Work Journal

For Week of October 25, 1999

Page Updated Tuesday, March 21, 2000 07:18 PM

Monday / Tuesday / Wednesday / Thursday / Friday / Saturday / Sunday

Sundays entry is getting published at the same time as this entry as I was experiencing internet problems yesterday so I could not publish anything.

Last week I fired off a few resumes to people I have not talked to for a long time hoping that by getting my resume on their desk, I maybe more successful, than waiting for them to pull my resume out of their records. Well this is having some limited success as one of these people called and I am going downtown to see them this afternoon.

I have been making slow progress with Netware 5 and need to pickup the pace some. I am finding more instances of jobs requiring some Netware 5 experience etc.. 

Evening: My sisters PC is apparently dieing ( a good friend who knows PC very well has given it a good inspection ) so I have been asked to do a bit of shopping to see what is available for a budget PC for my mom to get her for a birthday/Christmas present. I was looking at the home PC section of Compaq's site and found it interesting that they consider out of production models to be classics. I am almost tempted to build a PC for her but I don't really want to get into having to 1. ship the PC to Winnipeg, 2. have another relative who I have to do computer support for if I can help it.

Things are looking rather good on the job front. I had a meeting with a gentleman I first talked to about finding work in Calgary before I even relocated here from Winnipeg. He has a client that is looking for a  junior server support person. He is going to send my resume, skills assessment and references to the client tomorrow and get me an interview ASAP. I have met a few people who have worked for this client but cannot for the life of me remember their names. It would be nice to get some inside information before I have to go for an interview. Checking out their web site will hopefully give me some insight which will help during the interview.

I caught the end of a preview of what I though was a PC made by Creative labs but cannot find any information on Creative Labs Web site. The review I thought was on Dotto on Data and I have yet to find any information there either. The interesting thing about the PC was that like some Compaq PCs the USB and other ports are on the front on the PC as well as a volume and mute knob for the sound. Ah the problem is I was looking at the wrong Dotto web site. The proper web site still does not provide any info on Creative Labs new PC but hope fully some will show up soon on either Dotto's or Creative Labs web site.

Monday / Tuesday / Wednesday / Thursday / Friday / Saturday / Sunday

Multimedia is invading new spaces -- yesterday I was in an elevator which was equipped with an LCD screen above the door so passengers could see the weather, adverts, business news clips etc. as they rode the elevator. The clips were short enough that you could catch all of a single clip between two floors. If you were traveling from the ground floor to the 34th floor as I was, you could see the entire series of clips. There were even split screens at times so you could see the weather in out of town areas like Banff while a banner ad played in full motion video on the lower 1/3 of the screen.

Monday / Tuesday / Wednesday / Thursday / Friday / Saturday / Sunday

Microsoft has set February 17, 2000 as the release date for Windows 2000 as announced on ZD Net.

My pile of good spare computer hardware is shrinking. I had tried to build a low end Pentium PC out of spare parts the other day and had problems, which I initially thought was the power supply. Today I pulled the power supply out of the case and on a lark plugged it in and it started working. I put the power supply back in the case and it still worked. I connected the power supply to the mother board and the power supply failed to start. I disconnected everything from the mother board and put the board on my test case. I then got the same results, power supply is good but will not work when connected to one particular mother board. I then though I may have a grounding problem and checked mounting hardware to make sure I had a good ground which did not help at all. 

Monday / Tuesday / Wednesday / Thursday / Friday / Saturday / Sunday

I should have mentioned in yesterdays posting that I was working with an AT power supply and mother board. I got some mail with good tips regarding ATX power supplies and mother boards:

John,

Is this an ATX power supply?

I had a similar problem with Aria, a box I was building out of brand new parts. The Power Supply was good and the motherboard was good but I had the leads from the on-of and reset switch from the case to the mobo plugged in reversed. That is, there is text on the connector an I had that facing inward, to the board. After I turned them around, with the text facing outward, the board booted.

With an ATX power supply the Mobo has to provide the right signal back, so if the PS doesn't get that right signal back it plays death. If the PS is a generic part it could well be used with AT and ATX power plugs interchangeably. That could lead to a signal check : no signal means the board is AT and doesn't signal on/off so default to always on (no board connected and it works); correct signal means this is an ATX board so do what the board says (); there is a signal but is is not correct this could be a defective ATX board but it could also be something totally different (play safe and stay off).

