must have been only for windows. I love Mac’s. That was the easiest upgrade I can remember.

I already started offloading data from my powerbooks hard drive onto the firewire drive. Next up is getting quicktime pro and pulling some of my MPEG-1 files into Final Cut Express and editing them for burning to a DVD.

I also received my Dad’s flash memory key chain. I got him a pen sized usb flash drive that holds 512megs of memory. he will use it to shuttle data back and forth between work. not sure how fast it will be but it is USB 2.0.

Monday I ordered his new computer. I settled for a dell. It is probably overkill for his needs, but he likes over kill.

I for one have been shuttling ISO images from work to home. I think I recovered almost all the images now. I just copied over ISO’s for red hat and FreeBSD 4.7.

The Two Desktop’s

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I fixed my broken desktop at work yesterday. The floppy drive wouldn’t eject or take disks. I still use floppies for booting and drivers disks so I needed to fix it. turns out it was just a broken piece of decretive plastic that was blocking the drive. all fixed now.

My desktop at home has XP back on it. I also got all the security updates on it, but I still have not had time to install any applications. I will do that over the next few weeks.

With my hard drive disaster I forgot to mention I blew away my 2003 server and rebuilt it. I wasn’t using exchange so I went back to imail. I still want to get exchange working at work, but I need my mail to be up at home until I figure out exchange 2003.

More Data Recovery

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I got most of the OS ISO disks recovered today. thankfully I had most of them at work. I am still missing some programs but I think I can find them on some backup’s. The rest of the really recent stuff I can always get if I find I need it later.

Most of the video’s off Tivo are lost forever. The VMWare Virtual Servers were also lost. I had allot of them backed on my laptop and work, but some of the configurations I had are lost. I will copy what I have at work tomorrow and bring it back home. I was trying to make a basic VMWare configuration for every OS that I use so I have it if I need to use it.

I also began to robocopy (like rsync, but using a windows resource kit utility) to sync my applications folder up with a drive on my 2003 server. I have realized that I cannot back everything up to DVD anymore. I just have too much stuff. Some things can get backed up, but most will have to sit on more than 1 disk drive. Either that or get a DLT system that I don’t want to get.

Well I am off to bed. My hands are starting to hurt. I need a good night sleep since it will be a long day tomorrow. Keith is taking the day off. As much as I bust on him for stuff, he does good work. He just needs supervision. And if he is reading this, hey Keith you know I am telling the truth!

As the tag below will state I wrote this while listening to one of my all time favorite songs. I am not as big a Creed fan as I used to be, but this song still rocks!

This entry was written while listening to Higher from the album “Human Clay” by Creed

Recovery

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So I found a bunch of the video’s that I thought I lost. I still have the video tape originals for most of what I didn’t recover. that is the good news. the bad news is that I only found 30% on backup’s.

My Application backup CD’s also had some error’s on certain program’s. I think they were older versions of stuff, so I am not worried that much. The down side is that I have to go out onto the internet and get ISO’s for Red Hat, BSD, etc. They are gig’s and gig’s of downloads that I need to do again. I will see if I have any of the missing stuff at work.

This recovery has taught me some things. One thing to note is that burning a CD or DVD as backup does not always work. I was able to recover most of what I did have on DVD, but some stuff gave me errors on the restore. I am going to keep everything I have on two different disks. I will sync them regularly. I have wanted to do that in the past but never had a problem with my DVD and CD-ROM backups.

Data Loss

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I may have made a huge tactical error. I went to reinstall windows XP on my desktop at home today. I have 2 drives in it. A 18 Gig 15,000 RPM SCSI drive for the OS, and a 180 Gig IDE drive for all my stuff. So to reinstall XP I just formatted the SCSI drive and expected to just have the data stay safe on the second drive. I have done it before. Always no problem. Well the problem I realized after it was too late was that Windows trys to install on the first IDE drive it can find. It doesn’t matter what you set your system to do. I wanted the SCSI drive to be the master. It didn’t care what I wanted if an IDE drive was present. I lost everything. The correct way to do this was to have removed the IDE drive and built windows. I didn’t figure that out until I lost all my data.

Now I have backups. All my personal files (documents, photo’s, music, etc) is on my mac and safe. I also did a DVD backup 2 weeks ago. What I did loose was all the shows I pulled off Tivo and didn’t have a chance to burn to DVD. I also lost any programs I downloaded and didn’t get to DVD. The last time I did that was the end of July 2003. I am bound to have lost stuff that has changed since then. Not a catastrophic mistake, but a big pain in the ass. I also lost tons of backups that I had. I was doing a project where I took all my old backup CD’s and put them to DVD so I didn’t have so many disks lying around. That project is bust now that all the copies on the hard drive are gone.

