James Drews Blog Spot

It’s student move in weekend, and the “warning signs” are up. There are several signs going down University Avenue warning drivers about the up coming student move in days into the dorms.

Well, did some tourist type things around town today. The summer organ concert series at the Overture Center for the Arts. Today featured the organist was Gary Lewis, the organist at Bethel, where I spend lots of time (especially on Sunday’s). After that, it was off to Camp Randal. The UW had an open […]

Ok, I think I finally got all the problems with DNS for my domain fixed. It appears that when I re-installed the server, I had a typo in the domain name (Yeah, online has two l’s, right). So now the new server is all happy, and things work so much better.
I have completed doing […]

Ok, it isn’t as bad as it sounds. I think I am addicted to this new puzzle they put in the paper. Soduko. I generally do the one from the USA Today online. The level 1 or 2 difficulty I can generally do in 7-8 min. I have managed to do a level 4 […]

The site is now up and running on its new home. I managed to move all the files over withouth too much difficulty. The new site is using a different blog program, but I did manage to find a script that would convert the database over. It had a few issues importing some of the […]

Well, I have been on this planet for 12,785 days (or to put it another way, 1,104,537,600 seconds and counting). Yup, today I turn yet another year older.

I finally have time to catch up on things again. Been a busy couple of days. The SAN patch went just fine. Ok, outside of the fact that all the outside door keys we had to the building it is in didn’t work. Had to call Police and Security to let us in to the building. *sigh* I have since gotten keys that work.

Also had security patches to apply to our Oracle database (and its Linux OS). That didn’t go as well. After boot the DB didn’t start. Figured that out fairly quick, but then people couldn’t login to the database once I did get it to start. A few searches of the oracle knowledge base and found an answer to that. So, the DB was down a bit longer than I had hoped. When it is down, it takes out things like our DHCP server.

Our unix guys moved our mail server over to the SAN on Tuesday. Needless to say, the performance we got from the SAN was far from what we expected. Other equipment on the SAN didn’t have any problems. After lots of trial and error, calling Dell for support on the issue, and changing the IMAP/POP3 software to a version that will keep an index of mailbox files instead of having to scan the entire file each time to determine what is in it, we have a system that is much happier. Unix guys had a bit more configuration settings to change on the mail server before we got everything happy (ran out of connections and file handles). I have been watching the SAN this morning to see if there is anything else that can be changed to further increase performance.

Moving on to other things. I had a bit of time to start working with the new server. It showed up Monday, but I missed UPS by 10 min. Figures, and I could have easily left work earlier that day too. I managed to pick up the server from the UPS depot that evening. Trying to get Fedora Core 2 installed has been a challenge. It won’t recognize the RAID card. Downloaded the drivers from Dell, created a driver disk, and tried again - no go. Turns out the floppy drive in the server is bad. Used a “remote” floppy, and that worked with the same floppy disk, but the OS just locked up trying to load the driver.

I have a small number of choices of what Linux OS to run for the web hosting software that I purchased. I plan on using Ensim Pro for Linux. I am sure Fedora Core v4 would install on the server, but it isn’t supported yet by Ensim. Not wanting to purchase and pay for an annual subscription for Red Hat Enterprise server, I found out I can use CentOS. It won’t be officially supported by Ensim, but at least it works. So, after a long evening, I have the server up and running. Now to get a couple more things installed and then will try getting my feet wet with the hosting software. Once I have learned all the ins/outs of it, I will do a clean install and send the server off to the data center. Maybe after this weekend with a bit of luck. Guess I should call and get the floppy fixed on the server before I do that - you never know if it will be needed later.

Ouch, its early. But today is the day our Dell/EMC SAN gets patched. The patch unfortunately requires that all servers attached to it get shut down before patching. So, that means a really early day for me.

Yesterday we put the mail server on the SAN. Let’s just say, things didn’t go very well once everybody showed up to work. Things looked fine late at night, but about 9am or so, things started to move to a crawl. We have a case open with Dell on this, and have done a few tweaks to the system, but won’t know how well that did until later today. At least I managed to get away from the office for a few hours to get some sleep. I will be stopping at the grocery store on the way in this morning to pick up mass quantities of mountain dew to help me and the others make it through the morning/day.

Ah, beer. Well, that was quite the relaxing day. Out for lunch with friends, shuttle bus over to the park for beerfest. Long line to get in (didn’t open until 1, got there about 12:30). Some group decided to have some “fun” just before the line started moving and got the “wave” going down the line. Which is kind of something, as the line snaked back and forth. It eventually did make it most of the way.

Weather cooperated for the most part. Wasn’t too warm like it has been (high temps and lots of beer is a bad combination). Did get rained on a bit, but it was a gentle rain, and rather refreshing. For the first time, we managed to stay until the end. Five hours of drinking beer (ok, I quit a bit sooner than that). Out for supper for some spicy food, and then home. Nice quiet relaxing day, just what the doctor ordered as they say…

The weather finally cooled down. And just in time for this year’s beerfest. I will be attending this year (3rd time) after not getting tickets last year. Four years ago, tickets were available a few weeks after they went on sale. This year, they were sold out after just a couple hours. They did reserve a few for mail order, and a couple friends of mine managed to get us tickets that way. Over 100 micro breweries will be there giving out samples of their beer. Most have more than one to try out. Needless to say, that is WAY more beer than I can even attempt to sample.