Well, for those of you who don’t know, I leave for the weekend tomorrow morning. I’m headed over to Central Oregon (Redmond area) to go “camping” with my father. I say “camping” because it’s in a 42-foot 5th-wheel trailer with running water, sewage, and electricity. We bring a couple computers. Basically, it’s just a get away from the city more than a “camping” trip. My grandparents have owned the property for probably close to 25-30 years now. It’s nice. I like Central Oregon… it’s like a little desert that isn’t just sand (don’t go arguing the meaning of Desert with me, I know full well that there are Snow/Ice covered Deserts… but I prefer those as Desserts. ha ha ha).

Unfortunately, there’s no net access over there, so I will be giving up SOMETHING to go spend time away from the world. ‘s okay though… haven’t really talked to anyone at length in a bit now, so I doubt I’ll be missing anything besides my regular posts. I suppose if I’m really anxious to post, I’ll just write out a post, and then when I get back I can post/post-date the entry so that it appears when I wrote it. But don’t count on that. I suppose I could also frequent a netcafe over there… but again, don’t count your chickens. It’s nice to get away from the net now and again. I have done some of my deepest and best thinking in that trailer… though it’s also plunged me into some of the worst depression of my life.

A vacation is healthy. Gives a chance for a change of being. Getting away from the people you’re around all the time. I really don’t know if others can sympathize with this, but I’d imagine you all can. The feeling you get when you’re around someone too often, and don’t have a chance to be alone. Starts as an itch in your mind, then grows to be a great bothersome canker. You just want to scream “go away and leave me alone for a while”. Well, I can’t say I’m that bad, but time away does a body good. Makes you appriciate what you have when you come back to it. Unwinding time. Eh, you get what I’m saying.

A good portion of the time over there, anyway, is going to be handyman work. Fixing this, repairing that. Should be fun… hands on stuff is really liberating when all you do all day is sit at a computer. I relish the idea of splitting wood, or spreading gravel, or pouring concrete, or breaking up a driveway with a sledgehammer or jackhammer. There’s just something… I don’t know, physical about it (dare I say, masculine). It’s nice to have an outlet for otherwise hardly expressed testosterone once in a while. You can’t really beat on a computer and have it survive… nor your friends. I need to work out more and maybe start climbing or paintballing again. SOMETHING. eh, probably won’t happen… I’ll just want to do it, and not. What I really am going to try to do is start up working on Bonsai and my carnivorous plants again. That was a nice outlet of creative juices (at the time I couldn’t write though… so maybe I won’t be so interested). Eh, we’ll see.

On the “required” geek note, I’ll be redesigning my home network on sunday night I think. Subnetting off the wireless network, and organizing the switch to better reflect the way things are. My network has grown since I first set up the switch… so I really just need to update it. On that note, I may not be online Sunday night. Depends on how things go… I only expect a 30-60 minute outage of net connectivity. Wish me luck.

Well, with that, unless I decide to post again tonight or butt early tomorrow, I wish you all a Wonderful 3 day weekend (some of you, a 4 day). Don’t hurt yourselves (much) playing with Fireworks (a little hurt is never a problem. You have to start somewhere… I was playing with a lot of fireworks when I was much too young… and now look at me! 😛 ), and spend some time alone or with a friend, whichever is the greater vacation from “normal” life.

Today really hasn’t been that eventful. More work on that lab that has been such a bitch. I spent most of the day by myself at work, one boss disappeared, and the other had class and took a long time to come back.

Things are really starting to come together this summer. when the summer first started, everyone felt that our job was just too difficult. We couldn’t do what we needed to do over the summer. Well, after 3 weeks, things are looking better. We should be meeting with Dale from Network Services soon, and getting parts of the network straightened out. The Print server is working well now, I managed to get the printer working well too. We just need to move the server to a faster network connection… that should come at the same time we meet with Dale. Auth. is getting better… we’ve created some accounts for testing and everything is looking good. We just need to get some more drives and probably another machine to be the file server.

For those that have been at the Jschool, we are going to try to have people’s user directory be on the logical server they are going to use. For the Video class, it’ll mount Vertov, for the Photo class, it’ll mount Rowell. Don’t ask about the names, it’s a long story.

Personally, I am doing better. I got a full nights sleep last night, and the general feeling of emptiness is fading. Still not quite sure what is up, but I’m happy that it’s leaving. Can’t say I really got to look at it much… eh, oh well.

Well, I can’t think of much else to say… ti’s almost midnight, so I better post this now before it turns to tomorrow and I miss a day.

So yeah, today so far is cool. forget about all that shit from before… I just scored big. Non-geeks or people who don’t like computers, feel free to ignore this post. Infact, for all your benifits, I’ll put it in the extended entry part.

So yeah, here at the jschool, we are auth-ing clients with a program called MacAdmin, and likewise watching print credits the same way. It’s janky, and it’s OS9.x only. Those of you who have seen our labs know we have a very high number of nice machines capable and wanting to run OSX. So, we want to switch. We’ve been trying and trying to get some sort of auth server up that would handle user directories, permissions, etc. We chose ldap, of course, but we just couldn’t get it to work. We thought, “f*cking apple… they produce something that doesn’t work”. Happened before… why not now?

Time goes by, and we want to kill one of our NT4 servers that is acting as a print/file server. So, we go to move that to an Xserve. I fiddle, nothing. Samba is hosed on the box. So I say “f*ck it” and reformat and reinstall the OS on the machine. Yesterday, I get print serving to work on the server… so now it can take over serving printers. We also are thinking of using this to offset the lab problems I was talking about in a previous post.

So today, I think to myself, “What if those ldap problems were another symptom of the OS being hosed on that server?” I go in, I create an account to test with, I set up our crashbox with the settings to auth against that server, reboot, and VIOLA!!! we authed. Oh god, I was so ready to cream myself (not really). So yeah… my major project for the summer has now started up again… which is getting the backend ready for migrating our labs to OSX. I CAN’T WAIT!!!! all that power unleashed (cliche). Plus, I think I’m going to be using the idle time of those machines for distributed.net. I’ve already regained control of the University of Oregon team, and I think I’m going to create an sojc (School of Journalism and Communication) account to take credit for the work. Way I figure it, we should be in the #2 or #3 spot (for the entire RC-72 project) easily by just using 2 of our labs. Not too shabby.

So lay back, have a beer, and cheers to ldap. Oh, and cheers to Apple for proving that generally, the stuff they make (or impliment), works. Oh, and last but not least… if all else fails… BURF (BackUp ReFormat)!