Rinsefirst

Mezzo seems to be talking about hard drives, and because I have them, I felt it was time to show off what I have.

Other than that, not much new. For those of you who haven’t heard: The name server functions are now working on the new server. The new server still needs a new name so start submitting. I have like 15 entries from like 3 people… I know more people read this site than that, so people submit your server name entries!

I don’t know what I’m going to do with the rest of my day. I have a busy weekend, so I should probably finish some homework. Either way, I’m not staying here. Later.

I just learned my lesson in reguards to what you should and should not do with IP-Tables. For example, if you have a user-defined chain and you do an iptables -F, you will more than likely find yourself losing your SSH connection to the server and not being able to get it back without a trip to your server.

That said, I’ll have to make a trip to MSA tonight.

The 2nd to last episode of Friend’s is on tonight. It, in my mind, is really the last episode. If you think about it, what can they do with any story line the last episode. The only thing they can do is resolve things. But wait… There won’t be much to resolve. Eh, either way. I want to be home in time to watch it. It really is to bad that such a great show is going off the air.

Erg, I really wish I wouldn’t have typed that command. I was in the middle of something…

That’s all I have to say at this point. Later all.

It’s all about planning, that’s all it’s about. JR Corps need’s more planning, and that’s what it’s all about. You put your right arm in, you take your right arm out. You shake it all about. Woot.

Other than that, this is all I have to say.

Mezzoblue has an interesting article about the recent suing over JPEG images. It’s another GIF scam I tell ya. Well, what can you do? I know… ignore it and keep operating under the principle of good practice.

That’s really all I had to say, so that’s all I’m going to say.

So the story continues like so…

The beeping had stopped, because it was no longer running. It was a very very scary feeling. I could not afford to have the server fail again. So I started to debug. Rebooting didn’t help anything, I just ended up at the blinking white cursor screen again. I noted that the hard drive light on the broken hard drive was on solid, but still… Wasn’t do much of anything.

So I’m like, I don’t have enough time to get this fixed, but if I’m going to have to fix it, than I might as well start now. I therefore put the Win2k3 cd in to boot from that and to start the reformatting process.

I did just that, and low and behold, when it got to the detecting hardware stage, it stalled out at the blinking white cursor screen. I thought to myself, why is it doing that Justin, why in the world would it be doing that… I again noted the solid green light. So I thought about it, and decided that maybe reformatting should wait until I can get that blasted green light to shut off.

I therefore, removed the bootable cd and rebooted one more time. This time, I left it on the blinking white cursor screen while I went to do something else. I worked on some of Mooney’s computers and some other minor taskes that I had to do during that period.

Well, about 30 minutes later, all of a sudden… I heard that annoyingly loud beep again. I quickly flipped over to the server and saw that it had indeed started to boot. It confirmed my guess that it was frozen syncing up the two hard drives, and when it failed to do that, it would continue booting. Yay for me.

But now I realized that I would have to deal with shutting that blasted beep off. It took me an hour to find the proper documentation on how this could be done. At first, I tried the same thign Dan had tried, which was to go to adaptec’s website and find the software that shuts the beeping off on the raid card. That of course didn’t work, like it didn’t work for Dan.

I then did some research on the motherboard and found out something rather interesting. Apparently, there is something known as the SCA backplate which is what contains the ports for the hard drives as well as the raid controller/etc. If something fails on this, then the alarm will sound, and because it’s not software based, it can’t be silenced from the computer. So needless to say, Dan and I both will have to put up with the sound for awhile… NOT.

I then pulled out the book to our servers motherboard. Found the speaker. Found the jumper associated with the SCA alarm, and removed it. WOOT! now it’s just a red light, no more beep!

I have the hard drive now, and I plan to take it in tomorrow on my way home from or to school, whichever comes first.

That said, we arrive to today, where I was angry all day. I don’t know why, I just was. The trinity musical was great, I’m sorry if we left anyone in Genesis, but it was starting by the time we got there. I thought it was well done, and it had me wishing yet again that I would bring a laptop every weekend to church so I could digitally record everything that happened during service. Screw the tapes, I want it multichannel.

After that I went up to MSA for a few hours and worked. Server room is pretty clean, which is cool. Finished up a few things that should help Dan out a little. I wish I could do more for him, I know how hard he works. Maybe I should give him more desk space… How about just let him have free server space. We’ll see :-).

Also brought the new server online. It’s running, but I haven’t finished my apache install yet (I have a lot of modules to download and configure, so that might take awhile). But it’s running non the less.

I then came home.

Nascar rocked. Jeff Gordan won and Jimmy took 3rd! WOOT for my guys.

Amber and I then went to dinner. I dropped off a computer for someone. Had a great chat with Julie and Jerimiah, and then I came here to finish this wonderfully long post for you all. Talk to you later! Bye.

God has blessed me with many talents, but the one that always seems to stand out in peoples’ minds is my ability with computers. As everyone can tell from all my various posts, I love computers. I love what they are capable of. I love what they are growing to be (with the exception of Google). But today… Today was another story… However, let’s start this story with yesterday.

Yesterday, Blaine, Sim, and I, went to downtown Minneapolis to have a meeting with Stuart about server co-location. Stuart is CEO of a small 15 person company that deals in business to business internet. He’s a very cool guy, and owns, a very cool business.

Needless to say, we were all impressed with the facility and the prices weren’t bad either. They were about half of what visi would have charged us, and it wouldn’t have been as personal as this company was. To get a feel of how personal this company is, they invited the 3 of us to come watch movies with them on fridays (they watch movies on their whiteboard with a projector). Very cool.

The server will have a nice home there come June. But wait… That leaves me with a month to get the server ready. Lots of time, lots to move. But that’s not where this post is going. I called Simone and he gave me permission to put my server in at MSA while we get it prepped. I won’t be using it as a business server here, just getting the DNS stuff ready, email, databases, and probably get everyone who can move, moved.

That said I came in to MSA today to install it. While I was here I thought I would actually do some MSA work as well. For example, the server was making a horrible beep, so I decided that I should fix the teacher server, afterall, it is my responsibility. Dan had tried various things already to try to get it to work again, but to no avail. So when I got here, I decided to use a method Dan couldn’t try, which required rebooting the machine and rebuilding the array.

Now here’s where you pick up on the key point of where this story is going. Dan never had to reboot the machine.

I rebooted and loaded up the raid re-builder. It took about 2 hours to run during which time I installed my server into the rack. I must say the Dell rails are not only cooler, but easier to install.

Ok, I have to go, but to finish the story up:

The server didn’t reboot when the rebuilding of the array was done. But the beeping stopped!