Had to get up early enough to go to that football game today. It was a trip down there, and then it was raining for the whole game. Luckily I brought my headphones and mp3 player along so listened to music the whole time, while trying to avoid getting water dumped on me from umbrellas. Bethel beat St. Olaf, which was good. My brother got to play for a while, so I ended up running the video camera a bit too. After that it was down to Rochester to visit grandpa in the hospital after surgery. He's doing better so that's good, although it'll be nice when he's up and feeling better. Then it was a long and somewhat out of the way trip home looping over to Bethel before going home, but sometimes it's nice to just do nothing. Plus I got to cetch up on magazines a bit that I had only skimmed over before. A bit of chatting with friends and the day is over. A day with a lot of doing nothing... Sorta good, but it was in the car and sitting in the rain rather than just relaxing.

Well, got the list server basically up today. That's a pretty interesting project. Then this afternoon Dave and I managed to take down half of one of the server rooms. Of course we also hit a couple core servers (like NFS and SSO) that effectively made all the ones that weren't down act like they were for a while. Gotta love it when the breaker gets so hot it won't reset until you let it cool for a few minutes - oops. Guess it's time to get more circuits and redistribute load some more. The house stuff is looking better, and hopefully almost done. I'll be glad to get the iffy parts of that behind me. Tomorrow it looks like I'm stuck going to a football game, so we'll see how that goes.

Yea, it's been a few days... Mainly because nothing too exciting has come up. All the students seem to have been complaining about tests and homework (there have been quite a few), but now's a break for them which is good. Work's been pretty routine. Today I got to learn a lot about procmail and stuff. Tomorrow it looks like I get to load the non-RPM version of mailman since the RPM one has some issues. The list server looks like it's gonna go pretty smooth though. Right now I have it not handleing the list server domain normally, but treating it as an external domain it relays for but rather than passing it off through SMTP it dumps it into a procmail recipe. Probably doesn't make sense if you're not a geek, but I'm starting to become a much bigger fan of procmail - very nice interface and really powerful. It's really easy to do crazy things like run your email through perl scripts... House inspection was yesterday, and that's being worked on. Hopefully that'll all be figured out soon... It'd be nice to have it set. I'm was looking forward to doing pretty much nothing this weekend, but now it sounds like I won't have much free time. I guess that's how things go...

Not too interesting of a Monday. Spent the morning getting a server working. The state of the installed software was really weird, and didn't act right. Finally got that working to a stage where I could set up accounts and that's done now. Then started dealing with profile issues. Cached profiles and over quota accounts don't mix well. Managed to get all the lab machines removing all cached profiles on boot, and then managed to get them to reboot automatically at 2am. Hopefully that'll keep everything more stable long term...

Watched The War Wagon. I don't normally like westerns, but this one was good. Maybe it was because it didn't just involve gunfights, but actual strategy and blowing stuff up. And they didn't make things obvious right from the beginning like most movies end up doing...

Friday started off a bit crazy. Boss was gone Thursday, so woke up Friday to a flood of email catching up on stuff. Fun topic of discussion for the day is the Seminary in San Diego and how to best deal with them from a fileserver/domain standpoint. The options ranged from a single independent domain to 5 virtual machines running on a linux box. Hey, it's an option... :) The sellers for the one house are still crazy, but I think it's for the better. Friday afternoon I went and looked at the other house again, and ended up making an offer on it. Got something worked out the seller would accept, and as of Sunday all the paperwork is signed. So assuming inspection goes well closing is the end of the month. I guess I have to start putting things together and make sure I have everything I need for my own place soon. Luckily going from basically a room to a house shouldn't be too much work for packing. Gotta do stuff like figure out what to do for internet access though... Saturday I sorta caught up on sleep. Watched Phone Booth which while probably not as bad as everyone says, seemed a lot longer than it really is. They didn't keep it interesting enough. Oh well. Maybe today's picks will be more interesting...

