Mike’s World

I got quite a bit of little anoying tasks off of my plate today at work. Got some system builds finished up, some documentation updated, some SAN disk cleaned up, just a bunch of little stuff.

Tonight’s goal at home was to rebuild my windows box. I attempted to use the netbackup IDR feature, and did not get very far. First of all, I needed to get my floppy drive to work, as the Windows ASR feature still requires a floppy. I got my CD built, got my floppy built, got my hard drive attached, rebooted. Waited for the long format process, and then went in to the windows install. Once I got to the netbackup side of things, my pc could not talk to the backup server. Some more digging, no network driver. Yay!. I then rebooted, and forgot to remove my IDE drive (I use scsi primarily), booted windows to see whats going on, and Windows made my IDE drive the C drive, and my scsi drive the D drive. After this, Windows will no longer boot.

So much for IDR. guess I get to rebuild my windows box once again.

I spent today playing with my PS2. One thing I hate doing is swapping my PS2 disks every time I play a game, so I got one of those HDD loader utilities. I also have been playing with the networking as well.

Today I installed a Nintendo emulator on my PS2. It was fun playing super mario brothers on my 57″ tv set. It is also amazing how fast SSX3 loads off of the hard drive instead of using the dvd-rom drive.

Well, got Solaris 10 installed and running at home. Had to compile several items, but I found many items in /usr/sfw/bin. I with Sun would just pick a directory and stick with it! /usr/bin, /opt/bin, /usr/sfw/bin, /opt/sfw/bin. bah!

Looks like the biggest change for me will be getting use to svcadm. I am going to need to spend some time reading over the whats new docs.

The other anoying thing is that I cant get firefox to compile (I want postscript printing!)

Well, I managed to get through today with only doing about 5 minutes of work. Yesterday I decided that today would be a good day to take off (only have 1 day left to burn now). I started the day by sleeping until about noon. After waking up, I finished up my disk work. So far after replacing the SCSI terminator and shortening the SCSI bus on my main server (Nerta T1 AC200) by about 8 inches, it looks like I have solved the SCSI error problems I have been seeing. The bus is a single ended Ultra2 SCSI bus, and now has four drives on it. With each drive you add to a SE bus, the overall length capabilities of that bus shorten. With the 4 drives on the bus, I only have about 4 feet to work with on cabling. I finished re stripping the file-systems, and I now have a 932GB file-system on a 1U Nerta. I think that is quite impressive. Man disk space is cheap!

After playing with the disk subsystem on my server, I relaxed to some TV, then once the sun started to go away, I continued to watch my LOTR DVDs. I stopped at chapter 17 of TT during my last viewing, now I have finished up that DVD, and on to the last set when I get a chance. I forgot how much I like the idea of Ent’s. The big beasts that tame the forest.

One thing I noticed on my TV (a 57″ rear projection HD Hitachi). I used the AVIA home theater DVD to re-tune it, and I ended up turning down the contrast quite a bit. as I get use to it, it is amazing how much more crisp the colors are. The contrast is still a bit higher than NTSC standards, so I will retune again in about 6 months after I get use to things.

I went through quicken today, and entered my latest pay stub. With taxes going down, and insurance going up, I now get another $11.00 a month on my paycheck. Interesting how that works out. I also noticed that I have another 4 payments left on my grand prix.. yay!

Most of the day was spent watching the Minnesota Vikings loose the NFC division game. They did a great job at beating the Green Bay Packers last night, so that is good enough for me. Today they played the Philly Eagles, in Philly. The game should make interesting conversation during Disaster Recovery next year.

After the game, I went for a nap, and next I had to find something to eat. Yesterday for dinner I went to David Fongs for some Kung Bo Chicken, which was very good. I with they where open on Sunday so I could go for that again. Tonight it looks like the only thing in the house is .

Tonight is going to be washing clothes, and watching a bit of TV. I only made it up to about chapter 17 of LOTR:TT last night, and I do not think I am going to be up to much more, so it is going to be the normal Sunday night line up of Simpson’s, MITM, L&O:CI, and I think I added a new show to the tivo (thinking), yep, Iron Chef America.