I got my new sliding server rack shelf/drawer all painted and installed. It is pictured here with 2 new servers atop it:



Also today I moved everything over to the much bigger, nicer and less broken KVM switch I had brought back from my old system at my parents' house. It is really nice being able to push a button to see the screen on any server again, LOL.

In other server work I managed to get VEG up and running, which is to be a proxy server for all my utility machines (Backup, MySQL, etc) that I don't have enough public IPs for but need to be separate machines. When I first opened my DSL line with Century Tel they had no idea what to do with a person who wanted multiple static IPs and I was lucky to get the 5 I did. So our personal machines, the webservers, and the utility machines are all actually behind a proxy server apiece. VEG was the last one that needed to be set up so now the "face" of the new network is complete. Woot!



The server room accumulated a new mascot over this last Christmas season: this chilly little peguin. As evidenced by the Slackware symbol on the machine behind him, most of my stuff is running Linux. LOL

Today I was working in the server room but it sort of ended up being a woodshop project, hehe. I have these half height rolling racks I got insanely cheaply by buying someone's huge pile of cubix servers and related crap. You can see some of the servers in the left hand rack. I play with them sometimes to learn about beowulfing though they are a very low priority.



As you can see I haven't quite managed to migrate completely over to rack-mount equipment yet, so I have several machines that are non rackmountable. There are even more now that I brought my old system back from Minneapolis, and I need to implement a lot of those machines here since that was my primary system so it's all the best gear.



The racks have these great sliding rails that allow the servers to be pulled in and out of the rack for maintenance without disconnecting them. The picture above shows a pair of the rails pulled out like drawers.



Here's the hardware that fits on the individual servers and snaps into the drawer rails for easy mounting. My project today was to build a shelf to hold 2 free standing machines on one of these set of rails. Real shelves for racks are insanely expensive.



I started out by fastening 2 of the rails to a pair of 2x4's. Then I cut two more 2x4's to bridge the gap between the rails. I am not real good with conceptual measuring when it comes to wood; something always goes wrong. So what I did was slide the pair of 2x4's right into the rack on the rails, where they will ultimately go, and then I measured between them with a tape measure. LOL... fool proof ;-)



Then I made a top out of plywood, screwed on with countersunk drywall screws. If you think this shelf looks heavy you should feel the racks! Notice I have the rails screwed on with only 2 screws apiece. That is because I intend to remove them to paint it. They're just set in place for test purposes right now.



Underneath I put in diagonal screws to hold the corners together. I learned this technique of diagonal screwing from building porch railings for Habitat for Humanity houses in Colorado. 



One more test: I popped the shelf into the rails and made sure it works both as a drawer and as a shelf.



Here it is with the countersink holes filled and drying overnight. Next steps will be sanding, primering and then painting it with a heavy duty workbench paint, dark gray in color. Hurray!

This morning around 7:30AM I was awakened by a slow, rhythmic 60Hz pulsing noise accompanied by repeated recharge bloops of my cell phone beside the bed. It turns out our power was coming on and off over and over again. After a few of those we lost power completely. Not the cleanest power outage I've ever experienced! I called Xcel Energy and a computer (who told me its name was Mary! I never had a telephone computer introduce itself before) told me power would be restored within 4 hours. It actually took under an hour.

Punch list for items to fix:

1. The UPS in my office lost it completely during this outage and now needs refurbishment/replacement or at the very least, replacement batteries. It doesn't even pass its start up test now.

2. The UPS in the server room doesn't shift into warning beep mode before shutting down due to run down batteries. It went straight from "I've got lots of battery left" beeps to off. Needless to say the servers had a few sharp words with me after that. On the good side, WTF duly informed me via email that it needed one of its apps manually restarted, which was my first test implementation of a homebrewed notification system. Win!

3. Still on list of things to do is put in a panel to be able to hook up the generator to house electrical. I probably would have done it manually using an extension cord if the power had stayed off longer, but that is definitely less cool.

