Tuesday, February 11, 2003

Well as long as no catastrophic event happens things should be all set to go to the new location now. I think I am going to need to start a backup process on the systems. Maybe initially just mirror things around, and move from there... So adjust your bookmarks kids!

Monday, February 10, 2003

Wow. Talk about a confusing issue. Trying to setup an internal web server, that was viewable outside kind of. I was using Internet Connection Sharing, and fowarding requests on this port to an internal server. It just did not seem to work, which was weird cause all the other ones I had setup worked fine. I tried creating new ones, every new one I tried seemed to fail. Nothing was going properly, I would try setting the web server on the inside up on different ports and it still would not work. No matter what I did nothing. Till I tried one last thing. Changing my tests. I.e. I stopped testing on the ICS box. I went out and tested from a remote machine and everything was working fine. Apparently when you are on the ICS box you are in an middle area, so if you make a call to a local port, it does not forward it inside. Instead you hit the local machine, which probably does not have that port running as you are forwarding it inside. Talk about an aggravation. Mark up another reason to get a cable router/switch. Course then you cannot use little utilities and have dynamic DNS setup.
WoooHoooo! I am the first of the blogs I know to post this! Dude! You're getting a cell!

Friday, February 07, 2003

You know I did go to college, I did learn something there. And I understand the principals behind physics, specifically the idea behind entropy. But it is soooooo impressive when you realize the scope of it. Essentially, if you did not have to take any physics or really do not care about science, the idea of entropy is things tend towards disorder, But I look at it this way, its easier to destroy than build. I had to go to our co-lo facility today and de-rack some servers. Considering the time and energy put into loading those into the cabinets nicely, running the wires (somewhat nicely), probably took a few hours at the least, and two people. I had the drives, wiped, the machines out, and the racks de-installed in less than an hour, by myself. If you factor in the installation of the OS, the configuration and the time taken to integrate it into our setup, what took likely a few days work, was undone in less than 60 minutes. Man why bother building anything? Have I mentioned I hate snow?

Wednesday, February 05, 2003

Random notes: I registered a domain. Never done that before. Hopefully at some future point I will move the blog over there. I want to get mail running for it, and then work on getting archives of this imported into the new blogging system. If I have a boring couple of weeks here I should be able to get that done. I have paperwork at home waiting for me that confirm's my new job! YES! So I had posted a couple of months ago (before the posting hiatus) about our oldest cat having to be put to sleep. Well a couple of weeks after that we decided we did want to again have two cats, so we went out and found a kitten. She was 8 weeks old, and had spunk, but was definitely not as hyper as her brothers. Well her and the older cat, who is now about 2 years old get along great. They play. They play fight. They clean each other. They sleep next to each other. Its really great to see, and we could not be happier. Well something weird is going on now. We adopted the older cat about a year ago, she was about a year old, we were told, and she had also recently given birth. They spayed her before we took her home. Well from what I understand of the process of spaying a cat, essentially the ovaries are removed, kind of like a hysterectomy. Well its been a year, we have had the kitten since November, and recently, within the last week, the kitten has taken to NURSING off the older cat. And the older cat LETS her. Obviously there is no way there is any milk being produced, but she is REALLY nursing. I thought my wife was losing it but last night I pulled her off and that is exactly what she is doing to the other cat, right where you would expect. WEIRD! And this is how bad spam is, prior to our company going under I could in one evening receive around 100 spam emails. As the shutdown has progressed that number has dropped. Now that everything is down I can get about 10 a night. And I have found that most of those are for an alias that we have setup for cron/tasks/maintenance emails. Its amazing how they get a hold of your address.

Tuesday, February 04, 2003

Oh and I upgraded my Linux box at home last night to Redhat 8.0. I had a box at work running 8.0, and I wanted the Bluecurve stuff at home.
Sodium Hypochlorite. Why you ask am I putting up a link to Sodium Hypochlorite? Well because, I happened to notice it was the main active ingredient in both toilet bowl cleaner, as well as mildew remover. At over 2% for both of those, you wonder what the other about 98% active ingredients that it does not list are. After all there has to be SOMETHING that makes them different right? Maybe? Oh and of course this is one of the benefits of being a guy. You can notice things like that if they are around standing level while you are in the bathroom. :)
And here we are at Tuesday. My how time flies... Or not... I heard from Liberty finally yesterday, of course my wife could not contact me cause our internet connection at home was down and the phones are off at work. And of course any pages to my pager did not go through. Joy of joys. Now apparently its official that they want me, we settled on a salary, start date is still up in the air, and they need to do the background check. So really, ummm is that really any closer than yesterday? Granted its official now, but officially I am still without paperwork or a start date. Yeah I know I am being picky. I just do not liked the unemployed feeling, know what I mean?

