Work Journal
For Week of September 27, 1999
Page Updated Tuesday, March 21, 2000 07:18 PM
Monday / Tuesday / Wednesday / Thursday / Friday / Saturday / Sunday
Spent the day crafting a few emails to friends, job hunting on the net and the Saturday paper.
It finally is setting in that winter is coming, so since I am not working this coming Friday I plan to use the time wisely by getting an oil and lube for my truck, checking the furnace filter and digging out the winter gear that I stashed away somewhere last spring. I am sure some other jobs will come up that the change in seasons requires that I do.
Monday / Tuesday / Wednesday / Thursday / Friday / Saturday / Sunday
I downloaded OpenLinux 2.3 the other day and since the download was taking up a rather large chunk of disk space, I decided to try and do something with it.. The down load is supposed to be designed to put on a CDR but I had not read anywhere how this is supposed to be done. So I double clicked on col23_full_install.iso and CD creator started and told me that the source file had to be on a local hard drive. I copied the file to my local hard drive, double clicked it and dropped a new CDR in the drive and walked away. I returned later to find the CD tray ejected, and a message on screen saying that the CD had been created. I pushed the CD tray back into the drive and opened explorer, where I could see the CD was named OpenLinux 2.3 CD and contained four directories and a bunch of files.
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I could not access all my bookmark pages from this site from work today, which I found strange as I have not had any problems in the past. When I got home I went to investigate the problem and could not pull up my web site at all. Strange stuff was happening, I tried Tom Syroid's current page and it came up, but his home page would not. Then my home page came up OK and as did Tom's. I used Tom's page as a test because we both use Shaw's @home service.
Now my mail will not work. I know it was working, cause I received new mail when I first sat down at the computer. Now none of my mail setups work and they all ask for the password even though the account is set to remember the password. Oh somedays ya just got to love the internet. Oh ya, now my home page is not accessible again.
Monday / Tuesday / Wednesday / Thursday / Friday / Saturday / Sunday
Well yesterdays internet problems mysteriously solved themselves as such things tend to. I was able to publish my update just as I was finishing up for the night yesterday.
Working most of the day on a PC at work which runs Windows 3.11. I had to use Ghost to transfer the data off the old hard drives which were getting in noisy and ready to fail. After I got everything transferred onto new hard drives, and into an newer PC which is Y2K compliant, Windows would start but displayed a black screen. From somewhere in my memory came the knowledge on how configure and use Win3.11 which I haven't had to work with for 2 years. The video problem was fixed by running setup from the command line and changing the video configuration. Now I have to copy data from both sides of 17 optical disks to a slave hard drive, so I can take the slave drive and put it in another PC, where I have to cut CDs for all the data. This should take the better part of the next two days, which means I will be busy until the last minute of my contract which ends Thursday.
Monday / Tuesday / Wednesday / Thursday / Friday / Saturday / Sunday
The started the day with lots of energy and enthusiasm to get my second last day of my contract done and over with. I got lots of data transferred and a few CDs burned. I even had time to help some other people with their projects. Then the bottom fell out as I pushed the elevator button on the way out the office door for the evening. It was as if pushing the elevator button ejected the reactor core, leaving me on reserve energy only. This made my bike ride home a long and slow one.
I got two calls about potential work. One was to see if I was interested in my old helpdesk job which I turned down. The other was an update on the interview I went to last week. I seems that the client and the agency that sent me to see them are talking nice, and the position would be a permanent one. No contract required, no agency to deal with, this is looking good. The client is still sorting through all the potential prospects, but it still sounds like they like what I have to offer them experience and ability wise.
Monday / Tuesday / Wednesday / Thursday / Friday / Saturday / Sunday
I'm late posting anything today but I have been enjoying my status as a newly unemployed person.
I woke this morning to find a blanket of new snow on the ground and traffic reports that boggled the mind. There were apparently even a few highway closures last night and this morning.
I spent the first half of the morning relaxing, enjoying not having to get up early, and march off to work. Then I got in gear and got my truck serviced before the cold winter weather sets in.
I went visiting co-workers from a previous job, to catch up on how they are doing and also to see if I could do a bit of networking to find my next job.
