Things go boom - things that aren't supposed to go boom. OK, so it's Avalon upgrade weekend. The day's OK, miscellaneous stuff, a good lunch at Chipotle, and a meeting about accounts which wasn't bad. Then the joys of windows. Apparently the ATI AGP video card we had and Athlon chipsets don't agree at all. There's a patch, but in order to install it you need windows running, and yea... But then selecting files for restore takes a long time. Turns out that apparently the server is doing lots of account lookups on the unix side (not sure why - the program is running as root, and the files backed up have no relation to the unix permissions). Anyways, turns out this load is enough to slow down and eventually crash the NIS+ server. To give you an idea of the scale of how many requests, I couldn't get ICMP or ARP packets through the storm to the server for a while... But I noticed the problem when I didn't get email for 20 minutes. And I was able to localize the start of the total outage to within 3 minutes just by scanning the parts of my mail that aren't filtered to places I don't read. I think that means something like I get way too much email... Anyways, I gotta be back at work at 9:30 or so tomorrow morning, so it's time for me to go get some sleep...

So right from the beginning today starts with things not quite working right. Of course that's piled on top of I didn't work yesterday, so have way too much email to check and way too many Incidents waiting to be done. Then there was discussion about security, persistent sessions, and the proper way to implement user preferences. To top it all off the core router flipped for about 20 minutes, and I also got to migrate a directory structure from Maildir to Exchange... I did manage to sort through the pile of computers in my office to figure out which ones work. Turns out only one of the P90s was really dead, but there's another 16MB of RAM making machines not POST. Got that taken out and they're fine now. Too bad they're all P75s and P90s though. :( I didn't get much done in the way of prep for this weekend, so hopefully tomorrow I can just sit down and write scripts. Since this weekend is gonna be work, I decided tonight was a no-thinking night. I was gonna watch Animatrix, but decided against it. My copy of Dolby Labs' "We've Got the Whole World Listening" arrived so I watched all the Dolby Digital trailers, as well as behind the scenes on them and demos of stuff like dolby headphone. That was pretty cool. Then I sat down and started watching T2 Extreme. Apparently my DVD player is running too hot though right now, and it didn't like the second layer. I threw two fans blowing through the stack around it, but it's gonna be a while so I'll probably just finish up this weekend sometime. I'm not sure what I think of the whole multi segment thing, especially since they looked the same so far - I'll have to look into that. The quality is definitely very good. It was like film but without the flicker, at least until the MPEG2 decoder started getting a bit too hot... Maybe one of these days it'll force me to build a better equipment rack. Power amplifiers need to either go on top or in a different area - way too much heat...

I like days off - they're relaxing. I got up late morning, and debated with the lunch mailing list about where lunch was today - ended up being Subway. After lunch I wandered around, and spent a few hours hanging out between the PC Setup room, the Happy Lab, and the Help Desk. Then went home and spent more time pretty much doing nothing. I discovered when I made the iso for Dogma I dropped the mpeg2 files on there instead of the dvd fs structure. Of course it didn't complain about missing the TOC file either, I just noticed that the DVD didn't work right. Got that straightened out now, and watched that. It's sorta funny to see the edits in some places - like Jay and Silent Bob wanted desperatly to jump Bethany - right... I also discovered last night's recording was 7.2GB - files that big can be a slight bit of a pain when you have to remultiplex and split them out. There's too many crap music videos anyways, but I have a disc decently full of them now (or will in the morning)... I also discovered that my install of transcode now properly recognises xvid input files, so I can convert xvid format into DVD now too... I'm playing with that, but the mpeg encoder is going really slow - not sure what's causing that yet. Hopefully I got the flags right though and I'll have the right bitrate output and a usable mpeg2 file which I can just set the chapter breaks and burn. It looks like it'll be running for a few days - I like how I can just set the priority and let it go in the background without worrying about it at all. And I guess I'm bored and now writing about pointless stuff... Much Ado About Mousing...or Nutting...or who knows...

