Yea, it's been a while, but asking about it doesn't get new posts up more often. :) I just haven't had too much to write about, and have been doing other things I guess. I don't remember what happened Wednesday at work, so it must have been pretty routine. Lunch was sorta a surprise trip to Chipotle. We were going to Noodles, and then that changed as we were in the parking lot driving out. Austin had mentioned to me that it was raining outside, but a few minutes earlier I had looked outside and saw people just standing around on the phone, which didn't seem like a likely combination. The trip to lunch turned up why though - it was alternating between no rain and pouring down so hard you couldn't see 50ft in front of you. Always interesting, but you have to time your trips between enclosed areas properly to stay dry. The whole weather thing also caused the air in one of our server rooms to be rather humid. Turns out they never set the new AC unit to control humidity, and the old one was mainly case fan exhaust so was showing an artificially low number. Spent some time tweaking that, and it seems to be keeping the room better overall temperature wise too. You'd think the HVAC people would do it right when they set it up, especially after they spent like a week figuring out how to stabilize the temperature variances. That night Ben and Josie came over to see my place and spend the night. They were passing through on their way to Rochester to look for a place there, and since they hadn't ever seen my place it made a great excuse to stay. Ben and I watched Matrix Revolutions which is an OK movie. The soundtrack is a little messed up (weird distortions on fades on the surrounds especially - sounds like bad compression artifacts), but it could be the disc is just scratched as it's Netflix. Thursday was another one of those uneventful days, although with some more HVAC checking (everything always looked good though). Friday we had someone from the HVAC crew turn off the older air conditioner since they thought it wasn't needed. Nevermind that we need all 8 tons to keep the room in the range it should be within. Friday was spent looking at Active Directory stuff, as well as Avalon. We had some problems with Word XP still, and think it may be a bug exposed due to Application Data being redirected. No other app has problems, which is annoying, since it points to Word but what are we gonna do. I vote for OpenOffice everywhere, but... I managed to get a policy set up so Application Data would go back in the roaming part of the profile. Hopefully that'll make things more stable, but now I'll probably have to deal with people complaining about how long it takes them to log in/out again... It was also a night to stay late working on Avalon. I spent some time planning a new layout for our entire AD structure, which can hopefully be implimented at least partially sometime this summer. Then I demoted Avalon as a domain controller since I have two other ones running right now due to some other things that came up. Hopefully that'll help the load out a lot. The history of the domains unfortunately has involved a lot of combining file servers with domain controllers (typical small environment stuff), but we've definitely grown to the point where that's a bad idea. That and the merging of two distinct computing communities and another goofy split meant most of the AD redesign. Of course a CS prof had an assignment due at midnight (two hours after the outage started), and a bunch of people decided to work on it at the last minute. I think they survided though - I was done before midnight and none of them were around anymore. Of course I ran into the fact that the account management stuff all broke because of the change, so had to get that up and running. Should be now though, and I haven't heard any complaints so I'm caling it good. Saturday morning was sleep in time, which was nice. I had been really tired for a good chunk of the week. I need to not stay up as late. Tonight is a bonfire, which should be fun. If you don't know about it you haven't been talking to the right people this week.

