OS

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.

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.

Projects Going On

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We are still working on our monitoring phone call system. The company that makes the software thinks they have an idea of what is wrong. I should have more information today. I always love buying stuff that just does not work!

I think I finally am motivated to look into Proxy server software. Too many things are going on that I say if we had a proxy server we could figure this out, or we could prevent this. It is a pain to know a tool will work, but you just don’t have the time to set it up.

I found a flaw in the Windows 2000 Pro VMWare image I am using. I built it when I was learning about VMWare so I made the partition size too small. When I try to download large files to it, I get out of disk space warnings. I need to build a new one today. Howard also is trying to get a Red Hat 9.0 VMWare image. I found one I did that works, but I need to see if I configured it properly.

I want to do a VMWare image of Free BSD 5.1 also. I am not sure what to call the OS installs in VMWare. I guess an “image” of a disk is a close enough description of what it is.

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.

New blog look, or a small blog change

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If you read this blog, and lets be honest not many people do, you will notice that the title has changed. Also the URL or website address for you non computer people has changed slightly. I am always playing around with the name to see what sounds better to me.

I have moved the photo site completely off my Red Hat box onto a Windows 2003 server. I find it easier to manage the 750 megs + files within windows than within linux at this point. I am still running my blog on the Red Hat server until I can figure out how to move it to a Red Hat Server running under VMWare. Still working on that one.

Lazy Saturday’s

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I am being lazy today. I need to get a mothers day gift for my mom, but that is all I have on my agenda today. I slept late, and I am just hanging out now. My idea of laying low is very geeky. I am installing VMware 4 workstation on my desktop computer. I want to get red hat 9 on it so I can use windows xp and red hat on the same machine. If it works it will be awesome. Right now it is installing red hat.

My mom instructed me that she wants some pocket book or something. I will give her money and she can go get it for herself. That way I don’t have to get the wrong thing. I was also instructed to get flowers. I just love the surprise involved in this day.

Since Gus fixed my linux box I now have a choice. Should I leave my site on Red Hat or move it back to Windows? As of right now I have a copy on both. My friend jayson is letting me use his box to host my site, and I still have a copy on my Red Hat server. I am thinking I am going to leave the blog on red hat and have the rest of the site on windows. That way I don’t have to mess with taking the front page extensions out of the site. I was trying to deal with that for a few weeks and so far have gotten nowhere. I just don’t have the time. For now I will leave everything in both places. Unfortunately I don’t have the photo site up at all during this transition. it is 800+ megs and I don’t want to deal with it right now.

I have been following the apple music store since it was announced last week. I have a mac. I like it allot. I also find I use iTunes over winamp 99% of the time nowadays. I also went out a few months ago and got an ipod. That also kicks ass. So I am in a position to use this new music service. 99 cents is not bad for a song. I am still unsure if it is worth it. I saw an entire album I want to maybe buy and see if the service is any good. Limewire and the gnutella clients, and kaza are tempting. I am on the fence right now. The file format is supposed to be better, but I still like MP3’s. I was not sold on Microsoft’s windows media format, and now I am skeptical of this new AAC stuff. What is weird is that Microsoft comes across as more evil big company like, and Apple is the underdog hip company. In fact they are probably both just as evil. Right now for work I of course an clearly a Microsoft guy, but for home I am a apple guy. All this rambling boils down to eventually will buy stuff on this music service. If anything I want to know if I am missing out on something really good, or just saving my money.