More experimenting ahead :-)

Svenson

After doing some more testing I replied to Svenson as follows

***

I was doing some research on mother boards in the event I decide to build a new PC. What I have been thinking is that I would build a new server so that I can convert my current NT server into a workstation. One of the problems that exists with ATX power supplies as Svenson mentions above is that the mother board and power supply talk to each other to decide whether or not to power on the mother board. This is an issue for servers if you want your server to power on again after your UPS powers it down during a power outage. This is a problem with my current server which I would like to rectify if I decide to build a new server. I have heard good things about Epox mother boards from other daynoters so I started going through the specs on Epox boards and found the following spec for the Epox EP-BXB-S:

POWER LOSS RECOVERY: In the event of a power outage your system will automatically turn itself back on without user intervention.

If you are going to build a server/workstation and want it to function properly with a UPS, look for this type of specification or you will encounter problems with recovering from a power loss. Some more digging through other mother board manufacturers specifications finds:

Asus list a spec for P3B-1394:

ATX Power Connector: 3V, 5V and 12V 20-Pin ATX Power Connector, Soft Power-Off/Keyboard Wake-Up/WOL/WOR Supported

The WOR spec I believe is Wake on Reboot but have yet to verify this.

Tekram lists spec: 

Power State Feature allows system to automatically reboot in the event of a power failure

for several models.

I never thought of powering on again after a power outage would be a problem when I first started working with ATX spec computers. It was not until I was testing the UPS connected to the server I built for myself that I realized that this would be a problem. In the future I will have take this into consideration when I build computers for myself or others.

***

Interesting problem with my Shaw internet connection today. After doing my backup I fired up IE and could not connect to the web, I then tried to ping both of Shaws DNS servers with no luck. I then released my IP address and the renewed it which did not help. I then broke down and rebooted my PC. This reestablished my ability to communicate with the DNS server. Through all of this my IP address remained the same which I expected, but why I have to reboot to communicate with the DNS server is not clear to me. The next time this happens, and I am sure there will be another, I will try resetting my cable modem before I reboot my PC.

Monday / Tuesday / Wednesday / Thursday / Friday / Saturday / Sunday

I am finding that FrontPage is getting a little bit jerky on me. I can still type my entries directly into FrontPage without any problems, but scrolling up and down the pages is not as smooth as it used to be.

Starting to spend some more time with Netware 5. I tried upping the screen resolution to 800 X 600 but this just makes the GUI unreadable. I can't remember what I used for a video card but I think I will try a different card to see if I can get better results. I find that running the resolution at 640 X 480 causes me to loose an bit of ConsoleOne off the bottom of the screen.

I put my Windows 98 CD in the Netware 5 server CD drive, loaded CDROM.NLM and Netware automatically detected the CD making it a usable volume. I was then able to select the Win98 directory on the CD and copy it to the data volume on the servers hard drive. Doing this type of thing directly on the server was impossible on earlier versions of Netware. 

A bit of reading and I find that CDROM.NLM does not load but calls CD9660.NSS which manages CDROM support in Netware 5. There is also CDHFS.NSS which provides support for the Macintosh CDROM file format.

Today is one of those days I truly appreciate having a cable internet connection, and forget about the problems I have with it time to time. I needed to download Support Pack 3 for Netware 5 which is a 95 MB file. I was not getting great download speed by high speed internet connection standards, but it still only took about hour to download the Support Pack, and I don't have to worry about my modem loosing its connection. And as my download was taking place I also had RealPlayer streaming a broadcast hiccup free.

Monday / Tuesday / Wednesday / Thursday / Friday / Saturday / Sunday

I cobbled together a 486 so I can have a client machine to connect to my Netware 5 server. I was having trouble getting the 486 to connect to the server and went through the configurations with a fine tooth comb and could not find any errors. Then as I was rechecking the server config, the server for no apparent reason rebooted on me and then everything was fine. 