The day wasn't much different from yesterday, except there was a big watermelon feast in the afternoon. I ended up talking to people I hadn't talked to in a while at that. After work I spent more time on my IMAP server. I got a bit bored with it and decided to do something else after a while after implementing 4 commands or so. The async stuff with expunging is sorta annoying - the backend makes that a lot easier in my case though. When I decided I was sick of it enough to want to do something else it strangely enough coincided with when I got to the SEARCH command. Have you ever read through what the search command does? Guess how many special keywords and types of searches there are... Yea, so I watched Ferris Bueller's Day Off. Strangely appropriate since I'm not working tomorrow (although I'm not trying to avoid my boss or anything - I'm actually gonna show up there to go to lunch with friends anyways, but...). Then I got to video editing. A couple shows didn't get recorded right, and I realised I still had some 480x480 recordings saved - those are now gone to make way for higher resolution and also higher bitrate recordings. I recompiled the driver again to push the bitrate up higher yet. I'm apparently recording a 5 hour show right now (music videos I think - I'm not sure), so we'll have to wait until tomorrow to actually switch to the new module. Oh well, gotta get to bed if I want to get up for lunch tomorrow...

Pretty boring day. I didn't get to bed until way too late since I was reading Film-Tech. Of course then I didn't want to get up in the morning... Pretty usual day at work, miscellaneous restores and stuff like that. I finally decided to lock down the proxy server. People still try to hit it so we don't really want to turn it off, just not maintain it. The DNS is no big deal, but it was a sort of an active system on the proxy side (semi-dynamic list of allowed sites). Since there's no real use for it anymore as the transparent stuff has proved it's worth, I yanked out all those RewriteCond and RewriteRule lines and replaced them with a couple that just allow the single directory on the web server and redirect everything else there. That should be stable enough that it can just sit there untouched until we upgrade the server or something... I finally got sick of faculty complaining about their login scripts. They didn't do much except insert this .reg file which isn't really used anymore anyways. So I went through and modified all the accounts to point to a single login script which just maps a couple drives and moved a few thousand files out of the public space. Much simpler now... I also disabled the messenger service on the main lab machines, but I sorta forgot to tell the Help Desk about it. Oh well, I doubt there'll be any complaints, and then we'll probably go and turn it off domain-wide on all our desktop machines since we don't really have any legitimate need except maybe AV/status alerting on the servers (which can be excluded). I also figured out how to migrate active accounts with exchange boxes attached between domains. I can't believe I never had to do that before. I guess I did do a lot of stuff today. I did ditch the whole Apple thing though - didn't really appeal to me or Dave so we just grabbed our Jikki Jacks subs and hung out in my office with Junk. That's always good because it's a nice relaxing lunch. Apple released some cool looking stuff, but I guess nothing I care about too much yet. I may have to play a bit with Panther a bit for feature type stuff. I have this thing about that brushed metal though - can we have an interface that doesn't look like crap? I can't even count the number of people that absolutely despise the look of iTunes and Safari already... I think I've put in more than enough Apple-ranting in the last two days though. My iso is finished now anyways (some track stuff for my brother he wanted edited and thrown on DVD) - time to throw a disc in the burner and go to bed...

Nothing too interesting today. Talked for a bit with the guy running the video stuff at church as we sat up by there today. I brought the projector and piles of cables back downstairs today and hooked that up, and then watched a few hours of junk that had been on TV recently. Multitasked and did video editing at the same time (usually a mix between clipping out music videos and other clips out of whatever I was actually watching at the time too). The one box was remultiplexing video, playing full-motion video, and serving two different clips for editing. The laptop was pulling those two clips in and doing editing on them both, along with playing the finished clips to verify. I managed to lock up sawfish once (sshed in and killed it so I didn't loose what I was doing, but still rather annoying). I've never been able to get that kind of performance out of OS X (way too much latency), or have the machine keep working under Windows (I worked a bunch with XP Pro this weekend, and it had weird lags and stability problems where a program could almost lock the system). OS X looks pretty good and I wouldn't mind switching to it. I could probably eventually even get past the one button thing (I like middle clicking a lot though), but the latency and general system response especially when doing even light multitasking is practically unusable (whenever I topped 3-4 programs actually trying to use the system at once). Oh well. For "testing the system" after reassembly (more because I just wanted something high quality and interesting) I watched Fight Club. That's a really odd movie - so good at brainwashing others he gets himself and doesn't even know it...

