Well, the email migration seems to be going well. The mail seems much better filtered and the open server is quite a bit more responsive than exchange. Migration is a bit odd, but I suspect it's because of my machine. For some reason the NIC is confused and apparently thinks it's in half duplex. I think changing the switch port way back confused it and it just needs a hard reset at some point. Basically what's happening is whenever I select any individual large messages they have issues sorta randomly. Usually they'll work but a few in sequence won't. Where this becomes a problem is when I select a large batch and say move and go do other things I come back and it died halfway and I have to finish it off at another time. Oh well. Thursday lunch was run to target for office treats, and ended up with a couple jars of peanuts. That seems to be something everyone likes, and by the end of the day half a jar was gone. That's what they're there for though. We figured out what's gonna be a semi-massive change in how stuff works for BSSD students, which should be interesting to see how it unfolds. Everything started with wanting to account printing, and has just gotten more complex from there. Thursday night got the insurance stuff for the house sorted out, so ready to go in a week. Now just have to get the utilities all set... Friday started off interesting as the new mailman server decided to confirm the bouncing address again, and ended up dumping 6000 emails into my mailbox (they were all filtered properly, so that wasn't an issue). That should better be phrased as attempted to dump them into my mailbox. Apparently either due to an unfortunate coincidence or the added load pushing the server over the proverbial edge, one mail server suddenly started failing to connect to LDAP and started bouncing all messages requiring LDAP lookup (guess where most of the Bethel to Bethel messages ended up - yep, postmaster got a bit more mail than normal too). We eventually figured out what was happening and shut off that mail server, although then the other server promptly started doing the same thing, so the whole cluster was shut down for a while. Of course after turning off the sendmail queues running in individual messages always looked up fine, so the root problem is still unknown. We did clean up all the mailman messages just in case, but are still suspecting it's either an LDAP or sendmail issue, especially since it handled a bigger hit at a more prime time before and nobody even noticed. We're not testing until we figured why the failure produced 500 error codes rather than 400. It's supposed to do 400 so it is retried later rather than bouncing, because not connecting to LDAP probably isn't a permanant thing... After that I got to import PST files to Maildir. Of course the CD-RW with the PST file had one totally corrupted (wouldn't even copy off the disc from multiple OSes), and another one had two messages that wouldn't move so I'm suspecting the same problem. C1 for lunch, and then miscellaneous stuff. Figured out more details with the actual creating and integrating the new windows domain, which hopefully will go smooth the first time. Then managed to get stumped for a bit with the windows copy not working in a startup script. Oh well, that's next week. In the evening Jeff managed to talk me in to going to the Panther launch. Not sure how since I'm not a mac fanatic or anything, but it was fun. The line moved pretty quick, and was a surprisingly diverse group of people and not just geeks. Saw Ted who I haven't seen in a long time, and even got some cool looking "X" tags. Didn't buy anything, but entered to win a Mac so who knows...

OK, since Paul Boyum thinks I haven't posted in like 3 days, here's something. Of course when asked about lunch last Friday he said he couldn't go to lunch on Mondays, so why am I surprised? Anyways, comcast made me upset today. Apparently you can't order service when the existing owner has service until it's actually physically disconnected. Makes no sense since they're wasting at least the cost of a truck roll in almost every case, but whatever. At least I'm not rushing to move out of anyplace or something like that. I also decided to move my email off the exchange server and over to the open IMAP system today. The transitioning for new mail wasn't bad. Set up all my existing server-side rules in procmail and let it go. It's the migrating 71,290 messages between the servers that's gonna be a task for the email client to do when I'm away from the desk for the next few days... In the process of this whole thing I improved the routing since I can do server-side filtering at the source for my laptop's copy of my email. I also have all my rules server side, and wrote a little perl script that knows how to talk Maildir and can drop copies of messages that are filtered in my inbox as well, but marked read and deleted. Sounds totally useless, but very handy for mail clients that don't check for new messages in all folders (for quick checks and webmail stuff). Basically if the client runs a rule, it doesn't expunge so the original message is deleted and read in the inbox so you can see it existed and either read it without flagging the other as read or go look at the other copy. This just emulates on the server side, and they all go away even if I don't mess with them when my normal client expunges. Yesterday was Chipotle for lunch, and today was Great China, so this week is off to a pretty decent start there. Other stuff Tuesday was basically more mailman config. I sorta have the script to handle course lists, but need database access to do anything with that one. Played with procmail and how to route stuff and figure out what kind of lookup failures should result in what kind of messages... And chatting with people on IM much more than usual in the evenings/nights. Oh well, tomorrow will probably be a long day...