I get the idea my computer is trying to tell me something... my mouse was nowhere near this plaintive little message.

Last night and today I made good progress on webserver stuff. I got all the content transfered from Re and sorted out into the appropriate directories. I got all the users' FTP accounts configured and permissions set for the FTP server and for all the websites directories. And last night I switched all the DNS information for those sites to point at LMAO now. Then today I tested that all domains now come up in a browser on the new server, and I put in a lot of redirects for things that were going to be in different places (and tested a bunch that had already been on Garlen before and needed to be tweaked a bit).

Still to do on LMAO: get FastCGI and PHP running, and test that at least one CGI script on each sites will run. Test the individual FTP logins and make sure they work and I got their permissions right. Install log-viewing tools, PayPal access for easy payment (hehe, hey some people DO wanna pay) and custom spam filtering for each user.


I mowed another 1/3 of the yard today. As the picture above illustrates, the leaves are falling fast and furious. The leaf bag on the lawnmower fills up in about 1 row of mowing, meaning there is a lot of emptying involved. Luckily the bag is easy to remove and put back on, and quite light enough to carry across the yard when full. I like to bring the wheelbarrow when I am on the front side of the house, because it will hold 3 bagloads and the full bag on top. Here's all the leaves I have accumulated so far:



The compost bins are all full now, so I'll have to build the other 2 hoop bins I guess. For the time being the extra leaves go in a heap nearby:



Sorry, I once again worked until dusk, and apparently the camera is not as good at seeing in the dark as I am :-p That is why all these pictures have black backgrounds even when they've been Equalized fairly brutally.

One of my wooden compost bins had been inaccessible due to the fact that two avocado trees "volunteered" to grow in it and I didn't want to harm them. Well, it is now getting so cold only the heat of the decomposition below them is keeping them alive, and I needed the space so it was time to bring them in. Two more to add to my avocado grove!!



I try to do a little something extra each day besides just mowing so I don't go nuts. Yesterday and today it's been trimming. The front bushes in the yard are very shaggy. They already were when we moved in and I didn't dare mess with them last year. It's getting so out of hand now though I really had to give it a shot. I feel like I am a bonsai artist, trying to find the best place to snip for maximum beauty.



The above is fairly typical of the untouched portions. Long branches shoot off every which way, and tiny nubs of future growth are clustered down lower, leaving room for the getaways to run. The overall effect was kind of cool up to a point. That point was reached this year alas.



The above is a closeup of one part I worked on. I got the face mostly done and took the worst of the top. It still needs more but this is where I was as of tonight. And:



That's a wider view showing the trimmed front with the still-shaggy top. I think it looks nice! Of course the front was a lot easier than the top will be. Hehe.

This morning I worked diligently on the weather page and managed to get the webcam image a lot better. I moved the camera up to the top window so it wouldn't be looking through the screen, and adjusted the balances. It still needs something though. I think it is focusing too close. Maybe that is what the dial on top is for. I was afraid to experiment for fear of messing up my excellent (and totally accidental) framing of some sky and trees which I had taped the camera to the sill to retain. Of course, now it's the middle of the night and the image is black again. I need to remember to post one here tomorrow mid-day.

I decided the weather software is way too much of a kludge job to use for generating a full web page. So what I will do is program it up to send just the different images, then write a regular web page to use them all. That will be a pain too but at least it will look exactly how I want! For now I put pretty much every possible choice of dial and chart up there so I could see what all the choices are. It's a bit overwhelming as it is, but some of them are really interesting. The wind direction scatter chart is fun and so is the one that shows wind speeds over X amount of hours. That could be used to design a wind turbine for that spot.

Well, I'm off to bed... enjoy! :)

Today I made excellent progress on the webserver front, getting the content of both Re and Garlen transfered over from the old system to the new. I asked my mother to go ahead and shut down garlen, and will probably do the same for re tomorrow. I still need to do a bunch of little tests and adjustments on all the websites in their new locations though.

