Jacob's Insidious Ramblings

I know it has been way too long since I have graced the Interweb with my presence. A lot has been happening these past few months that my blog lay slient. I will start with my Son of course. He has been doing great, he is a very good natured baby so far. He smiles a lot and will laugh often enough. He is eating solid-ish food along with his soy formula.

On the job front, at the end of July I took a new job at a company called Glacial Energy. It is not a bad place to work and the responsibilities have increased compared to the job with Wells Fargo. I enjoy the responsibility so that is always good. It is also more along the lines of what I like to work on and do. I manage the network, the servers, and the workstations. Of course I also do the helpdesk part of the job, which is not bad. It does help that most of the people that I talk to are of a nice sort so it makes the troubleshooting a rather calm affair. I am slowly trying to improve the way things are done and optimize my job as to make things easier on everyone.

Now, on to some of my hobbies. I have of course ‘mastercontrol’ as the AD server here at home with ‘zoidberg’ running a RAID 1 setup using two 230GB drives. I have a third sitting around just in case one fails. Unfortunately ‘zoidberg’ currently seems to have a problem when it comes to uptime; which I may have found the solution to it. As usual my mind seems to revolve around the computer and related topics and so most other hobbies tend to take a back seat. I do want to work more on my chess playing and get back into trying to learn the guitar. I have some natural talent with chess but no music talent at all so the latter will be a bit harder to do.

I got a bicycle from my niece Jessica and her husband. I have kept finding excuses to not fill up the tires with air so I can exercise more. I need to start because when I look at my Son I do sometimes think of what would happen when I depart from this rather buoyant body I am attached to. If it were to happen before he is grown then that would of course not be a good thing.

As you can see I have done a bit and have been mulling over a lot of things recently. I know I ought to update this blog more but time is not a luxury that I seem to have a lot of.

I had the chipset fan on my motherboard go out a few weeks ago which started to cause rebooting issues every few days on my main desktop. I found a replacement the day before Thanksgiving. It is a huge heatsink without a fan which seems to be doing the job. I think that the job was done to Windows before I got a chance to fix the problem. Before, the reboots were so sudden Windows could not do a BSOD and now Windows seemed to be doing BSOD’s on me. After debugging the dump file it looked like it was the network driver(I hope). So far things seem to be stable after updating all the chipset drivers and network drivers. While I was at it I went ahead and updated my video drivers. I will be hoping that things are stable this coming week. If not then I may have to reinstall Windows. If that does not fix it then I think my MB may be crap and I will have to rip hardware from my secondary workstation. That is something I really do not want to do. Anyway, later…

I got a copy of the newest beta of Microsoft’s most recent offering of Windows. The install is beyond simple from what I have seen so far. I am installing it on my Dell Latitude C640. All the specs are fine for it except for the video card so I will find out how bad the new GUI runs on it. I may post a few more items with it as the topic with my thoughts and comments soon.

It has been a little while since I have done any posting to the blog. When I have not been busy I have been tired of doing too much with computers. I know that sounds scary if you know me, but I am doing better now. I updated some of the software running houstonjuggalos.com. It is a site that I am just the ‘code monkey’ for so don’t get any ideas. heh… I am enjoying things mostly. I am also slimming down my pile of computer junk slowly. I may have trouble not accepting old computer hardware but once I mess with it and make something useful I am finding it easier to get rid of it. The same can be said for hardware that does not work or is flaky. I am tired to dealing with that crap. Anyway, while I am typing this I am putting the finishing touches on my laptop image that I am creating. When I am done I will never have to reinstall Windows on my laptop again because I will have it set to just need a restore DVD put in the drive to get it back working in case I hose the OS.