Monday was just miscellaneous stuff. Fixes on the OS X side, eliminating another account which existed in more than one domain, etc. Apparently the Help Desk got a bit of traffic as I heard some complaining, but nothing that hit me this time. Finished off the day by getting a call asking for some help connecting a remote office to their NT4 server. Wouldn't be a big dael, except the server team had no clue they had a server out there (it was apparently before they merged in, and we were never told it existed). Now to see if we can get a trust going followed by replacing that with a machine where we don't have to worry about someone's laptop getting infected and coming back to work to take down the network. Lunch was C1, which was cool. We chatted quite a bit with Dan, which is always good. Not often you hear your waiter say some of the stuff he says... Read lots of AD planning stuff, specifically in relation to Windows Server 2003. Not sure if we'll go that route, but we'll see what benefits it'd have. They have some interesting hardware requirements for their systems. Academia has a much different usage pattern than corporate, which makes everything need to be taken with a grain of salt. Unfortunately that means we have to guess, and half the time means overshooting excessively and the other half it barely works and is slow. Such is life I guess, although you know it's bad when the MS people feel sorry for anyone in an academic environment. Tuesday was gonna be my day to try and plan out the AD structure before we make any massive changes. That didn't happen unfortunately. Ended up looking a some Storage Server 2003 stuff, and then investigating claims of slowness on the student file server. I poked a bit and changed policies to hopefully cause student accounts to be less dependent on realtime access to the server (with the tradeoff of slightly longer login/logout). Unfortunately the policy didn't reverse well, at least in the short term. Maybe it'll happen tomorrow. Then told everyone to basically not update any Windows documentation until they hear otherwise from me, which probably won't be until mid-summer. Hopefully we won't make too drastic of changes and create too much of a documentation crunch. Spent a good chunk of my evening hooking up my myth box again. I had configured it to boot in runlevel 3 and left it sitting in a corner just recording stuff. First I had to figure out how to get it to boot into X without a mouse. Not too bad, assuming I don't want to be able to plug a mouse in and have it work. I had to wire up my kvm and a bunch of VGA cables to get it into my av system though, which is sorta a mess right now. I need to do something about cable lengths with the new system. If I can get the AMX stuff up and running I could leave a lot of stuff behind the rack rather than in it and save space, which would be nice if that works. Anyways, I started off with an upgrade of mythtv, and now am not sure why the internal audio doesn't work. I finally loaded in the right modules and the mythvideo component plays fine, but the internal recorded programs doesn't. Sorta annoying to have that problem... Then there's this whole audio sync thing. I think that's an issue with either the divx files themselves though, or with the ac3 decoding. It only is really noticable after a couple hours of the movie (and then only a second or two without compensation turned on). I'm not sure how I'm gonna fix that since it's not a constant adjustment I can throw in either. Well, didn't get much done for visitors tomorrow, but oh well, such is life.

Woke up this morning to no email. Sorta odd, turned out Bethel's router was messed up again. Haven't heard a cause yet, but I wouldn't be surprised if generator testing let sasser loose again. Heard the UMN CS network has some probably unrelated problems, which could be not so fun. Good luck to them. Church was at Salem, which if you can't guess what the subject was you've probably got someone disappointed in you now. After that was trying to figure out what my family's plans were for the day, which took like 3 phone calls to get from "we don't know" to "nothing". Oh well. Sat around for the afternoon doing pretty much nothing. Probably should have cleaned the house, but that would be work. I'll have to do that tomorrow or something. Despite the weather I didn't even notice the heat. Normally during the day my house has stayed relatively cool (under 80) even on the hottest days. Anyways, I stumbled across this thing called Akimbo which is basically a STB that plugs into your ethernet network and downloads video on demand. They use WMV to store stuff, supposedly pretty good quality. 1.5Mbps max means that cable modem allows effectively streaming too. The thing even has an internal HD to store 200 hours of encoding. It's too bad they only have S-Video output and not component. They seem to have plans to allow others to produce boxes for ti though, which could mean improvement there. The content is the only thing lacking. They seem to allow pretty much anyone to submit content, which is cool and makes sense for VOD since it doesn't cost them much at all unless their customers want it but it does increase the content base easily (basically free distribution to their customers). IFilm is cool if it's still how I remember it. It'll be interesting to see what happens with CinemaNow and their integration. If they add more stuff even better. I'll have to watch for reviews once it goes production. Hopefully NetFlix will follow through on their VOD idea too and give it some competition. Anyways, headed over to my grandma's place late afternoon to meet my family for dinner and to celebrate Mother's Day. Turns out it started storming pretty nicely and sirens were going off everything. I could have gotten some cool pictures on the way over if I hadn't been driving or I had decided to act like the average american driver. I think I did get some good ones at my grandma's place though - I should pull those off the camera soon. Didn't stay around there too long as my sister had to get back to school to work on some project or something. On the way back across the cities there was a lot of cool lightning. I like lightning (except when it hits any component of the power grid). Of course then it started heating up inside too. That's the one drawback I've found at my place - doesn't get warm during the day, but does in the evenings. Fortunately at this time of year I can just open up a window and turn on and exhaust fan. Plus sitting in the basement listening to music since it's cooler there. :)