I am thinking I will just let Newar and Narvoon run as-is until I go to Minneapolis, then bring them back and change their names here. They still need to get re-done, but I'm not sure that it has to be before the trip at this point.

That means my next task before I can go is to clean out the storage locker and get all the computer-recycling loaded into the truck to bring down to St. Paul. That will probably take a few days by itself. I'm still waiting for the components of my brother's birthday present to trickle in sluggishly as well. (Oh dear... now that is an image.)

The weather web page software is really clumsy and hard to use, with about a million conflicting features that affect one another, so it will probably be a while until I have it the way I want it. However, you can see a primitive start by clicking here. This software is also the source of a weather "gizmo" I can include at the bottom of each of my posts to show my weather at the time... fun ;-) Here's the first one now; I will probably change the color and so forth for future ones. There is a weather cam too which I have to figure out how to get onto the same page as the rest of the weather.



Today I mowed much of the lawn, go me!



I also planted some bulbs in the small round garden at the base of a carriage-light that is on our front lawn. I had been transplanting indoor geraniums there each summer but I am trying to phase in as many perennials as possible. They are "rock star" irises which should come out burgundy with yellow, and will hopefully bloom twice!



I had to smile when I took the packing slip out of the box and realized from the address on it that Dutch Gardens where I bought the bulbs is part of (or at least very near to) the Intervale cooperative farming effort in Vermont, which McKibben talked about in Chapter 2 in his book. It's on Intervale Road in VT lol!  Here's their photo of the iris on their site:



And here's the link to Dutch Gardens' Rock Star Reblooming German Iris page if you want to see if they still have any in stock.

I brought inside the dug-up Geraniums and took down the erstwhile hanging plant from the porch (well, it was still hanging, but was an erstwhile plant) and hung the bamboo wind chime there instead. I got the chime when visiting my Spouse in Honolulu last year. It is shaped like a turtle and has pleasant low notes. It's looking a bit weathered after its year outside. (It was hanging over by the garage for summer.)

(waves)

For the past few days I've been working on various projects.

One of the Compaq Proliants is now partially set up as lmao.kfap.net, the PhP and MySQL enabled Apache webserver. LMAO is a nice single-processor PIII with a raid array. Unfortunately, although stuff works well enough to be used for now I am not satisfied with the raid array's setup and I think that machine will need to be redone completely. I think it will be fine barring any emergencies, and I can re-do it once the other system has been shut down and I've gotten to the other higher priority issues. In addition to PhP, Perl and C this machine will also allow Ruby and Python scripting. Fun!

Once LMAO is ready for action I will be transferring some of the existing client and personal sites from the old network (where they are spread out on 3-4 different machines) to there. Then I will get started on the other webserver that will have the Java and Tcl capabilities as well as high-speed CGI.

I got the Webcam working on ORLY. It is supposed to be mounted in the window of the server room to look up at the sky for weather reporting. However it also was instantly and automatically integrated into the Skype internet telephone capabilities of that machine as well. Surprise!! One of my odd quirks if you will, is that I do not trust webcams. I treat them like loaded guns. I don't point them at myself even when they are not powered up. So the camera is currently pointed at some stuffed animals and a blank wall. Snicker.

I also got Weather Display installed, which is a 3rd party weather reporting software package that I am going to try out instead of the WeatherLink II software sold by my equipment's manufacturer. As soon as I have a webserver running here so that I can start it auto-posting weather web pages for Ashland, I'll supply the URL here. There'll be a little picture from the weather cam integrated into the site too. I thought it would be funny to post it at the bottom of each entry here too if I can figure out how. Just basic "my weather" with a tiny picture of the sky.

I had my 2nd meeting of the study group for "Deep Economy" by Bill McKibben today. By now I have read the introduction and chapters 1 and 2. It's interesting that Chapters 1 and 2 are so different they could almost have been written by 2 different people.