It seems that I have been too busy with life to drop a post or two. Well, I will update on a few things that I have done in the time of this lack of posting. One thing that I have done is get a smaller computer case instead of the server case I was using for years. It is a mini-tower with 3x 5 1/4″ drive bays, 1x visible 3 1/2″ bay and 5 3 1/2″ bays for hard drives and the lot. The thing actually holds my three internal hard drives, one DVD/CD burner and a CD burner without too much problems. Another thing is that it has a clear plastic cutout on the side of it and so I have a Green LED exhaust fan to light it up. Yes, I know I am a bit late to the party on this one but I found it fun. I did not want red or blue because those LED colors hurt my eyes. Green is a nice calm color for the future of my vision. I almost have my dedicated Multimedia PC ready to go so when I rip music/movies/etc., capture video and otherwise edit graphics I will have a dedicated workstation for such a feat. The thing has a bit more power than my current system. My processor is an Athlon XP 2100+ and the one in the aforementioned system is an Athlon XP 2500+ so it is a bit faster. The RAM is the same at 512Megs but it is faster than what is in my main system. The thing I need to get soon for my main system is a really good video card because mine is and has been showing it’s age for a while. What sucks is that since I am almost always broke I doubt I will be able to afford one for a long time to come. I know you are thinking, “hey, where the hell did he get all that hardware if he is broke?”, and I have an answer for you. I tend to accept any computer hardware someone is willing to give me. I am not too proud when it comes to that. Anyway, I am going to get out of here for a short and will attempt to most more often for the 2 or 3 people that sometimes visit a month.

Well, I finally got my Niece’s gallery upgraded to the newest version. She was using Gallery 1. She is now using Gallery 2. I also set up one of my nephews with a Gallery 2 set up of his own.
For my Niece, Jessica, it is http://seeker.theuncle.com/
For my Nephew, Charlie, it is http://chucknasty.theuncle.com/
It was interesting doing the import from Gallery 1 to 2 and it was actually really easy… Only a few differences exist that can be irritating but oh well. Got to go…

Well, I am going to try my hand at getting a replacement site going for the slightly aging look of the Lone Star Spirits site. I am going to try and use Drupal as it seems to be very versatile and yet clean and modular. I think I can get something whipped out in a few weeks or a month or so. Lates.

About a month or so ago I learned how do something on a Cisco Router called ‘IP Unnumbered’. The neat thing about it is that if I have two of them hooked together over a connection with the CSU/DSU WIC card in it I do not need a set of WAN IP addresses. It uses the ‘fastethernet0′ as it’s pseudo address. It took me a short bit to wrap my mind around the routing for it but once it clicked it became easy. I learned it as we hooked up a T1 connection between the main San Antonio location and a location in Webster, TX. I found out about the command when I was hooking up a T1 for an Internet connection and the ISP told me to use that command. When I learn a new command or trick I have to figure out all aspects of it if time presents itself. Luckly it did so now I am versed in that method. You know, if I was rich I think I would buy a bunch of routers and bridges and other devices just to tinker with them. Alas, I am not flush with the green so I just learn as I get chances to.

So far this week has dragged on. Oh well, the weekend is coming up and it will be a long one at that. No work on Monday means good times. This week up at work I got the Cisco 1721 router talking to the new T1. I even got the Cisco PIX 505 almost totally configured. I still have a few items to set up on the PIX and it will be all done. I enjoy how easy most of the Cisco stuff actually is to configure. Of course I never use a GUI or anything like that. Command line all the way as usual. Much easier that way it is…

Most of my growing up years I was not a fan of Apple. It is widely known by friends and family of my thoughts about not just the company but the awkwardness of the OS. That was until OSX came along. I have found it to be mostly clean and not too bad of an Operating System which brings me to the title of this entry. A few months back I had the pleasure of test driving a couple of these units. I found that the Mini is worth the sticker price. In fact, I may one day soon get one of my own. w00t!! Below is the specs of what I want.
• 1.25GHz PowerPC G4
• 512MB DDR333 SDRAM – 1 DIMM
• 40GB Ultra ATA drive
• 4x SuperDrive (DVD±RW/CD-RW)
• Internal Bluetooth + AirPort Extreme Card
• 56K v.92 Modem
• Mac OS X – U.S. English
Those options jump it up to $748.00 but I would still find that worth it…

It is a DVR-A09XL Pioneer drive with a black front. The max writes are below for each format it can handle.
DVD-R 16x
DVD+R 16x
DVD-RW 6x
DVD+RW 4x
DVD+R DL 6x
CD-R 40x
CD-RW 24x
The link to the page showing the specs for this unit is here.
So far it is pretty sweet. I am starting to do backups with it and plan to learn how to compile dvd movies one day. I got some DVD-R and DVD+RW blanks. I would have gone with DVD-RW blanks but I could not find them in more than 10 in a pack unlike the +RW blanks. I would have gotten some Dual Layer blanks but they are a bit costly right now. I even noticed that my burner can go faster than most of the media I was able to find can handle which is kinda neat. Anyway, I plan to waste a few DVD-R disks toying with the DVD movie functions. Gotta go… Later.

