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Night at work…

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Spent most of the night last night at work, or back at home waiting for something to finish. Huge PITA. 

The term starts on Monday, so I had to get everything rebooted, and systems updated for the term. Because there are always people in the SOJC, it’s difficult to schedule downtime. I hope to be able to schedule outages this term as I have in the past, so that I can apply various updates. Got the firmware updated on our primary server switch, and the fibre channel switch (things that really can’t be done during the term due to possible failure). 

After that, I tried to get kerberos fixed on the OD server. No love. Archive, Demote, Promote, restore. Then try a slapconfig -kerberize… boom! kerberos dies horribly. Tried removing all of kerberos and starting from scratch, no go. kdcsetup results in a segfault… awesome. So, going to have to push this one back to later in the term, or Summer break. I hope to have it fixed before migrating to 10.6. 

Speaking of which, the possibility of migrating to 10.6 looks tenuous at best. We currently have 5 Intel Xserves, hosting student data (users on one, group shares on another), FCS, the primary MDC, and the website. This leaves email, OD, and the secondary MDC on PPCs, which won’t do 10.6. I’m really really hoping to get 2 more Xserves out of our dwindling budget, but who knows what will happen. With two, I could move OD to the secondary MDC, then migrate mail to the other Xserve. This would be a bare minimum. I’d get to retire our old first generation Xserves, and put the backup server on a G5 Xserve, as well as have another G5 Xserve for… something. 

Add to this the fact that Xsan wants the MDCs to be on the latest OS being used on the SAN, and I REALLY need at least 1 new Xserve. Mail has waited this long… though, I think there is a big desire to use CalDAV this time around. So… money? 

My latest idea was to try to split up the cost. Maybe buy the FC cards, and extra HDs this fiscal year, then next year we buy the servers. Or maybe just buy one server this year, and another next. I really want to get this going. 

More next…

Just updated to 2.7.1

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Just wanted to post since I just updated to 2.7.1. Seems pretty ajax-y. 

it’s been a while since a post. maybe I’ll get around to writing a “what’s happened since then… maybe. =)

House M.D. Inspired Invention

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So, here’s one, and maybe they already exist and I just can’t find them, but…

Garage Door opener with an integrated CO (Carbon Monoxide) sensor.

Explanation: Garages house several items that are CO producers in the average house. Gas furnace, gas water heater, CAR! All of these can produce CO if working improperly, and those levels can build up in the space, and then seep into the house.

Why not have a Garage door opener that can sense that, and if the levels rise too high, the opener is triggered, and the door opens. For security purposes, after the level falls again, the door closes. Obviously, an alarm would want to go off along with this to try to alert the home owner to the problem rather than just having the opener cycle open and closed for days. =)

CO has a very similar density to normal “air”, so basically, you just set it to trigger at a low enough concentration so as to evacuate the space before levels reach toxicity. Same as a home CO sensor.

Extra added bonus, it prevents people from using their cars in closed garages to kill themselves (not that I have a problem with suicide, just that it’s kind of a shitty way to do it).

Hell, building code required that they install a CO sensor in my house when they did the heat pump install, why would a garage not be required to have something like this?

I expect royalties if someone invents this… or, at least, credit in a “special thanks to”. Hmmm, maybe this should get posted on “Prototype this”.

BTW, if anyone has known someone that has died from CO poisoning, I sincerely apologize if I have offended.