I really did not like chapter 1 at all, but I was not required to read that one technically, had only been told to skim it. If I had to quantify what I didn't like about it is, it did not have good citations and had a visible bias in areas I knew enough about to realize what was going on. For example, it claimed that all the economic (dot.com) boom in the 90's did was increase misery all around, not make people happier. I beg to differ! I was there for the 90's and we were very happy indeed while the going was still good. Not only that but I distinctly remember that crime, especially violent crime, statistics shot way down during that time. So while I don't disagree with his basic points, I don't like having my intelligence insulted either.

Additionally it was just a bit heavy-handed overall. I felt a bit defensive even though the people it was talking about didn't really include me. I think what felt like "accusatory" to me was actually simple clumsiness and overdoing the message a bit. I've never been a big fan of the point being hammered home again and again and again and again, as at least one person near and dear to me can attest to.

However, Chapter 2 was a refreshing surprise. While Chapter 1 had been focused on the problems of today and the roots of their beginnings, Chapter 2 was about Local Foods, the concept, examples, and the benefits. Very nice! Citations were thorough and most times I thought "wait a minute..." an explanation arrived not long after. Excellent work and it makes me wonder if the 2 parts of the book were either written by 2 different people, or if the editors requested Chapter 1 cobbled on to give the book a beginning, or what.

For the meeting itself we discussed Chapter 2 and then did some brainstorming on what-all would be required to do the local food thing for a given locality, all the different angles and ideas for implementation. One thing that was kind of odd about this part was the other 2 guys at the meeting were both students and transient to the Ashland area. So every time I'd say something that was from the perspective of someone thinking in terms of implementing it right HERE, they would give me an odd look like... well it wouldn't be HERE. LOL

I will post the final drawing from the whiteboard when I can figure out how to transfer it off my cell phone to my art machine.

I will report on the later chapters as I can get to them, and subsequent meetings. I can't make it to next week's as I will be going to a Candidate Forum in town here which is, alas, at exactly the same time on the other side of town. But there should be at least 2 more meetings after that.

P.S. I almost forgot to mention that on my way to the meeting on college campus, I passed a house that had unfortunately placed their McCain/Palin campaign sign right next to a Slow Children at Play sign. I must go back today with my camera! :D

Hello!

Yesterday I tried the manly art (hehe) of Fishing for the first time. Although I didn't catch anything it was quite fun. I knew that the sport fish were likely to be up large deep rivers or at river mouths at this time of year, but I decided not to stress out too much about success/failure my first time and go somewhere easy just to test out my skillz. So I headed down to the marina here in town and asked the fellow working there where he recommended I try and he suggested the end of the harbor wall where it was easy to fish both inside and outside the wall. He said a few people had caught fish there in the past couple weeks so it wasn't completely insane, but I still knew it wasn't the ideal setting.

I spent a couple hours practicing casting into and against the wind, with and without different size weights, and learning what the spinner and spoon do in the water. I could clearly see what was baitfish-like about each one, if used properly but it will definitely take practice to do it well at a distance (IOW when I can't see what I am doing). I got the gut level feeling that I did not have the right color/pattern of either type for the conditions. Now I have something specific to shop for, that will be a lot more fun than standing there like a dope and finally resorting to getting an "assortment".

I did actually get one bite that I was not able to bring in. It felt very light and looked smallish (about a foot and a half long and dull gray). I only caught a glimpse of it as it broke the surface and flapped as fast as a sparrow's wing in the instant before it got loose and vanished. The whole thing happened so fast I am still not sure what I did wrong. I don't think it was hooked very hard. Maybe I should have done something to make the hook go in farther before I tried reeling it in. The other possibility since it was such a small fish is, maybe it had just bit down on the body of the spoon, then let go when it put up a fight. LOL

My goal was to catch 1 fish before winter as a proof-of-concept, so we'll see if I get another chance before it gets too cold to be fun.