So I'm sitting here coding, and the cable modem looses block sync. Or effectively. It's like the headend just stopped talking to it anymore. No more DHCP lease, can't get a new one, and the modem can't sync even though there's enough activity to swamp a decent connection. Maybe that's it - enough people got hit with some virus that there's an effective DDOS against the system. Either way, I guess it's time to stop coding for the night, go to bed, and hope it's working in the morning. As for the coding I was doing, for some reason I decided that tonight would be a good night to write a discussion board. I basically have it together without the user management part (anonymous users only, although it keeps the namespace segmented for users later). After all the functionality is there maybe I'll consider aesthetics. As for what else happened today, I got to spend some time fixing the policies that were applied to a bunch of laptops that were supposedly leashed to the network, but really they're used off network so need the whole caching logins and profiles pieces and stuff like that. And JoeBuck decided to finally get his web site relating to koalas and "imminent puntification" started, so that's something to look forward to in the near future. If you can guess or remember the URL he was going to use, you can look at a funny temp page before he changes it. :) And comcast is still broken... Hopefully this will post sometime during the night and not have to wait until I get to work tomorrow...

The weekend was nice. Slept until sometime in the middle of the afternoon on Saturday, which was very needed. Watched To Live followed by Soylent Green. Both were interesting movies, if a little weird. Soylent Green got an unplanned intermission due to someone plugging in a hair dryer and tripping a circuit breaker. Imagine a room that's effectively light-tight with normally a decent amount of lights from not only room lights but also VFDs and LEDs. Then imagine that room without power - yea, it's very dark. So after resetting the breaker with enough delay to force a move of the hairdryer to a different bathroom, the ending was uneventful. After that I tried to sleep some more, which was interesting since I hadn't been up all that long so kept waking up and having to fall back asleep. Sunday was church, and not sleeping through Sunday School this week. After that it was attempt to control the Asian Beetles. After a few times vacuuming and cleaning up a dozen each time, I found and cleaned up a bunch in other rooms as well. Then I watched The Legend of Drunken Master. While dubbed to English rather than subtitled, it was still one of the funniest movies I've seen in a long time. I mean, with quotes like "What does it mean when there's a picture of a skull!" with the the reply being "Good Stuff!!!" and "If you have job, you wear the pants!", how can one go wrong? Then more cleaning up the beetles, involving removing the light fixture to clean up more this time. After cleaning up the ones inside the light (not many), it was good for a while but now I see 3 up there. Talk about annoying little critters...

So today started off a bit late, seeing as I somehow managed to confuse the off switch and the snooze button on my alarm. Willowgate for lunch, which was good of course. I still find it funny when to order you just say "yep" a few times and the whole process is about 15 seconds. When I left for lunch, I had around 120 messages in my Inbox. Not a whole lot, as it was sorta a slow day. I came back from lunch to "[Folder "INBOX" opened with 6,125 messages]". Oops. I managed to have one of the servers send my boss and I a few thousand more emails than expected, to the point evolution was having a bit of a problem dealing with all them (the exchange server gets a bit annoyed and puts weird delays when doing lots of moves). I went in and ended up removing 2100 messages from mail server queue, and 2700 from another, which was a bit nicer waiting until it delivered them all... Overall I'm guestimating I got around 8,000 emails today, which is about 4x the normal amount lately. And in the process learned that mailman's bounce detection doesn't respect the don't notify admins when you repeatedly bounce many thousands of messages into it... After work a bunch of people picked up KFC and came over to eat and watch Matrix Reloaded. Like the first one I liked it better the second time around. They like to hide little things in the movies you just don't pick up the first time. Especially since for movies like that part of the fun of the first time is going crazy with friends and hanging out at a theater for a movie starting at midnight when you're already lacking on sleep. Anyways, that was over early since Dave had to work at 10 and brooke had to make a phone call to the other side of the world. So I settled in for a bit of web browsing, which worked for a while, but then something on the Internet blew up. Paul Boyum and I decided that it's something big since we're both seeing the problem from different networks and it seems to be where the whole metro area connects up to the backbones. That's probably not a good thing... Hopefully after a half-day or so of sleeping it'll be working again. :)

Culvers for lunch since it was Ross' birthday. Then after work a bunch of people all went to the cheap seats to watch Finding Nemo. Very funny movie. After that was hanging out and cake and stuff. So basically party half the day... iTunes for Windows came out today. Preliminary running it under wine didn't result in much luck, but maybe I'll try on my machine with crossover. Anyways, I just got done cleaning since I'm having people over for Matrix Reloaded tomorrow, and am tired.

