Silicon Patch Work Journal

Journal For Week of December 04, 2000

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Monday December 04, 2000

Almost never made it here today. Got home, made supper, felt a bit of a chill, so I rapped up in a blanket in front of the TV news. Next thing I know it's late and I have had a nice nap.

Managed to wake myself in time to do a few chores, turn the Christmas tree on and go for a walk.

I have been trying to get a DLT drive working on one of the servers at work with poor results. I had it working once, then since it was a not production server and too much testing had been done I rebuilt it. Well since the rebuild the DLT drive has not wanted to communicate properly. NT can see the drive, the SCSI adapter sees the drive but the backup software can't communicate propurely with the drive. I was starting to think it was a hardware problem. I started to trouble shoot the hardware and found that one of the pins on the SCSI cable was bent. Borrowed a cable off another server and everything worked as it should.

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Tuesday December 05, 2000

I took a picture of my little Christmas tree which can be found here. Beware it is a rather large 250k file.

Now I had better get my act together and head off on the morning commute.

Oops! I must not have done a very good test of my code when I made the link above to the picture of my tree. I have been trying to fix it but can't test it as I can't bring up this site to verify things. If you can see this but the link fails, I will get it fixed sometime today.

Ok now I think I have the link above fixed, but since I can post to my site but have had no joy all day viewing it with a browser, I am not sure. I wonder how it is I have any web stats at all if this is the regular situation for Shaw serving up my web site.

At last after much cursing at Shaw, I have managed to verify that my link to the photo of my Christmas tree works.

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Wednesday December 06, 2000

I have tried out Opera 5 today and really like it. So far all of my regular haunts I have visited render correctly and quickly. Then there is the built in support to use Google.com as the search engine. Very nice.

We got a Maxtor SnapServer to evaluate at work today. The model we got has two 60 Gig hard drives which can be configured as two drives, one large volume, or as Raid 1. It was very simple to setup, plug in the power, plug in patch cord to the network and turn on the power. Then install the setup utility on a PC, which finds the SnapServer and launches the web administrator. Walk through the setup tools and in minutes there is more available storage on the network.

It is now official, it has been too long since I turned a wrench on anything mechanical. It took me 5 minutes to remove two screws and the tail light assembly on my truck so I could change a bulb. The guys working the counter at NAPA must have been thinking that I was some useless suit attempting to save a buck by trying to change a brake light bulb myself. I almost feel that way as my most common use of the term dipstick is not in reference to the device normally associated which check the oil level, but with those special kind of people we have to deal with every once in a while.

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Thursday December 07, 2000

I plan to do a commando raid on some of the PCs at work so I can make some configuration changes then put some locks in place. In preparation I have started work on a batch file which presents a menu of registry hacks which can be applied from a floppy disk. This way I don't have to go through the time consuming process of logging in as myself so I can access the registry hacks I have stored on the network. I have the ground work done now and just have to plug all the pieces together.

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Friday December 08, 2000

Well yesterday's post never got posted as I was unable to ftp to the web server. I am getting more and more dissatisfied with Shaw's service, but unfortunately until Telus puts a switch in my neighbourhood I have no other choice. Well that is not entirely true, I could just use Shaw's connection and move my email and web site else where. I have been toying with the idea of setting up my own web server and possibly a mail server, which looks more and more like a good idea lately.

I have most of the parts put together for testing a new firewall configuration for my home LAN. I think working on it will make for a good weekend project by letting me put some of the stuff I have been reading into practice.

Weird weather, or more correctly, typical Calgary weather this week. Tuesday it got hot enough to melt all the ice off the back lane and get people back in their shorts for a day. Wednesday back to season normal temps, now today colder and snow predicted for the next few days.

I started the week off being able to ftp my posts to the server but not view my pages on the server. Now I can view the pages but not ftp. I guess you'll see this when I have full server access again.

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Saturday December 09, 2000

A little more snow over night then the mercury dropped to below 20 C. A quick check of the ski conditions shows that the ski hills are still hurting from a lack of early season snow.

I tried to make an ftp connection to Shaw's web server this morning and was able to connect but cannot retrieve a directory listing.

Hey I found a round about way to publish my updates. On Shaw's customer support site I found I can use a webspace file manager to copy files to my site. It is slow and painful, but it does work.

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Sunday December 10, 2000

I have always liked Compaq products, and always felt safe recommending them to people. Well about two years ago I got my mom a Compaq Armada laptop. About a week ago the integrated modem stopped working, so I had mom call Compaq. A tech walked her through some diagnostics and informed her that while her laptop was off warrantee, they would replace it. Mom swapped the modems and is now back on line. That is what customer support should be like.

While I haven't had the pleasure at work, I understand dealing with Dell support can be a frustrating experience especially when the person making the call is an experienced computer tech. I must say though that once you get through the initial hoops, the Dell support techs from Unisys here in Calgary have been prompt and efficient.

Well my latest upload method has now failed, and the Webspace Manager shows that I have not used any webspace even though my site still appears to be working.

Had some trouble installing the XOSL boot manager, and the error message I was getting did not show up in the documentation. When I changed the BIOS so that the CD is not seen as a bootable device, everything worked out nicely after that.

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