Out of habit I copied the cab files for Win95 and Win98 onto the hard drive of the 486 prior to doing a Win98 install. I don't have an OEM copy of Win98 so I need an upgrade product to do the install. I only have a 425 MB drive in this PC so storage space is tight, so it would be nice not to have to copy the Win95 files onto it. This PC has no CD drive so I have to copy the cab files to the hard drive via my Netware server. Then I remembered that Win3.1 is a valid upgrade product while I was reading Daniel Kaohuokalani Seto's site. As I recall Win95 upgrade only needs tosee disk 1 of Win3.1 when doing a Win95 install, but Win98 upgrade asked for Win3.1 disks 1,2,4, and 5, why the the change? only Bill Gates knows.

I have been listening to netradio.com via RealPlayer all day without any interruptions, now just past midnight when I would least expect problems, I encounter Net congestion and am without the stream of music, bummer. I just happened to look over my shoulder at my cable modem and the cable light is blinking, looks like the problem is Shaws not netradio. Ah the service outage was short and I have music streaming to my PC again. 

My NT workstation has been acting up over the past 24 hours. I encounter no problems while I am at the keyboard, but if I go away for a while and come back the graphics are messed up something terrible. Sometimes I can get things back to normal and others I am forced to hit the reset button. First thing I did was to remove the blank screen screen saver to see if that was the problem which seemed to help for a little while. Next I reapplied SP5 which encountered several error messages about files being in use. This did not help, so next I rebooted and reapplied SP5 a second time then installed Diskkeeper and defragmented the drive. Hopefully things are back to normal now.

I went to lunch and returned to find my desktop a mess again. I was able to get all the applications closed but when I started them again my desktop went all funky again. I then logged on again and then noticed that even though no applications were open NT was using gobs of memory so I rebooted. While rebooting I noticed that the memory check seemed to be having trouble which worried me some so I hit reset and this time the memory check appeared to go well. I decided that maybe I had better stop over clocking my CPU as the voltage change maybe affecting my memory. I set the CPU back to its normal speed and time will tell if things a fixed. I have been leaving RealPlayer running all the time which I think maybe the memory hog which is causing some of my problems. I will continue to use RealPlayer full time and see if changing the CPU speed has any effect first.

Changing the CPU speed did not help so my next move is to close RealPlayer when I am leaving the computer for extended periods of time to see if this solves my problem.

Windows 98 is now running on the 486 I put together, and now I have to install Novells Client for Windows 95/98 on it, put a shortcut on the desktop for Netware Admin then I should be set for a while. Surprisingly a fresh install of Windows 98 runs well enough on a 486 with 16 MB of Ram for a basic Novell Admin station.

Oh how I love networks, my download of Netware 5 Support Pack 3 is on my NT server, so I configured my 486 Admin PC to connect to the NT domain as well as the Netware server, and now I can copy the support Pack from one server to the other. I could configure things on the server side of things so by logging onto one server I can also access the other server but the NT server is my production server while the Netware 5 server is for testing only and is likely to have many changes and reinstalls done to it over the next few weeks.

Support Pack 3 is finally installed, I had some problems with it which were self induced because instead of doing things the easy way I tried to a custom type update which didn't work, as I could not get the install program to see the Support Pack. When I went back to basics every thing went smoothly. I need to remember that sometimes KISS is the best policy. Now that I have spent the time to apply the Support Pack I can't remember what I was going to do which required it. Time for a break.

Monday / Tuesday / Wednesday / Thursday / Friday / Saturday / Sunday

Looks like RealPlayer was not the cause of the display problems I encountered yesterday. I stopped using RealPlayer and my problems did not go away. 

Now that Support Pack 3 is installed on my Netware 5 server I went to install ZENworks 2 but the install program won't let me as it looks for Support Pack 2 and doesn't recognize Support Pack 3. The installation instructions I located on Novells web site have not shed any light on this problem. I tried the installation a second time and decided not to add the inventory database to the server and the installation proceeded with no problems. Why not installing the inventory database on the server made a difference is not specified in the instructions either. Maybe this will become clear later.

Murphy must be paying me a visit, my ZENworks install has not gone a smooth as I had hoped thus I have been using the Web to dig up some information to help smooth things out, but my internet connection has conveniently gone south.

Next Week