While I was in the port area I saw a really cool looking, but tiny 2-masted schooner come in to refuel its inboard. It had no sails up and was being manned by a single old guy who looked like he really knew what he was doing. Its name was the Pirate's Witch but I was not able to find out more about it on the web. It looked like one of those deals where someone got a modern yacht custom built as a mini schooner. Neato!

On the server front, all actual email operations have been turned over to WTF and OMG, and the old system has no email responsibilities anymore. I forwarded all left over email that people hadn't picked up to the new server so that's done. I still have about a day left of adding capabilities to the new servers, and then tomorrow I will start work on the new webservers. Since it is going to be a while before I get to Minneapolis and I want the network there shut down ASAP, I have decided to reassign the 2 Compaq Proliants I have here as the new webservers. My Proliant administration CDs arrived in the mail (gotta love eBay!) so I can get to work on that tomorrow. Later when the old dead system's machines come back here, 2 of those can be the replacement OMG and WTF.

The new webservers will have differing capabilities. One will be PhP enabled and the other will be fast CGI. Each will have a mix of available languages in addition to Perl and C. Java, Python, maybe Tcl. But they probably won't both have all the choices. I hope the Java environment is more stable now than it was when I first ran one back in 1998.

The Chequamegon CSA share I picked up yesterday was quite the bonus crop. We had not received one the week before so this was kind of a double one as well as being the last summer share of the year. There were a huge pumpkin and a huge squash which were loose. Then inside the box there were green peppers, medium-hot peppers, jalapeños, tomatoes, a big bag of apples and pears, fresh big yellow onions with the dirt still on(!), cilantro and parsley, eggplants, a few handfuls of herbs, a head of leaf lettuce, about 10 medium size beets with the greens on, a bag of carrots, etc. etc.

I am going to be busy preserving this week haha.

That title got your attention didn't it? ;-) Note: This is going to be another of those posts where I add the pictures in later, so be sure to check back.

OK! I feel like I am coming into the homestretch on the DNS/NTP/Mailserver change over.

Mail:
The receiving mailserver, WTF, is now up and running and receiving mail. I don't have the per-user custom spam blocking fully implemented yet but I did all the research, and got it partially done last night. Spam mail is still trickling in to the old mailservers so I will need to put in some forwarding aliases to prevent any more from arriving. I suspect some of these spam spewing zombie machines have caches of mailserver IPs they use regardless of real-world configurations. Some of these undeliverable spams have been bouncing off the same non-existent junct.net recipients daily since I registered the domain 7+ years ago. Why shouldn't they cling to bad MX IPs with the same tenacity? The other things I still need to do are to set up a choice for SSL-encrypted POP3 and also SSL-encryption for outgoing mail that is being relayed through non STARTTLS capable servers. Fun stuff!

DNS:
All domains are switched over to using WTF and OMG exclusively and the old name-servers back in Minneapolis have been physically powered down. There are still a couple of clients domains that I don't have control over that never got switched over, who will just have to play catchup I guess. Until then those websites will be unreachable. This is why people are supposed to put me as their Technical Contact when they register the domain... so I could reach in and change the DNS by myself. Ohwell.

NTP:
WTF is also the master NTP (internet time) server for the new network and that is running well and OMG is synced to it.

----

Now that everybody who is a non-techie is completely catatonic, I'll talk about the rest of my life ;-)

I haven't been doing a whole lot besides working hard on getting this server stuff switched over. Luckily as I say I think I'm in the homestretch there. The rest is all relatively non deadline oriented.

The weather has been really wacky here lately. It's fall so of course there are beautiful colors. The colors are somewhere between peak and spent I'd say. Today is quite cold but the other night we had a freaky warm night. It had been coldish all day (50's) then suddenly heated to 67 degrees outside around midnight. I walked out into a steamy blast of heat... very weird. Haha. I really need to get the weather software running on ORLY so you guys can see the weather here, both data wise and the weather-cam. That is next on my list finishing this mail/dns then getting a basic LAMP (Linux, Apache webserver, MySQL database and PhP-capable) webserver running for the new network.