Didn't get to do any real techie stuff today. :( Got up at about 11 this morning, as I had to figure out how and mount my projector to the ceiling in the living room and run VGA to it for my sister's grad party at 2. That was actually sorta fun. Then there was the party, which was supposed to go 2-7. Got to see lots of people I hadn't seen in a while, but also answered lots of "so what are you doing now?" questions for people who don't understand what servers are and in some cases even what information technology is... That can get interesting. Of course parties around here never end on time either. Sometime around 10 we decided that we had all seen the slide show of my sister enough and broke out music video DVDs. We went through a nice stack of them and the last people left sometime around 1am. Of course, one guy even showed up at 12:40am... At least those people had no intention of asking me what I was doing for work and stuff, as long as I kept a steady stream of DVDs running through the player... That's more my type of party...

Pretty usual day at work, basically a bunch of smaller things, but I guess it kept me occupied. Lunch was Eddington's which is always good. Went home, and started reading RFC3501. Yes, that's the RFC for IMAP. I'm now most of the way through the Authenticated state commands and maybe will get to the rest tomorrow. After this part is complete I'll start working on the rest. The backend design is similar to exchange in the single-instance message store, except with a different purpose. In this setup the server will have something very similar to Ximian Evolution's vfolders which are virtual folders based on different attributes of the message, and can be set up in the same way as any other filters. Except if the server supports them I can use any client (Evolution is really nice, but it's nice to be able to use other ones - like pine is really nice in many cases). The other cool thing is Evolution's filtering isn't really top notch, and neither are most other clients (Outlook on exchange does decent, as does procmail, but they're both server side). As I designed the system and therefore have direct access to the data rather than dealing through IMAP or some other system, the vfolders and filters can both be implemented by the maildrop and neither are limited to preset rules - lots of regular expressions... I like regular expressions... :) Anyways, at about 1am I decided to take a break, cooled off the DVD player to operating temperature, and dropped in Die Another Day. I hadn't seen it before, and have to say it's a pretty decent movie. Some effects were pretty bad, while others were quite decent. The audio mix is very nice in places, such as during the swordfight the blades slicing through the air as well as hitting each other and other objects make smooth transitions around behind you. As the blade swings right over the camera and the sound moves from front left and moving behind you around to front right at a volume lound enough to feel it... Yea, I like those kind of movies... To top the day off my package of 200 DVD-Rs arrived today, so I get to start working on stuff for the long car trip known as vacation... I just wish I didn't have to get up early tomorrow - it's my sister's grad party, so there's getting ready and then tons of people coming over. I have a feeling I'll be consuming lots of coffee and dew...

Had a meeting today. Yea, doesn't sound like fun, but it was server team stuff and nobody outside the team was there, so it was pretty cool. We decided to go for all the stuff this summer, including resetting all student profiles. Should be interesting, and help get rid of a lot of complaints. Also discovered that apparently a bunch of upperclassmen have been telling incomming freshmen they can see their schedules online. Of course that's BS since they won't get access to the online system until August, and most of their classes haven't even been assigned yet - they don't think that maybe only current students have already registered... The work day finished up with Ross stopping by, and then we went out to dinner with Neil. Haven't seen either of them in a long time, so it was good to catch up. Of course when I got home there was cleaning and apparently my room got ripped apart a bit, but oh well...

Spent time in active directory and with group policies - changed more stuff there to lock down the lab machines a bit better. Hopefully all this will mean a much more stable and efficient lab environment at Bethel next year. Got a meeting tomorrow morning about other stuff related to that - should be interesting. My sister's new laptop arrived today, so spent most of the evening with WinXP Pro. It was rather annoying to have so many critical updates right out of the box, and that IBM seemed to have not installed all the latest drivers but they were on the drive waiting to be installed, but oh well. NIS+ also died again tonight due to heat (that server room has been about 14-16 degrees over what the thermostat is set for lately - they're not sure why yet), but the boss is back as of today, so he took care of that. Moved the machine to another server room so it can stay a bit cooler until they figure out what's been going on with that one as well...