On Thursday the OS X server seemed stable and everything on it was fine, so served out all the shares and hoped for the best. Avalon had been stable for the most part, but I had heard a few complaints about "freezing" so best to get it out of the way before problems happened. Apparently something was up with mac authentication through MacAdmin so taking off Avalon from the list caused students to be unable to log in. My staff account could log in fine, but not my student one. I got a temporary fix in place which allowed logins but took a bit longer that evening, and Mike and I sorted it out in the morning. Not sure why the other AFP auth wasn't working, but it seems the combination of OS 9, and OS X server, and macadmin still needs plaintext password (the old AFP server always required them too, so oh well). Totally shut off AFP and AppleTalk on Avalon which should help the load over the next couple weeks. I think Thursday wins for the week with 1022 Incidents modified. I didn't look on Friday, but the Help Desk seemed somewhat more relaxed, so... Friday was Arby's for lunch, and we even dragged jherter out with us. Always a good time, if slightly on the more expensive side. Avalon seemed pretty stable all day, and the disks didn't show much IO wait which is a good sign. After work hung out around Bethel a bit and fixed an app that had been broken on my site for quite a while. My cousin called and will be coming through the cities this next week and hasn't seen my place yet, so they're gonna stay here for a night. That should be fun, as I haven't seen them since Christmas. Then I tried to talk brooke into leaving the mass voicemail about people being put in "The Dungeon" VLAN for misbehaving computers using TextEdit and the BadNews voice. She didn't go for it for some reason (although the sample "you have been burninated" message sounded pretty funny)... Then Dave and I headed down to Station-4 (their website currently sucks) for a Moxie Bliss concert. A bit too loud, although mixed better than a lot I've been to. Can't complain for free though. We left shortly after they finished since we hadn't heard of the others and even after calling and bugging him Ross wasn't gonna show up. Excessive caffeine was already necessary anyways, so it was time to call that a night. Saturday was sleep in a lot day, which is always nice. Read up on the tech stuff a bit and fixed some speed issues in my newsreader (mainly involving indexing and cleaning out around 60k old articles). Then realized it was definitely time to go grocery shopping since the fridge was starting to get empty. Got back and found out the SSL wildcard cert for work had expired - oops. Apparently problems with getting the right name on them didn't get worked out in time. Oh well, at least I'm not responsible for buying the certs (except one which has the correct name and has been in place for a while without any hastle for probably a month now). The SSL cert people sure seem to do a pretty poor job for how much they charge though. Finished off the evening by watching Brotherhood of the Wolf. That genre line on IMDB really is about right (it's listed under 6). Basically think Sleepy Hollow meets The Matrix. They made extensive use of time distortion on the visuals (both speeding up and freezeframe), usually to good effect. One scene made me think of the Burly Brawl in Reloaded quite a bit down to even the coat, which is funny considering it came out two years earlier... I grabbed it through Netflix on a recommendation so didn't catch language thing at first. The only talking by the people where you can see their faces in the first fifteen minutes or so is a couple sentences, so suddenly I realized that it was actually doing the dubbed version by default. I don't get that - who in their right mind defaults to a dubbed track? A quick drop to the menu resulted in finding there was a french track and english subtitles (which seem to have some thought put into them), which was much better. Good movie, but the french origin definitely shows. The good outweighs the bad though and I'd recommend it.