No, not the bug spray. RAID means “Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks”. It is a term used in the computing world for a collection of hard drives with fault tolerance so if one drive were to die, you could just replace it without downtime. Up here at work we just got a new server with 2gigs of RAM, two Pentium 4 Xeon 3.06Ghz processors, and two 36gig drives for a RAID 1(mirror). The second RAID device is 7 146gig drives acting as one which happens to be running RAID 5. This is fun stuff at least to me…anyway, gotta go…

I have been cleaning up my computer room since we moved into our house last year. It is one of those slow processes as I have limited space and not the whole house. It is coming along good and the servers are working good in the closet. I just need to clean the work bench off and rewire the power cables so it is not so much of a mess. Gotta go…

If I get time this weekend I plan to throw two 30gig drives in an older computer I have sitting around and use one of the Promise RAID cards for binding them together. I then plan to Install Windows 2000 Professional. It will be a backup server and backup workstation for my Dad to use. I have been meaning to get this done but time has not always been available to me.

If anyone is in doubt or outright does not know, phpbb2 is a message board system. I had to update it on two sites today. One of them I used as a test since it is not being used yet. It is www.digitalsheep.org. The other is used a lot so I did it second which is www.houstonjuggalos.com/board. Even though it went smooth on the first domain I was kinda spooked about the second one because it stays kinda busy. I ended up putting up an index.html file to block any new visitors to the page and explained that it was being worked on and waited until everyone was out. I am glad it worked out. It is kind of irritating when security issues come up. I am just glad this was easy to update.

I recently got a 3.5″ hard drive enclosure that has both Firewire and USB 2.0 connections on it. I did not want to use the usb side of things for a perm. solution so I went ahead and got a Firewire card. One thing I can say is that it may not be hooked directly to the IDE chain but it works damn well. I am pretty much sold on Firewire. I think all external enclosures that I purchase will have both types from now on. I know, it took me long enough but it is fun in any case. I like this enclosure because if I decide to put a 250gig HD into it the unit will take it. It currently is housing a 80gig drive which is plenty for now. It is acting as my tertiary data drive. I have 4 drives hooked to my computer. I have the main SCSI 9.1gig acting as the system drive. A second 9.1gig acting as an application drive. The third which is housed in a 5.25″ removable drive rack which is a 40gig acting as my games drive. I then have the Firewire drive for graphics and other misc. stuff I want. I plan to redo a bit of it but for now this works fine. Yes, if you have not figured out by now, I ramble a lot. Later…

You know, it really irritates me when I come to make an entry and find that I have gotten spam comments. I really do not like having to delete them. It seems to be happening once a week or so. Anyway, lates…

I don’t know about you but I plan to start using it asap to see how the whole version number handles. I almost never use Internet Explorer now except for the Windows Update.

One of the many things on my plate is trying to get a Linux-based kiosk working for where I work. I have to get it stable then lock it down but make it still useable. I plan to use Firefox as the browser as it works rather well in Windows and Linux. I wanted to use Debian because of how easy it is to update but it is a pain to use new stuff in package format. I am trying out the distrobution named “Ubuntu”. It is based off of Debian and offers regular security updates for 18 months per release. Each release comes out every 6 months so this should be interesting.

A question was presented to me today regarding authentication methods for Windows 2000 servers(and *nix ones) across the Internet so only one login is necessary. While I think there are a few fielded answers, finding one to implement that is secure is not necessarily easy. RADIUS was proposed but Windows 2000 I am not sure supports it. I have found it can run a server for that auth. method so when I do further research maybe it will be viable. Another possible type is LDAP. The problem with LDAP is that from what I have been looking at, you have to rig Windows a bit differently to auth. on it but might be worth a shot if done through SSL or some other secure method. Kerberos might show some promise. It looks like no easy way exists but I do not plan to give up that easily.

More on this later…maybe…