Monday / Tuesday / Wednesday / Thursday / Friday / Saturday / Sunday
I have an 8 port hub for my LAN but have not been able to use all the ports due to not being able to find all my patch cables since I moved my computer lab into my basement. The other day I got some more patch cable from a friend so I moved some of the cables around so that the PCs which are closest to the hub use the shortest cables, so the longer cables can be used where they are needed.
I need a PC capable of running Novell Netware 5, so I pulled the SCSI adapter, SCSI hard drive, SCSI CD drive, video card and NIC out of my current Netware 4.11 server and transplanted them into the Pentium 133 I have been using for testing. I had to disable the on board IDE controller to stop hardware conflicts to get the SCSI adapter to play nice. I also had problems with the floppy drive which I traced to a bad ribbon cable.
I tested the ability to connect to the Novell server by firing up my Windows 2000 test PC which has Novell's client32 software on it. I couldn't connect to the server because the PC was not running IPX as a protocol. I installed IPX and Windows 2000 did not ask to be rebooted but still could not see the Novell server. I rebooted the PC and then could see the server, and logon to it.
Now that I have the server running I need to up the RAM to 64 MB so I can upgrade the server NOS to Netware 5.
Monday / Tuesday / Wednesday / Thursday / Friday / Saturday / Sunday
I have started upgrading my Novell server to Netware 5. I booted the server to DOS and ran install off the CD. One of the options is to upgrade a 4.1x server which is what I have.
Well the upgrade seemed to work but after downing the server, trying to bring it backup was not successful, it would stop loading files partway through the startup, leaving me with a hung server. I rebooted the server to find that the Netware install had completely replaced my autoexec.bat and config.sys files leaving me with no CD support. At least the install was nice enough to rename my original files so that they were not lost, I just had to rename them to recover them, reboot again to get CD support back again.
Now that things in DOS are back to where they are useful again, I used deltree to remove the nwserver directory from my hard drive so I can start a fresh install of Netware 5.
The Novell install has been fairly painless, but one minor problem is when the new java GUI is loaded during the install, the GUI is unreadable. I found I can fix this by pressing Ctrl+Esc to list the current screens, switch to the System Console, then list the Current Screens again to switch back to X Server - Graphical Console and then the console is clear and legible.
I want to do a Linux install on an old Compaq 486/33 I have but do not have a CD drive for this PC. I am going to try to install Linux on it by attaching the PC to my Novell server which has a CD drive which I can map as a drive volume. I have a fresh install of DOS 6.22 on the 486, and just have to put the finishing touches to the boot disk which will connect the PC to the Novell server.
I did not install IPX on the server, but had configured it as IP only. I do not yet have a boot disk which lets me connect to Novell using IP as the network protocol so I had to bind IPX to the NIC. I struggled a little to remember the syntax for Binding IPX, then remembered that inetcfg is a useful utility for doing just what I needed to do, verify that IPX was installed and running and bind IPX to the NIC.
My final problem getting the PC to logon to the Novell server I traced to the PC and the server using different frame types, once I changed the frame type for the PC I was able to logon to the server and map a drive to the CD drive holding the Openlinux CD.
I have never read anything about Linux other than reviews, and peoples comments on how much they like it, so when I started looking for the DOS install it took a while to locate it. Then when I tried to run it it would start to run then stop and leave me with a blank screen and a dead keyboard.
I was not making any headway by trying to install Linux by mapping a drive to the CD in my Novell server. I then located an automated Linux boot floppy creation on the CD, so I ran the routine and created the boot floppy. I installed an old CD drive in the PC, booted with the Linux boot disk, the kernel loaded, checked hardware, and tried to start Lizard Install Wizard which failed.
Next I tried booting with a Windows 98 startup disk ( yes I hear you Linux people screaming at me not to poison the install by using a Windows boot disk ), then running the DOS based install off the CD which also failed with a message that Lizard is unable to install OpenLinux on my system.
I put another extra 16 MB of Ram in the system and tried the Linux boot disk again just on the off chance that the installer wants more memory to work with. Well no dice again! I ran hwinfo to get hardware information to see if I can use it to figure out what the problem is. It is now passed midnight, so time to call it a night.