So if you want to make the cocoa, basically you take a small bit of ground red pepper (don't know my measurements, a little mound in the center of a normal spoon in 20oz is about right) into the cocoa. As for the tabasco sauce, four or five shakes of the bottle is probably about right (three wasn't quite enough). Anyways, the last two days have been interesting. Miscellaneous stuff at work, and then the network blew up. Turns out someone brough Sasser on ResNet, and it started overflowing the routers, and there were enough machines vulnerable they actually started saturating switches too. Network services finally squashed it by reconfiguring the switches to by default drop all traffic at the source port, waiting hours for the switches to actually get the new config as they couldn't even talk to the management system reliably so it had to work from the core slowly to the edge, and then moving people over as they're patched and known clean (such as moving all machines which had been using appletalk over to active again). Made a lot of stuff single clicks in the system or basically in most cases read off and verify and click a button but the Help Desk has been getting calls solid all night tonight. They actually went to CDs again as with machines which are infected can't be let on the network even limited to only talking to a machine with patches, and there's no way to sort them out. Everyone has to talk to the Help Desk to get online. I'm glad I'm not on the Help Desk. Today I got OS 10.3.3 server in and built a machine. Copied over the things to share and it's actually ready to be production. I actually had to fight with it a bit as the base install didn't even want to mount .dmgs, but I got that working again. Only took a few seconds to bind into AD, and Workgroup Manager looks cool although I haven't done much beyond add some shares (I'm not sure i like the opening accounts first though - it adds a big delay with AD when there's thousands of entries, not to mention the unneeded load on the domain if you're only going to go pull shares or something. I'm hoping I can turn AFP and AppleTalk off completely on the student server now and that'll fix the load. I have at least one other option up my sleeve still, but I'd rather not go that direction. Lunch on Wednesday was Village Wok. I really like that place, even if Ross sends us in the wrong direction to get there. :) On a totaly different topic again, garbage service is overpriced. I have the small container, yet I still manage to only get my garage picked up every month or month and a half out of laziness and still don't overflow the container (and that's with two people). Yet there's no option other than to pay for it as if it's picked up every week. They should really look into doing something like bi-weekly pickups or something.

Oh, before I forget... Those of you who pay attention regularly may remember me ranting about hot cocoa and red pepper. I decided tonight was another good night to enjoy that mix. For the second batch I decided that it needed a bit more smokey flavor to it, but didn't have any powdered chipotle pepper. Pulled out the good old standby instead and shook a few drops of chipotle tabasco sauce in and stirred it up good. It's very good, and I highly recommend it. No, really. I'm not crazy. You have to try it. Let me know if you need more details on how to make your cocoa a lot better.

Sunday was good. The morning was my sister's confirmation. Went a little long, but was good. That was followed by lunch at Olive Garden and the unlimited soup, salad and breadsticks. I normally don't eat too much on Sundays, so only ended up eating two bowls of Zuppa Toscana, but it was good (especially since my second bowl was a fresh batch). I don't think it quite compares to Emily's Chicken Potato Chowder (not as creamy), but it's good. For the afternoon I watched Shrek, which is a very funny movie. The nice touch was the lens flare for a wide open aperature of all things. Think about that one for a second... Sorta like the new M&Ms commercial (which also looks animated). The soundtrack is good too, gotta love when they pull out Joan Jett songs in a kids movie. After the movie was music time again. After the Sunday night TV I decided it would be a good idea to turn off the projector, but was too lazy to go turn on the lights. I realized I actually like it better that way. Those who have been at my place know how I have the entire front wall of the room a black cloth surface and that I can effectively shut off almost all outside light. So yea, if I look up from my computer screen there's *nothing*. It's the kind of dark your eyes just kind of focus off way into the distance trying to find something. Yet the only thing is a couple LEDs on the light switch off to the side. It actually makes the listening experience better in my opinion, as the walls just disappear. Especially with some processing so the sound comes from all around it sounds like being in an extremely large room or just open space. I've heard lots of recommendations about how listening in the dark can be much better but never bothered for no good reason (it's not the walking in the dark part - I walk around doing things without bothering to turn the lights on all the time). Too bad I just discover this when it's gonna start being light outside for longer. At least nobody complains if I crank the music in the middle of the night...