I don’t know why I am so calm about this right now. I truly don’t know what really needed and lost.

One think I do know is that I am going out tomorrow and getting a 200 gig firewire hard drive to put my stuff on. I am not taking any chances again. I have been pondering buying one for a while, but now I am going to do it.

If this was at work it would never have happened. Why am I more careful with other people’s stuff compared to my stuff? I guess I cannot get yelled at for messing my own stuff up!

OK, now I am a little pissed that I screwed this up. Not much stuff is lost forever, but what pisses me off is that it will take me months to get everything and organize it the way it was. I think that is what pisses me off the most.

I am now making a DOS bootable disk so I can wipe the large drive again so it doesn’t have an OS on it. Then I can remove it and build my computer with the SCSI drive in it and then insert the IDE drive back and use it as a secondary drive. if you are asking why don’t I just use the IDE drive as my primary drive, the answer is that it has more space. I need it for my stuff. the 18 gig drive is large enough for my OS and applications.

Sleep Mode On A Mac

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Do Apple Powerbooks have a hibernate mode? I put my powerbook to “sleep” yesterday morning and ended up not using it till the train ride home last night at 10:30PM. It had run out of power while sleeping all that time. Not sure if the Powerbook is screwed up or if that is what is supposed to happen.

Old Gear & New Gear

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I just got a new server in. We are building a Data Warehouse running on SQL 2000. We built one to demo and everyone liked it we have been using it for 4 months on a desktop with allot of hard drive space. The “server” finally showed its desktop limitations, so we are upgrading it to a Dual Xeon 2.4 Ghz server. We are doing IDE RAID, and threw in 2 gigs of ram. For just around 2K it is a nice little box. If you don’t need SCSI you can get server gear cheap now a days. Our dumb-ass vendor forgot to ship us a CD-ROM / Floppy Drive so I have the box open on the floor of my office with a desktop CD Drive and Floppy drive plugged in trying to get Windows 2000 installed. We have been buying Windows 2003 Server since it came out, but for most applications we are just downgrading to Windows 2000 Server. So far today I had no luck getting the OS to install. I think the USB floppy drive I used wasn’t working correctly. I need to cannibalize a floppy drive or buy one for $12 or whatever they are going for these days.

We have some older desktops that we were using as Red Hat web servers that we consolidated to one box. That means I have 2 box’s to use for testing and such. I am trying to demo Exchange 2003 on one and put Windows NT 4.0 Terminal Server Edition on the other. Terminal server will not boot off the dam CD from MSDN. The boot disks we have for it wont work either. I am continuing to work on that. I may give up on NT 4.0 and try 2000 server in application mode. I don’t need it for more than 30 days so I should have no problem with the demo mode it makes you use if you don’t have a key code.

As for Exchange 2003, we are looking to see if it is something we may want to move to. For maybe just the Technology department or for the company as a whole. Howard said good things about Outlook 2003 over HTTP. He said it was fast. I am going to look at how Idealab! did their deployment and maybe segment some users onto Exchange for a trial. Not sure yet.

The Best Laptop(s) I Ever Had

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Technology is supposed to get better over time. You are supposed to have a “better” computer, PDA, Phone, etc. as time goes by. But is that always the case? Think about cars. My dad talks about some old car he had in the 70’s that was probably the best car he ever had. Tons of people like classic cars, and would go back to them in a flash. Does anyone really want to go back to a 286 computer and use DOS again? That old 10lbs laptop from 12 years ago cannot be dreamed about. I mean you can think back to the good old days with nostalgia, but do you really want that old equipment over what you have now?

I just thought of that when I declared (with Gus) that the IBM Thinkpad T40 I have is probably the best laptop I have ever had. But if it wasn’t wouldn’t we have a problem? It is of course the newest laptop I have. It should be the best. Shouldn’t it? Now my last laptop an IBM Thinkpad T31 or the Dell Latitude C400 I had before that were good solid machines, but the T40 is just rock solid awesome computer. The little things push it over the edge from company computer, to the best machine I ever had.

On that same note, I have to say things about my Powerbook 12″ that I have. You can and cannot compare it to a Thinkpad, or a Windows computer. They are the same, and different at the same time. I think that the powerbook is also one of the best computers I have ever had. I have had machines the size and capabilities of the Powerbook before. It is actually a bit bigger than my Latitude C400. It is just better. The keyboard is the best or one of the best I have ever used on a laptop or off of one. The DVD Burner is amazing. The port layout and other features make it fantastic.

The question is when these machines get a bit older and I upgrade, will I look back and wish I still used them? After all their is always something better just down the production line.