The cold of Winter has arrived. My daughters and I went out this morning and shoveled our driveway. Man, it was cold. My ears were aching when I came in — that's how cold it was.
This afternoon, I took a picture looking out one of the windows in our living room and up the street. You can see all the blowing snow.
Time for another Fozzolog.
My productivity at GuruLabs has been up and down the last couple of weeks. I’ve been doing some really cool stuff and learning a lot as I go, but it’s been so incredibly easy to get distracted and diverted to other stuff. I’ve noticed the same phenomenon is occuring with some of the others I’m working with. That said, I have been getting a lot done.
I don’t think anyone knew how much work the scripts for the troubleshooting class would be to get done. But, we’re closing in on the end. I think we’ll probably be done next week.
We’re in the process of moving all our servers to XMission’s data center in Salt Lake City. Currently, we have one server at XMission and that server hosts our “premium” websites while our other servers host our “standard” websites, e-mail, and other services.
After this weekend, all our servers will be at XMission. In the end, we’ll save a little on overall colocation cost, but our bandwidth will be burstable to 100Mbps and our servers will be much more accessible to me since I’m usually close to Salt Lake City.
The server currently at XMission is a SuperMicro 6010H which is a 1U rackmount dual Pentium III system with two Ultra160 SCSI drives. This will be replaced by a 2U AMD Athlon based system with two SATA drives and the old server will get some hardware upgrades and take over other duties.
I got the hardware components for the new server earlier this week and got together with Adam — my brother in law — on Wednesday to help him solder a Jamma Board while he helped me put the server together. We got the server put together fine, but it had trouble with a Fedora Core install. It seemed like the SATA controller was the culprit as the Fedora Core installer was generating kernel error messages regarding writing to the SATA drive devices. For example, one error said data was attempting to be written beyond the physical address space of one of the hard drives.
After work on Thursday, I set up the server at Guru Labs and tried to get Fedora Core installed using a different PCI SATA controller. The first attempt to install Fedora Core went fine, but then I got wondering if it was because I was using a different CD-ROM drive (one I borrowed from the Guru Labs surplus inventory as opposed to one I had borrowed from Adam the night before). So, I reconnected the drives to the onboard SATA connectors on the motherboard and tried to install Fedora Core again. Midway through the installation, I was having drive errors again.
This again suggested the onboard SATA controller was the problem. I was ready to do a final install with the other PCI controller, but I wondered if an update to the motherboard BIOS would resolve the problem with the SATA controller. The only problem with doing the BIOS update was that the BIOS update application was designed to be run from a DOS boot diskette. The server did not have a floppy disk drive connected to it, but I could get a drive out of the Guru Labs hardware surplus pile. The next problem was creating a DOS boot diskette.
Several months ago, Adam gave me a USB “jumpdrive” that he had replaced with a bigger and better one. He told me he partitioned the USB drive with a 1.44MB bootable DOS floppy image which I could use if a motherboard supported it. I tried, but it didn’t work.
Making a bootable DOS floppy is easy if you have Windows, but the only Windows machine at Guru Labs was a Windows Terminal Server in the server closet and it was locked up in the rack. I had Windows 2000 on my laptop, but no floppy drive.
In the end, I used one of the new Dell desktops that had arrived the day before and were running Linux to download a Windows 98 second edition boot disk image from bootdisk.com and used the Linux dd program to write to image to a floppy diskette. This worked great. I unzipped the BIOS update application to the diskette and booted off of it.
After flashing the BIOS on the motherboard, I tried installing Fedora Core again using the onboard SATA controller.
The result: disk errors. AGHGHGHGHGHG!
I went back to the PCI SATA controller. Disk errors.
Now I was really frustrated. The next thing I did was booted off the Fedora Core installation CD and typed memtest86 at the boot prompt to run the memory test suite that the Fedora project includes on the CD-ROMs. After 10 minutes or so, the errors started popping up on my screen. After it had found 19 errors in the same spot in the RAM, I powered the machine down and took out one of the two DIMMs. I ran the test again and found no errors. I put the DIMM I had previously removed back in and found errors. Bingo. Bad RAM.
I installed Fedora Core using the onboard SATA controller and only one stick of RAM and everything worked great.
Tonight, Sons Of Nothing will play their last show of 2004 at Liquid Joes in Salt Lake City. This will be a pretty low-key show for me as I’m just running projections and sound effects (as opposed to running video cameras, lights and whatever else too).
This show has been heavily advertised, so we’re hopeful it will be well attended.
Goozbach is watching me type this.
It is too late for me to be doing this.
Actually, it’s not too bad. I’ve been waking up about this time because my blood sugar goes low. So now I’m already awake and feeling the shakes. I probably need to adjust my Lantus dosage down a bit since I’m not eating as much these days.
If you haven’t noticed, Jennie is remarried. I still wish they had waited a few more months because I know a lot of people (myself included) were uncomfortable with their decision to rush into it. That said, it sounds like they had a great time at the ceremony.
I got the opportunity to do some contract work at Guru Labs at exactly the right time. Had I not gotten that opportunity... gee, I don’t know what we would have done. It is pretty obvious now that Iodynamics would not have been able to sustain my income.
In hindsight, my working for GL was the best thing I could have done, — not just for me, but also for Iodynamics. In the last few weeks that I’ve been working for Iodynamics, Mike and I have come up with a plan to get the business firmly back in the black and operating under reasonable and sensible procedures. We were just stretching things a little too far before. We weren’t bouncing checks or anything like that- we just weren’t operating within a nice comfort zone.
For now, we can build up that comfort zone and we’ve got some good business going on right now to help make that happen.
Alright. I need to go eat some cereal or something and then get to bed.
Hi there. I’m running Fedora Core 3 rc 2 on my laptop. I got it mostly working in a relatively short amount of time. I’ve got the USB mouse and the ALPS trackpad working together. This required some modification to the 2.6.9 Linux kernel that comes with FC3.
I’ve been trying to document these processees meticulously so I can give back to the community in hopes that others with an HP laptop can use my stuff to get their laptops running Linux too.
Tomorrow’s votin’ day... so vote.
If John Kerry wins this election, I’ll be giving some serious thought to moving to Australia.