Our cat Daisy was incredibly hyper this morning. So much so that the other animals, even the dog, were standing around watching in awe. Mitsuyo, the dog, actually ignored her freshly laid-out food in favor of walking over to the living room and gazing at Daisy who was racing around frenetically like a fruitbat on speed.

Today is the last Summer delivery for the Chequamegon CSA, the fruit and vegetable farmer co-op I hold a share in. Then there will be 3 fall deliveries and that will be the end for this year. I have additional chickens (and fresh turkey too!) to pick up this fall as well. Hurray for the freezer! My preservation project for today is to find out if it's possible to make leek and potato soup for freezing. I have 3 huge leeks and a whole lot of potatoes to deal with and that would be a nice recipe if it's possible. We'll see!

I have been keeping an eye out on eBay for these glass tulip lighting fixtures that we are using in the kitchen. They are made of downward-drooping bent glass petals with brass or fake brass trim. The glass is slag glass in various colors. They were made for decades so there are slightly different styles and quality levels from the different decades and they also come in different diameters. I am nesting them so the medium size ones have a tiny one inside, and then a pointy light bulb so the total effect is flower-like. They will be hung so that the kitchen ceiling resembles a lush flower garden. It should be, in the words of one person who's seen the plan, "trippy" :D  Unfortunately I am still down about 5 fixtures that I need... the smallest diameter ones, some white/beige and some colored. These things go through phases on there where sometimes they sell for insane money ($50 apiece or more) and other times you can pick them up for $15. I think there are also considerations such as manufacturer and year, color rarity etc. but since I don't know all those details I can never tell when they'll apply. Still, I do know that if I keep watching diligently the ones I need do pop up. Constant vigilence!!

I will add in the photos for this entry soon.

OMG is now fully set up as the new outgoing mailserver. Somehow my brain did not explode while setting up the TSL and SASL, go me! I do actually still need to set up SPF checking on there (for incoming mail) but I went ahead and told everybody to switch over to OMG instead of Syrus as it shouldn't affect people sending stuff out from my network, just incoming spam mail needing to be relayed to WTF. As I type this, tiny OMG with it's teeny tiny brain is laboriously compiling the Bundle::CPAN preparatory to installing all the pre-requisite Perl modules for the SPF checking. The actual postfix policy code is tiny but the infrastructure is staggering. Well at least it is if your widdle mechanical brain is the moral equivalent of a package of Radio Shack transistors. Sorry OMG! ;-)

In the other window I am beginning the painstaking transfer of configuration info from Re (the old incoming mailserver) to WTF. This will be a little bit tougher as I was going to implement per-user UCE this time around. Since I've never done that it'll be an adventure! :-p

WTF will also be the new timeserver for the new network. Previously they had all just used Dis which had the time for the junct network. But that will be going away soon!

Gosh I know you guys are just riveted with this amazing news. (wipes forehead)

Today's weather was actually pretty nice and I wanted to go try fishing but I made myself mow and rake the south end of the lawn, trim and weed gardens over on that end too. I may go tomorrow though if the weather is this nice. I figure on a weekend day I have a much better chance of being offered helpful advice by fellow fishermen, or at least am more likely to find fellow fishermen mid-day.

The south side garden along the house is alternating blue veronica and purple coneflowers. They were planted this year and I was somewhat alarmed to see that the coneflowers have already died back completely greenery-wise. There has only been one hard frost and they are supposed to flower to the end of the season. Maybe I will email the lady whose farm I picked up the last batch of chickens from, and see if hers died back already too. But hers are 3 years old so much better established. They might have a longer season as a result. Well, in any case there was a goodly supply of seeds dried on the coneflowers heads so I harvested those for future reference.

