Journal For Week of August 7, 2000
Last Update: Monday, August 14, 2000 06:10 PM
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Monday August 7, 2000
Back from my short camping trip. Enjoyed spending a day and an evening in the woods, away from the noise of traffic and the trappings of city life. Spent many hours around the camp fire and white water rafting. The rafting was a blast. My hosts have a part share in a river raft which we trailered up stream from the camp area along the Red Deer River, then floated down the river getting soaked to the skin and having lots of laughs.
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Tuesday August 8, 2000
Back to work today after the long weekend. Problems with btrieve forced me to down the main Novell server twice in the morning. I am not fully convinced that we had to down the server, but I don't know much about btrieve and my boss was running the show to get things up and running again. My first week on the job I put a task to learn more about btreive on my task list. Looks like it is time to move it up the priority list.
Found some printers I never knew about today. The engineers have a large plotter and an inkjet printer tucked away in a corner. I have yet to find out how the naming has been done on these printers, but it must be rather poorly done, like the rest of the printers, for me not to have noticed them after all the work I have done on the printer services to date.
Got to do a little teaching today as my co-worker was having some trouble installing a new hard drive in a PC and using ghost to copy the old disk to the new disk drive. He was making some bad choices in the BIOS when installing the new hard drive which lead to some problems. Also introduced him to Partition Magic which I used to convert the partition on the new drive which Ghost created to FAT32, and resized it to use the full capacity of the drive.
Busy evening, setup my tent again so it could dry, as it was wet when I packed it on Monday before coming home from camping. Also had to sneak in some road work, grocery shopping and get some cooking done to prep meals for later in the week.
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Wednesday August 9, 2000
The idea of tracking server downtime has been at the back of my mind lately. Then today my boss asked me to track server downtime and create a report for management. Seems that management has been asking for stats, but no one has had time to work on this project. So I created a spreadsheet which if I input a start date and end date for a reporting period, it calculates what 100% up time would be. I then enter the downtime ( hopefully none ) and the actual % of time the server has been running is calculated. All that is left then is to enter some notes to explain why a server was down. I showed a draft copy of my report to my boss and he thinks that management should be satisfied with the format.
My first of several trips to the dentist was today. Had the first of several cleanings, a filling and a wisdom tooth pulled. The dentist gave me a prescription to be filled so I went straight to the pharmacy when he was done. The medication is recommended to be taken with water, and since I was hungry I bought a meal replacement drink to go with the pills. Now trying to drink out of a can when half your face is numb from the freezing done by a dentist is tricky. I held a napkin under my chin just in case my lip leaked a bit.
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Thursday August 10, 2000
I found it odd, but nice that my dentist called today to follow up and see how I am doing after all the work his office did for me yesterday. I think this shows that customer service is starting to make it's way into the medical field.
It just finished raining cats and dogs, rain so heavy I could hear it over the sound of the TV as I checked my email. Stuck my head out the door and the rain was falling straight down and splashing at least 6 inches up off the pavement.
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Friday August 11, 2000
Spent most of the day fighting with a rogue PC. The video would go south any time even a minor change was made, even logging off would toast the video at times. Also could not load the correct video driver. Got rather tired of fighting with it and swapped out the video card and got things working much better. Now if I can only figure out why IP will not function I could put this project behind me.
Got home to find that the power had been off sometime during the day. Fired up my PC and was able to log on, but not get all my drive mappings. Turns out that one server could not boot because the KVM switch was pointed at the other server, so it could not see a keyboard thus it would not boot. I think I need to move a UPS off a workstation and onto a server.
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Saturday August 12, 2000
More power outages again last night which means I have to power cycle some equipment to get my network up and running 100% again. I have been reading how Matt Beland and Dan Bowman have been using X10 modules to control electrical equipment and even power cycle modems to get internet access going again. So last night I ordered a X10 starter kit from X10.com so I can take a crack at automating reestablishing my internet connection after a power outage or when my ISP has technical problems.
Spent some time setting up standard drive mappings which will apply to all user accounts on my home network. Up until now I have been setting up drive mappings as I have need them which has made for some inconsistent use of drive lettering. Now I have added drive mappings at the top of the NDS tree which will be implemented as part of the login script for all users.
Moved all the data off one of my NT Workstations onto my main NetWare server. This particular NT machine had been my main PC, but I haven't used it other that to do a few minor things for at least two months. Now it is going to become a server after I take the CD-RW out of it. The CD-RW is going to get installed in what I had planned to be only a test PC which has over time become my main PC.
I was thinking the other day that I missed the one year anniversary of maintaining this site. I checked and I missed the big day by a long shot. It was way back in June of 1999 when I started this site, which on one hand seems like ages ago and on the other hand feels like it was just yesterday.
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Sunday August 13, 2000
Up early ( for a Sunday ) and attacking the usual Sunday chores. Also got a start at setting up the old NT workstation as a server by deleting all the partitions off the hard drive and creating a new 200 MB DOS 6.22 partition so I can start in stalling Netware 5.0 on Larry. Larry is the name I have given to this box.
Pulled the CD-RW and sound card out of Larry as they can't be used by NetWare. Next I think I am going to shuffle things about on the work bench so that all my servers are together and on the KVM switch.
Mowed the lawn and had planned to use it as my warm up before my Sunday run. Mother Nature did not like my idea, and not sooner did I get in the house after yard work that the dark clouds in the north which I thought were going to blow on by, instead rolled in bringing rain and some hail. Bummer!
After a one hour wait it looked like the weather might break so I headed out the door. Ended up getting rained on for 15 minutes, then the sun broke out making for a sunny but cool run.
Copyright © 1999, 2000 John Doucette. All Rights Reserved