Friday was as Fridays have been recently, at least as far as work was concerned. I need to start planning something fun for Fridays to get rid of that. Did end up taking the fixed BethelAuth module that Andy had cleaned up after we discovered and fixed a rather major bug in it and converted it to the other format and posted them up on the docs site. Then had to track down everyone who uses auth and tell them. It wasn't a security bug or anything, which was good. I had been meaning to do that for quite a while lately, since there were a lot of little upgrades he had added over the last couple years. After work was the 2004 ITS Student Worker BBQ which also was Tenley's going away party. It was good, although seemed a little quieter/slower than last year - oh well. After that Dave and I went over to my place and watched Kill Bill: Vol. 1. I have to say that's one of the best movies I've seen in a while, and I'm pretty sure Dave agreed. We were trying to think of a theater good enough to go see Vol. 2 in. The soundtrack for the movie was very well done, with extreme attention to detail (should have expected that though). I'm not sure why I didn't have that much interest in the film when it first came out, I blame the reviews saying it was just full of violence and stuff (true, but that's not anywhere close to the main purpose of it). Anyways Saturday slept in a decent amount, sat around reading tech stuff, and then watched Reservoir Dogs. Good movie, not sure which I like better yet (leaning towards Kill Bill due to the more complex plot). After that decided it was listening to music time. Some (most?) songs sound great with Logic 7, but I found 2-3 tonight that get some really odd effects. Sound like modern pop as defined by the radio. On the other hand, hearing about your favorite radio city sounded amazingly well defined in the surrounds. Every time I'm down there listening I realize I should do it more often - some music just doesn't sound that great with headphones, you need the effect of feeling the music. Maroon 5's Harder to Breathe was one I really noticed tonight. I've never been too big of a fan when listening on headphones or even upstairs at home. Get it on the good system though... I may have to pull out the rest of the album.

Thursday I went to work. Did stuff but don't remember too many details. I think I talked to people about the NAS/SAN stuff and also OS X. Oh well, days like that happen. Lunch was C1. Between that and 10's going away party (despite lots of people hinting at it, she still hasn't been convinced to stay), they took a decent chunk of the day. That reminds me though since I talked to like 4 people about it separately that it was the day I decided to try and get rid of AFP on Avalon within a week. Somehow that managed to get approved without much hastle (very much to my surprise), and now I have a copy of 10.3 server on it's way to me hopefully in the next day or two. Wednesday night I finished up Season One of Alias. OK, the show is good, but isn't a magazine about just it a little excessive?!? Anyways, Thursday I realized that this whole AFP thing could be somewhat of a mess, even with the original timeline by the end of summer. First off there's the allowed character set. This I should be able to fix with a script to traverse and rename any files with invalid characters. That should be easy. Then there's all these files without extensions. Not a big problem except that the Resource Forks are already in jeopardy due to AFP and SMB access methods storing them differently. I'm pretty sure I've figured out how to read the NTFS AFP_afpInfo stream enough to reliably determine document type and add extensions to any files lacking them. That shouldn't be a problem and is actually looking easier than it sounds. The fun part is the resource forks. One way to get them converted is to copy them down to a Mac through AFP, and then back to the server through SMB. That's suboptimal if not absolutely crazy. There's no way we're gonna get faculty to do their files that way even by the end of summer, and I'm not gonna do it manually and then try to sort out permissions. So reading the resource fork is easy, now I have to figure out how to combine two things into one that's smaller than both separately but doesn't look compressed. Should be a fun day tomorrow. After work hung out talking to people for a while, caught up on my tech reading, and pushed the load average on one of my servers up to in the 140s before killing it. That one was sorta accidental. I needed to clean up 10-15GB on one of my machines, so started a move of around 12GB over from it to one of my fileservers. This is a machine I just booted up yesterday as it had been off until I got around to upgrading the OS on it. Of course this upgrade is because the kernel is old and running an older version of the RAID card driver. So I managed to confuse the driver and had the kernel spewing SCSI errors into messages and promptly blocking IO attempts. Of course the machine which had the server's drive mounted kept trying to reconnect, and ended up with a large collection of defunct smbd processes on the server. Had to hit the power switch since shutdown also blocked. Reiserfs rocks though, and the 240GB drive was up and running within a minute or two with no problems (and that's at around 90% usage). :) Then Ross started talking to me on IM from Cali, which he seems to be enjoying. Then I got to talk to Brad who finally updated his blog too. Hopefully that'll be a trend?

Nothing too interesting. Work has been a jumble of stuff. Jumping between OS X, different web pages, evaluating server ideas, trying to figure out why Windows and AFP hate each other so much... I'm trying to pull some drastic changes regarding that last one, which should be interesting considering how fast finals are coming. At least the server isn't crashing, just being slow. It's being slow enough that people loose data though, which is really bad. Monday night didn't do much. Stocked up the fridge with dew, hung out talking to people, and went home and did nothing. Hit some problems with encoding but have them figured out now. Takes a lot longer though now, which sucks. Tuesday after work left a bit earlier, and watched 3 more episodes of Alias - up through 18 now.