I will not be going to my brother's for his birthday after all as the server situation was not yet where I wanted it to be before I went over to Minneapolis to take the old system down (figured I should have incoming mail set up at the new location.. yeah). However I am reliably informed that his damaged screen door patiently awaits our pleasure  convenience manhandling when I go there in 10-14 days.

Today has been a not very exciting day of working on servers. I finished up the big power handoff between the old and new DNS servers and WTF and OMG are now totally in command of the DNS for these 2 networks. The old 2 are still around but are just slaved onto them and will be turned off forever on Sunday or Monday when I am in Minneapolis. There are a lot of DNS-related loose ends to take care of for individual domains where I am waiting on someone or something to happen first, but those are all notated in a punch list and awaiting crossing-off.



So once that was done I dove into the mail server aspects of the new two. This is more complicated for a number of reasons. I am adding a new feature to the receive mailserver (per-user spam controls and whitelisting) and they will both need security certificates which would be brand new as these servers had never been up before. That is always a good time to set up but at least I am familiar now. The original learning curve was a bear back when I first did it about 3 years ago. I am working on the outgoing mailserver first as it's the least painful for the users to switch them over.

I still get a laugh whenever I see these server names and it's been 2 years since I made them. OMG! snicker

Hello,

As I wait patiently to go to bed, I am nearly done switching the DNS over to the new network. WTF is now the master, and the old two DNS servers from the old network are now slaved to it. All the data is transfered (though not tested yet) and Network Solutions knows about all of my domains' changes. I have written letters to most of my clients to get them to switch theirs over. Still need to fix one in particular though (hi Mark!)

The reason I am waiting patiently is because the new OMG is not a fast machine and it is taking all of eternity quite a while to compile bind 9. Yawwwwnnn. Luckily secondary DNS and outgoing-only mail shouldn't be too much of a strain on it. And it is only temporary.

Tonight I went to a study group about a book called "Deep Economy" by Bill McKibben. Basically we read the book chapter by chapter then discuss it together, asking questions etc. It will go on once a week for about 6 weeks. I'll let you know how it goes as time progresses! The book is about local/regional economies and living according to such a plan intentionally in order to save the planet. I think. I'll let you know once I have read the book ;-)

I made an odd discovery earlier today. All the websites where I tried to order things for my brother's birthday presents, no longer really mean "next day shipping" when they claim it. For example, Lego.com allows you to pay for 2nd day or next-day shipping, but they add on an automatic 24 hours of "order processing" before it gets shipped, and it's business days only. So "next day" shipping today would have been Monday or Tuesday, not tomorrow. Still would have cost a bundle though. Amazon.com was even sneakier. My Spouse signed up for this great service where you pay a flat fee to subscribe, and then you get free 2nd-day shipping or $3 next-day shipping. Trouble is, even though they let you select those options and the items say they're in stock, the estimated arrival date is like 4-5 days later... wtf??? Dagnabbit. Next time I will remember this little trick and check the shipping times BEFORE I spend 3 hours picking the perfect present on a site.

Note to self: buy substitute present for brother in Minneapolis.

Yesterday I spent much of the day working on server stuff again. I phoned various clients warning them about the impending changes and I got the two P1's set up with 2.4.x kernel Linux and locally-accessible-only SSHD. I wrote up master plans for 2 phases of server operation, phase one being from now until a week from now, and phase 2 being the weeks after that.

I didn't figure you all wanted to see more pictures of the same servers again so here's a fake panoramic of the server room/office instead:



With all of these images, you should be able to click on them to see a bigger version.

Today was also a big day for telephone calls. I spoke to my father-in-law and my grandmother. I also had brief calls with my mother and brother about my impending trip to Minneapolis and my brother's impending birthday. I agreed to help my brother with a screen door on his house that got damaged. I was glad to hear it was not the same door I helped him install new only a couple years ago. Whew!

