Everybody Staze…

Today at work was fairly boring, save the fact that at 4:30am this morning, a drive died in one of the arrays. So it’s been rebuilding with the spare since then. Should be done by about 8pm tonight. It’s a 3.6TB array with 750gig PATA drives, so rebuilds take a while.

Thankfully, we have an extended service contract with the Apple on the array, so a replacement is free, and was shipped from either Portland or Seattle today. Should be able to replace it tomorrow. Turns out, these can be ordered from the campus repair shop, which is an Apple Authorized Service Center. Otherwise, Apple wanted to put a $1070 hold on my Credit Card until they got the old one back. =[

More work with ACE today. Again, can’t comment on much. But, progress is being made. =) Otherwise, no comment. =)

Today we also moved over a server from another department that we’re now hosting their hardware, which hosts their website(s). Pretty easy move. It’s a G5 tower, so the hope is to migrate it to something in the rack, or better, migrate it to our primary web server. Least we have the power and space in the room. Worst case, I might just put the tower on top of the rack.

Word on the street is the state legislature is going to approve our $7.5 million in bonds which will match the private donations we’ve gotten at work. This will give us a building expansion, remodel the remainder of the 2nd and 3rd floor, and replace all the windows with double glazed windows (our current windows are circa 1950, so the building leaks like a sieve, and dust builds up everywhere). Interesting part, the bonds would need to be used by the end of the 2009-2011 fiscal year. So, construction is probably going to need to start by next summer at the latest. Next summer and year is going to be… “fun”, but well worth it.

I’ve added a couple sections to the site. I hope to open up the Code section when I have something there, and to populate more of the “Plants” section. Basically I just excluded that category from the front page with a single line of php () in the post loop of the index_template.php (link). Here’s hoping. I have a couple other sections I need to start populating as well. Think I’ll do the same for the reviews section.

Also been playing with the iPhone Configuration Utility 2 for our faculty/staff that have iPhones. Overall, it’s extremely cool. We can create a template for each user, or just a generic one that sets up LDAP for an email directory, as well as set up a calendar server. Once 10.6 is out, we’re going to set up iCal Server 2, and get everyone onto that. Then we’ll finally be able to kill MeetingMaker. Once we can kill the Quark License Server (i.e. once we get rid of Quark), and we get rid of the APWire Satellite feed (which the software that parses the feed runs at 100% CPU, all the time), I might be able to basically decommission a server due to lack of services, rather than consolidation.

Alright, that’s it for now. Again, hope to post some about home in the next few days. But not a whole lot has gone on, so it’s kinda difficult to write about.

TTFN.

Work has been going fairly smoothly since Spring term ended earlier this month (Jun 13th). Since that time, usage has been way down on the servers, so AFP has been crashing a lot less (once every few days). I’ve been having continued progress with Applecare Enterprise on the issue, but so far, looking at leaked Seed notes from 10.5.8, it doesn’t look like it’s addressed. I really can’t comment outside of that.

All and all, I’ve been spending a LOT of time documenting various things at work. From our Xsan topology, port layouts, service topologies, backups, etc. This has been something I’ve needed to do for a while, and going on vacation week before last really made me realize that if I’m out of cell range, and something breaks, work is kinda boned. Needless to say what would happen should I get hit by a bus.

To do the documentation, I’ve installed dokuwiki at work to handle it. Plone just doesn’t accomplish the collaborative aspect as well as a wiki, and Dokuwiki is just so damn simple, and yet extremely flexible. We used it briefly at work before Plone as an eportfolio experiment. So I knew it easily integrated into LDAP, which was necessary, and it stores all it’s data as flat files, making backups and moving stuff around a breeze. So, that’s pretty much taken up a lot of my time.

I would really like to get a code repository of some type up on this site in the near future to keep track of my various scripting/coding projects, and in a way, force myself to go back over that code, and comment it, as well as clean it up. I have so many scripts I’ve written at some point that I use once or twice, then forget about.

*sigh* svn is easy to set up, but I don’t have a ton of experience with it. But, I’m giving it a shot.

This week at work is short (holiday), and I’m going to leave early on Thursday. Because the Fiscal year starts Wednesday, we can start ordering hardware tomorrow. Basically, as long as we don’t receive the hardware until Wednesday or later, it’ll go onto the next fiscal year budget. So, here comes a new Mac Mini, and a Nehalem Xserve. And an extra PS for one of our other servers (we accidentally ordered it with only one). Once I have that server, I can update our ldap server, and secondary metadata controller (I’m merging the two together, since the secondary MDC never does anything anyway, and it’s actually how Apple suggests with smaller setups). The Mini is going to become a test server, which will run VMWare Fusion, and allow us to easily test different things (like a test web server, development web server, linux testing, windows web testing, and something to run OS seeds on).

Can’t wait to try out the Nehalem 8 core server (which has hyper-threading, so shit will see it as 16 cores). Handbrake, or better, Xgrid will be just awesome (Xgrid sees all 16 cores). 2.26ghz x 16 = 36ghz. From one server. crazy! That with the GeForce GT 120, should give us crazy performance. Hell, I’m just going to run SETI on it for a week. =)

So, other than waiting for all of that, this week will be a lot more documentation, and writing more of the quota reporting website. I need to implement quotas over the summer, which means just turning on quotas for those under, but some more special stuff for those that are over. Sending emails, setting soft and hard quotas, and timelimits. Hope to get that mainly done this week… at least the basic website functionality for students, and enabling quotas for those that are under quota. Once I get the secondary MDC upgraded, I’m hoping to turn on Spotlight on the SAN.

That’s all for now. More later when I get SVN up, or when I have more to talk about in some other way. I might post a “home” update in the next day or so.

Family: Crassulaceae (krass-yoo-LAY-see-ay)
Genus: Crassula (KRASS-oo-la)
Species: Muscosa (muss-KOH-suh) lycopodioides (ly-kop-oh-dee-OY-dees).
Common Name: Watch Chain
Min Temp: to 32 degrees
Bloom: Bright YellowWhite/Near White – Late Summer to Early Winter
USDA Zone: Zone 10
Exposure: Bright Light
Origin: South Africa
(the above text was lifted from here.)

Notes: Got this plant as a “cutting” off a coworkers plant at work. This branch had been looking rather dry, and upon moving it, it broke off. I’ve tried rooting in some normal soil, but it didn’t work too well. Now trying to root in rockwool under high humidity.

All and all, seemingly a very easy plant to care for in the home.

Not sure anyone tried, but sorry for the outage today. My dyndns account expired, so my normal dns started failing.

Oh well… fixed now.

More tomorrow, or this weekend.

We went camping from Wednesday to Friday in the redwoods. It was actually pretty nice, though Mosquito ridden.

We camped here: Mill Creek Campground, CA.

All and all, we did about 500 miles from home, down through Drain to Coos Bay, to Crescent City, camped two nights (hitting the “Trees of Mystery” Thursday), and then back up to Crescent City, over to the Oregon Caves (the road UP to the Oregon Caves from the Highway is amazingly windy (as in, curvy), to Grants Pass, then back home.

The Oregon Caves are quite nice, though, a bit touristy. I think the lava tubes outside Bend, OR are nicer, though less to look at.

Great trip all and all. While I was really paranoid that something would go down at work since I was out of cell range, nothing went wrong, so all the paranoia was for naught. =P Oh, and I need to buy a decent sleeping pad. The one we borrowed for me was rather thin, and didn’t keep my rear from hurting in the morning. Tara’s cheapo self inflating pad worked great though (for her). =D