Apparently I forgot that Matrix Reloaded was released on DVD yesterday, but that meant a nice surprise seeing the DVD when I got home today. Watched the extras disc, which has cool stuff. You can tell in some places where there's rather obvious differences between stuff shot on film and stuff shot on video. Even the MTV Movie Awards spoof (yes, it made the disc) is obvious on composite shots when you watch it on a decent medium. Anyways, today was interesting. Tried to track down some crazy profile problem. The user was able to log in but not load the roaming profile, which was odd since permissions were right, but also the machine hadn't reported in to the logging system in 2 days so I'm starting to think it was rather messed up. Rebooted it for good measure though (make sure all the policies are applied properly), and we'll see what happens tomorrow morning. Lunch was Arby's, which seems to have become more popular. Today was a direct result of Mike J bringing coupons and massively campaigning, but we've gone more than normal otherwise too. Finally filled out some paperwork for the house I should have done like a week ago. Oops...

We'll start off by saying why FedEx rocks. That screenshot should pretty much speak for itself - something shipped ground yesterday evening arrives today and even with residential delivery to top it off. They always seem amazingly quick. Like stuff shipped from Malaysia arriving the next afternoon (don't remember how that was shipped, but it was cheap and happened multiple times). Anyways, that something was the package of electronic parts I ordered Sunday. I ended up pulling out some of them and having a little fun with the soldering iron. The goal was to get a VU meter built out of an LED 10 segment ar graph, a LM3916 IC, a resister, and some wire. Somehow even though I was typing half the time trying to figure out some perl craziness it even worked the first time. Now I just have all the rest to do and figure out a permanant way to power them. Work went well today, I probably caused well over 20,000 emails to travel around the mailing list server. I now have multiple forms of temporary archives for logging, spam detection, duplicate message detection (if someone sends the same message to multiple addresses for the same list, it'll only let one through), and a few other cool things. Plus we started talking about storage possibilities. When you start getting into massive amounts of user data and high availability there start to be some really cool things you can do. After work I hung out at the Help Desk for a bit, watching (and playing one level) of this thing called "flea circus". Weird game, but sorta interesting since it involves strategy and is a lot harder than it looks. Then it loops back to the beginning. And since I've been writing this, someone decided to start probing a few of the announcement email list addresses apparently trying to send a message about a soccer game to all the students at Bethel from a hotmail account. He probably wasn't expecting to get a nice email to his Bethel account from one of the sysadmins at 1am commenting about who to contact for existing lists and new email list procedures. Somehow I'm guessing I won't get a reply. :)

Semi-interesting day. Began with a bunch of people suddenly having problems reaching a bunch of machines, one of the servers confirmed to have issues, and then all the rest just start working fine a few minutes later. Who know if we'll ever track that one down. Then the console on the exchange server locked up really nicely. Couldn't get in at the machine or over the network, and couldn't restart the VNC services either. Ended up rebooting later in the evening, but that's a pain. It's the second time that box has done that in the last few weeks. In the afternoon I decided to test the new lists server a bit. The personalization features of mailman 2.1 are pretty cool. Then I decided to load test a bit and added 6000 email addresses to the test mailing list. Sent out a few tests of normal grouped vs personalized to test the load differences. There's a big difference, but it's reasonable either way. Then to test the bounces I changed the procmail recipe for the virtual domain where all those addresses were to bounce them. Luckily that worked well and mailman dealt with them and didn't pass them back to the -owner address. :) Then I laughed at Paul Boyum (yes, there's a reason the link is done that way :) for drawing some crazy stuff on the whiteboard. You'll have to ask him about that one... As for the house thing, since people seem to want pictures, here they are - Front, Back, Backyard, Kitchen, Upstairs and Downstairs.

Finally got the house stuff figured out, so I'm glad that's over. Maybe I'll post pictures one of these days. I thought I got a decent amount of sleep last night, but apparently not. I barely stayed awake even with caffeine in church today, so skipped Sunday School and took a nap for a couple hours. Better, but still not totally recovered. That getting up before noon yesterday messed me up... Then there were family birthdays, which were pretty decent, although I was barely staying awake. After that I surfed ebay for a bit and found a bunch of switches that are a great deal. Too bad I don't need that many ports in my house... Found some cool and inexpensive dimmer switches though. We'll see about them. Then was more fun looking for parts for another project. We'll see how this one turns out. Gotta love pulling out the soldering iron and building semi-useful stuff for fun. I only wish blue LEDs weren't so expensive - I settled for green, which are probably better for this anyways, but blue has more of a cool factor to it...