Sorry if anyone has been trying to reach my site lately. My little server was getting overwhelmed so none of our sites were available. I turned my site off until I could move the busiest ones to a hosting service. The move is complete and hopefully that fixed the problem so my site is back on.
It’s the middle of January and the new baby will be here around the end of April. That basically gives us around two more months to turn the computer room back into a bedroom.
I’ve completed two steps off my checklist so far. I moved the phone line with the DSL signal into the basement along with the router, so now I will be able to run cat5 to the kitchen where the Wife’s computer will be.
The other thing I did was to buy a decent laptop off of Craigslist to replace my desktop PC. That way I won’t need a desk taking up space.
I think I’m going to try and move her desk and computer sometime this week, or maybe this weekend while she is out of town and I won’t be as pressured to get it done right away so she can use it.
Baby Steps
I got a phone call the other day from a woman who wanted me to fix her computer. She admitted that she doesn’t know anything about them but hers is broken and she can’t do anything with it. I ask to to describe to me what it does do and she says, “I can’t do anything, I turn it on and I get a blue screen with errors”. I tell her to find all the cds that came with it and bring it by.
I plug it in and everything works perfectly. It’s really slow though and I remove a ton of spyware (their PC Tools spyware remover apparently is useless!) I turn off a bunch of auto start programs and set the BIOS for “Performance” and it seems to be working a lot faster now, but still no crashes.
I think I’m going to have to take it to their house and check it. I’m thinking it has to be a hardware conflict with a device they are using.
What an afternoon! For the past month I’ve been working on switching my 10 year old NT Domain controller over to SME Server. I’ve had the files copied for a while and using the new one with the old as backup, everything seemed to be working good so today I took the NT box offline and make SME server the new Domain controller.
None of the windows machines could log in.
Not that they couldn’t log into the domain, they couldn’t log into the local box since the domain was different and I guess I never bothered to allow the users to log in on a local machine. After messing with it for about an hour I got everything (shares, printing, passwords) working again.
SME Server seems to be a nice piece of software and I’d recommend it to anyone looking to have a dedicated fileserver in their network.
Last night a horrible thing happened, the connection light on my DSL modem started blinking red.
I’ve had my service for 8 years and it’s always been there when I needed it so I called “Tech Support” and after calling 3 different times I finally got someone who would listen to me and understand that it wasn’t my computers (I’m a legacy customer and my connection doesn’t work like they do now) so they set up a repairman to come out and look at it.
It turned out that my modem finally bit the dust after all those years of use so I bought a new one from them and everything is working again!
It was a real rough 12 hours too. I couldn’t know what the weather was going to be or what my playgroup was going to do today. (well actually that’s not true, there is an open wireless router somewhere nearby that I borrowed for a bit)
I’m worn out.
I’ve been taking care of sick people for the past three weeks, without the “luxury” of myself being sick and waited upon. The wife seems to be over her illness and noticed how I needed a break so she is taking Gavin out shopping for the night.
What am I going to do with this time to myself?
Call up some friends?
Watch a movie?
Surf for porn?
How about REBUILD THE PRINT SERVER!!
Yes! I am taking this time to get the networked printer working again.
I’m such a hopeless nerd.
I have been having a hell of a time backing up my file server. I’m running NT4 server just because I installed it about 9 years ago and it’s always been rock solid (that’s coming from a linux fan!) I don’t have any complaints about the performance but the hardware is lacking. My 120GB drive is full and the BIOS can’t handle any bigger, that and other things like no USB support is leaving me to pursue other options. I want to run at least RAID-1 which I think I can do with a P3 450 box I got for free and using linux with samba. I want to get a SATA RAID card and two 200GB drives and mirror them so there is less chance to lose something important, since everything we have is stored in that one location.
Anyways, I’ve been trying to back up my stuff and so far it has taken about a week and I still haven’t got anywhere. I bought a 250GB drive, split it into a 200GB as NTFS and the rest as ext3 for the webserver backup and went about copying the files. I kept getting errors over the network so I took the drive out of the USB housing and tried to put it into the fileserver but the hardware is so old it couldn’t see the full 200GB drive. I then put it into a newer computer and tried pushing the files into it and still got errors. My last resort is to take the drive out of the server and put it into the newer computer and Ghost it, so far it seems to be working but it is so very slow!
The last option worked but it took 29! Hours! to copy! If I have to do that again I am going to take the drive out of the USB housing and connect it direct. I still haven’t mustered up the desire to start on the webserver backup yet.
I’m not sure what to do, I need to consolidate computers soon and I don’t know if I want to give up my 1700AMD linux box or my dual 450 OSX, or the 733 OSX machine. There is a reason I have these computers doing their jobs but I don’t know If I can give up linux on the desktop.
After thinking about it for a few days I think I will use the dual 450 mac as my main desktop. The 733 is doing fine as a jukebox, while my current day to day machine, the 1700AMD linux box, has more of a chance to be productive doing something else.
Update on the computer situation. I tried a Knoppix live cd instead of ubuntu and I was able to mount the windows drive and access the contents so not all is lost. I also tried booting with an XP disc and going into the recovery console to fixmbr. I was able to then get as far as the XP splash screen and the computer would reboot. It looks like it is reinstall time, I’ll burn a bunch of her data to CD and then wipe the drive and start over. I think thats my best bet right now, plus it was time for a good housecleaning anyway.
I wake up this morning with Aubrey saying, “My computer doesn’t work, you need to fix it” I ask her what it is doing and she says that it won’t boot it just says 99 99 99 99. My first thought is that Lilo is acting up. She uses XP but tried Linux for a short time in the past and I’ve been too lazy to fdisk the MBR.
After she leaves I grab a boot floppy and discover that I get the error with that too. I unplug all the drives and finally get something I expected, BOOT DEVICE NOT FOUND. Knowing that at least something is working correctly I plug it all back it and was able to boot into a live linux CD. Still thinking that the bootloader is corrupt, I go to open the mounted HD and it isn’t there! I shut it down and as it is rebooting Gavin comes walking in and says, what was that noise?” It was then I discovered what I think I was purposely ignoring the entire time, the HD had died. When you power a computer up you normally hear the whining of the drive spinning, but now all I hear is BZZRT and silence, not too promising. Luckily, we have a file server here that we back up most of the important stuff to, so if I can’t recover any data she will probably just lose her email and email addresses.
We must have had a brownout that caused this issue since all the computers in the house rebooted but none of the clocks were flashing. One of these days I’m going to have to break down and buy some UPS’s!
I guess I’m going to be busy today while Gavin is napping!
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