So I wake up and I have pages about the library's web site and FTP server being down. No big deal, since usually that just means it's slow and will die in a day or so if I don't restart IIS, but sometimes it just comes back (it's some ASP they have somewhere but it doesn't happen enough to be worth tracking down). After church I start looking into it more and it turns out that IIS is totally shut off, and VNC is just closing sockets right away. I manage to restart VNC remotely and then get in, and it looks semi-normal except that IIS is off. It does seem a bit sluggish though, but I attribute it to the fact it's been up way too long (it had been logged in since Feb 7). Hit reboot, and wonder why 20 minutes later I still can't get an ARP response. Uh oh. :( Turns out one of the drives went flaky and decided rather than just die like a normal bad drive it wanted to spew enough junk on the SCSI bus that the controller got enough errors to flag all the drives as bad. And I don't care what kind of RAID you run - if the controller thinks every drive is bad, it's not gonna work right... So since this WebBIOS thing apparently doesn't work if you can't load the OS (not sure how that's supposed to work for recovery), I manage to find out that it needs a DOS utility, and am able to flag the remaining two drives as good again. Oh, did I mention that because it was so screwy I had to start unplugging one drive at a time and power up the machine to see which one disconnected would actually let me scan the rest of the bus? Yea... It's up and running now, but I'm not happy with the whole situation. Looks like we're replacing that RAID controller (American Megatrends MegaRAID) with a better one sometime (probably Adaptec 2100S). The whole thing reminds me of what happened with Avalon last summer... Oh yea, I did manage to get homework done too, and surprised flabre with a checkmate just when he though he was about to get me... I forgot how much fun chess can be sometimes (especially when it's your homework assignment)...

Joe and I spent way too much time on AI homework, which has been nothing but a headache. We have a good method for solving it which while it works decently, is something that doesn't program into MARE well... Oh well. I spent most of the day doing nothing, and watched The Matrix, so it wasn't all a loss. If you're looking to invest money right now, here's an analysis of how some investments and their returns...

Well, class today was the usual. Lab went really quick, which was good. I ended up spending a significant portion of the day working on AI homework, which was a bit of a pain. It's automated reasoning, and we're working on demodulators, although it'd be nice to know how the code which handles the demodulators worked. We didn't really get many instructions other than it runs them repeatedly and the basic format. It'd be nice to take a look at the code for the interpreter, as many good rules for demodulating can form loops if executed in certain orders, but work great in others. While it finds every possible output without loops now, I unfortunately can't tell how stable that would if someone started poking... Oh well, at least the rest of the class seemed to be in the same boat, and we got our quiz pushed back to Thursday...

Actually got some stuff done today. I have a computer sending itself email every few minutes, and actually checking it's box and reading the message, which sounds really goofy but has a point. The sending checks that both email frontend servers are up, and the checking part makes sure that all the internal routing is working along with authentication and IMAP, and it all happens in a timely manner. Then I spent a few hours with my group for Networking working on our homework assignment. I actually decided to spend some time on physics, so actually researched and calculated the pressure that an elephant vs a woman wearing high heels would put on the floor. Crazy part is that one half a question is about half of my assignment by size. Oh well, should be interesting reading for the TA.

Pretty usual day with classes and work. I didn't get finished with homework during class, partially because I messed up and got big white spots from the flash in some pictures, and partially because any problem that required even remembering stuff like that water weights 9800N/m³ and using it to calculate the pressure on the bottom of a dam was deemed too much thinking for class time... I did end up doing it this evening though. Reprinted AI without a typo this time and also got asked about the homework by so many people I stopped keeping track. I finally got around to putting IMP on webmail (DNS may not have propogated everywhere yet), which is a lot better than the old cyclonic mailer thing. Now I just need to get an IMAP server up and running on the new server and migrate the mail over to it... Drew also loaned me Snatch which I haven't seen, so I'll probably end up watching that sometime this weekend when it won't cut into sleep time.