Not too interesting of a day. Looked at a couple houses, not sure what to think of the sellers on one but the other one looks good. Went to Culver's for lunch and they lost my order, but was signing paperwork so it wasn't a big inconvenience. Ended up getting a free lunch next time though, which is cool. Poked with the authentication server since there were weird delays and other people started commenting too. Ended up poking through for a while and eventually converted some of the scripts to mod_perl. Tiny little scripts are suddenly causing apache processes to chew 35-60MB though, but luckily even with mod_perl the bloat is sticking with the children and not the parent. Get around that issue by having them exit after 5 requests, and make up for the needing to respawn children by modifying the priority of the parent. The box isn't anywhere close to CPU bound in a realistic sense and it was just the swapping insane processes in and out that was killing it, so this is helping. We'll see what happens long term though. The evening was nice and relaxing - sometimes it's best to just sit and do nothing for a while.

Well, dropped in a couple 2 line batch files and a single table in a database and a tiny little cgi and within a few minutes started getting nice logs on every domain machine login/logout/reboot. It's nice to know that policies go into effect that quick, but I'm starting to think maybe I need to watch the load on the domain controllers for that domain. The good part is this new logging provides a much better way to keep track and analyze the data, and doesn't seem to have any noticable impact on the client machines. Power outages are never fun, especially when switches loose their VLAN info and it takes longer for them to reconfigure than for things to reboot and ask DHCP for IPs. Students having to reregister is annoying, but then when you figure out 12 hours later why people are complaining about the printers not working... SCSI vs IDE can be a big difference. If you set up RH9 for IDE it's easier to switch the destination to IDE rather than convert the image. Yea, it's easy enough to switch, but getting it to boot without assistance apparently requires something else since even an initrd with the right modules works long enough to try and remount rw and then says the disk doesn't exist... After work watched There's Something About Mary. Another one of those if you haven't seen it, don't bother... Rather predictable, and while it has funny parts, it doesn't live up to a good followup to Dumb & Dumber.

Monday during the day wasn't too interesting, the usual stuff... Near the end of the day I discovered the winexit.scr screensaver though, which is solution to a lot of our lab machine problems. Basically it's a screensaver that when it pops up a box, counts down and logs off the user. It's a bit of a hastle to install since it requires registry permissions hacks, but can be done through a domain policy and once it's in seems to work quite well. The trick was getting it working. After the normal end of work time there was dinner and then most of the night was spent trying to get it working while also helping brooke debug her program. I finally got it done around 1 and watched the entire lab reboot near simultaneously. It's a cool effect especially when the lights are off and all the patterns are moving on all the monitors, but by that time everyone had ditched an hour and a half previous so nobody else got to see it. No complaints for a day so now it's much more widespread, and we'll see what happens. If it works how it should that will solve both the security issue and the user annoyance issue at the same time. Tuesday was another pretty routine day. I cleaned up a bit of junk from the previous night, and tweaked a few things. I also ended up getting the proper 3ware drivers installed on a machine, and proceded to load test the box a bit. Just CPU and memory for now, but I got the load average to jump over 1000 for a bit so I think it's safe to say those are working. Probably end up with disk tests tomorrow. This box is far more stable than the last one already though. C1 for lunch, which was another good day with excellent service. I have a feeling we'll start visiting there more often again, which is both good and bad...

Got up as usual this morning, which was easier than the last few weeks since I actually got a decent amount of sleep this weekend. Then I even actually went to Sunday School, which was good since I hadn't done that since it started up this fall. After church was driving around time for a bit since my sister left some book at school. My dad was driving and having fun already so I occupied myself with the emergency brake and changing gears when he wasn't paying attention. The brake makes a loud dinging noise along with the light to warn you right before it actually engages when you're moving and you pull it though, which can be both more and less fun... Did nothing for most of the afternoon, just poked around through web logs. Followed some interesting referers. I've decided that Paul Boyum checks his logs way too often though. :) Then I watched The Trial - the older Orson Welles one. While not having the entertainment of modern movies, it is one of those ones you just can't stop watching. A really good reflection on how crazy the world could be even way back when the movie was made and even when the book was written. Just because people are the authorities can you trust them? I guess Orson Welles was probably a good one to make a movie out of the book. I'm sorta curious how the newer remake of it is, but I'm guessing it'd just be a disappointment (plus it appears to be harder to find). Anyways, also got around to updating the about me page on my site, which was way out of date. I did end up buying more movies too, and they arrived yesterday, so maybe I'll have more movie commentaries this week even though I have all 3 of my netflix ones to send back tomorrow...