Monday, February 03, 2003

I went to the end and got the below, I wonder what it means.... Warning: fopen("http://216.216.246.31/bin/findwhat.dll?getresults&mt=Church web hosting&dc=3&base=0&aff_id=42397&ip_addr=63.127.198.180", "r") - Operation now in progress in /www/alt/visual.com/includes/findwhat.php on line 64 Error reading XML data.
Okay translation is such a tough thing to get right, and yet we expect someday computers to do it for us without any problem. Well this site has some humorous snippets from subtitles for a japanese done english sub-title of some of the Two-Towers movie. I particularly like this , this, and this particularly.
Ahhh its Monday, so what does that bring us for today? I got to shut down DNS, well not shut it down but remove pretty much everyone but our market sites from the named.conf file. Which means if you were a client and you did not move, then your domain is NOT resolving now. BAHAHAHA I got to shut down mail relaying for our former clients. Which means, that if you were using our servers for sending or receiving mail and did not move yet, YOU ARE SOL. I got to shut down ftp access for any of the client sites. Which means, that if you did not grab your web site yet, you are SOL! Does it seem I am happy about this, well I am a bit. For those people who did not get the month long deluge of emails about shutting down I feel bad for. But there were tons of our clients that used and abused us. Hey you get what you can for free, right? And thats what many did. It is sad to see cause just seeing the few I did go off to other hosts, let me know they are most likely going to sink in the Internet fish pond, cause they have no clue nor do they care to pay to get a clue, they want it handed to them. And some of them, they still do not get it. I was able to procure, i.e. talk my boss, into letting me have a KVM switch. So now I actually have it setup so that I can get to the console of my linux box without having to have it redirected in lilo. Not that that wasn't cool, but once I upgrade the box to RedHat 8.0, that means I get to have a nice Linux Desktop. I also received probably the nicest desktop unit we had, AMD Atholon 700, 256 MB RAM, and 36 gig IDE drive. Its got a DVD-ROM and a CD-RW drive in it. I think I am going to make this my wife/kids primary box. They currently are on the "main" machine a PIII 550 with 384 mb RAM. If they are the sole users of the 700, the 256mb should be fine. I will move over the data they need and then have the PIII 550 to re-install. Not sure how I am going to set it up, since I have a running Linux box might be just another desktop for myself, where I can play my games (when I rarely do that) or maybe I will put Linux on there and dual boot. Not sure yet. The biggest issue will be organizing the office space, the wife does not want any CPU's on the desk, the desk has a cubby that would fit a CPU, but they tend to get hot in there, and piling them on the side is a no-no. Any suggestions?

Friday, January 31, 2003

Although our company closed down the 18th of December, it has not really felt quite like that till now. Pretty much everyone else is gone, or there are a few stragglers that will be around, but not people I really talked to or had much to say to about anything at all. Today, is the day when the last help will be given to any customers who cry for it. Today is the last day that there will really be someone to joke with or make comments about how badly things were run. Its all rather depressing. On Monday I get to shut down DNS for anything but the market sites we own, I will be turning off FTP access for anything. I will be taking them out of our mail servers or shutting some mail servers down. By some counts we may still have a few hundred clients that have yet to move away. Who knows why, maybe because they think the technology world is better left alone, too complicated, too fast, or too uncaring. Or maybe they were just too confused on how to figure out how to move away. Some may say thats a good thing, after all, if they cannot figure out some basic stuff, should they really be doing it. Not sure of that myself, but I think its likely not a good thing. I still have yet to hear the official word from Liberty Mutual. On a good note at least they seem to be moving somewhat forward as I got an email requesting me to fill out some online forms. I will feel much more secure when I have an offer in my hands, rather than their desire to hire. And on a technical note, I am yet again installing Cygwin on another box, so it will have an SSH server. Going to use it to transfer a few million files.