It finally wasn't raining today so I was able to finish stacking the woodpile outside. I started pretty late and was talking to my Spouse for most of the time so by the time I was finished it was pitch black. Pardon the quality of these photos; I had to PhotoShop them quite a bit to make them look like something besides big black rectangles. The light is red in this picture because the overhead source was some yellow bug lights the previous owners had mounted over the rear deck. How attractive!



Full Pallets... no more wood stacking for me until 2009! I did go ahead and cover them again afterward:



While doing this labor, and while not on the phone, I listened to some podcasts and one was about eating bugs. Apparently the US, Europe and Canada are the only places in the world where people do not eat insects. Bugs are actually quite nutritious. They listed some of the dietary benefits of various ones. The insect "power food" is apparently caterpillars, which are on a par with salmon for food value. Crickets are quite nutritious also. Although most of the bugs we find in town in the US are probably rife with pesticides and not good to eat for that reason. Hmm, I wonder, I could raise crickets at the house... they're 25% protein!

Speaking of Podcasts I had been listening to some about Buddhism just to see what it was all about. They reminded me that I had meant to find some about meditation. I found one from the Meditation Society of Australia (or something like that) the purpose of which was simply to give straightforward instruction on how to do it, something I have tried to find throughout my life with no luck. So I gave it a try and have been practicing diligently once a night. I learned how to zero out my mind pretty quick because I had already gotten some of those techniques over the years in my theatre and self defense classes, so I just had to learn to do it their way. The biggest difference in their method is in addition to releasing tension, you also take in happiness and satisfaction at the same time. This causes a warm happy feeling in your chest as your mind goes blank. No complaints here!

Well, they say the real value of having a clear mind is being able to do it while actually thinking about stuff too, not while just being blank. I had not known this before (see, they just need to tell people these things straight up). In the meditation instructions they said you are supposed to have something lined up to think about once you get into that clear-minded state, so I gave it a try and... LO AND BEHOLD...!! I made the important discovery that I could "psych myself up" to do some horrible task with enthusiasm by thinking about it for about 2 minutes after getting into that zeroed-out happiness mind state. Wow! It could sometimes take hours or even days using my previous brute force technique. Now it takes only about 5 minutes and does not make my brain hurt. Granted I have to sit somewhere quietly with my eyes closed for those 5 minutes, but I think I can live with that.

I learn something new every day. :)

This morning there was water leakage in the basement so I got to see my leakwater channelling strip in action. Unfortunately some water had done an end-run around the head end of it, which kind of defeated the purpose. It appeared to come out of the very base of the wall where there is a gap. I think when I go through and patch all the wall cracks that problem will take care of itself. I hope so anyway. Hehe.



The basement has so much dehumidification equipment down there that the puddle was already partially dried but based on the evidence left it looks like the part that seeped around the end only made it a short way, so that's good. The rest of the strip worked exactly as it was supposed to. The cat, Zinger, agrees that wet floors are teh suck.



Also while I was over there I noticed that it is time to scrub the parts room door again. When we moved in the door was covered in mold, oh yuk! It has been scrubbed all over with bleach twice now. It appears the 3rd time will be the charm, as it is returning with very little force now.



Yes, we have a parts room. What do you expect in a house owned by 2 nerds? :-D

This other "leak" at the stairs end of the basement turned out to be a hairball. Thanks guys.



Today I spent much of the day on the 2 Compaq Proliant servers. Ultimately it turned out I will need some software I had to order out for, so realistically they will not be ready by October 12th when I had wanted to go to Minneapolis and switch the system over. So I have a modified plan now where I will use the two P1's with 2.4.x kernel Linux and no SSHD capability as temporary servers. Once everything is all switched over I will be able to finish and swap in the two Compaq Proliants at my leisure.

While I was moving stuff around I made an important discovery regarding a used KVM switch I got on eBay a while back. I had never had enough machines running on it at once to really pinpoint what it's issues were, but I figured it had some since it was included for free with something else I bought. Lo and behold, it has exactly 4 bad keyboard channels. (The 3 marked with X below, plus the one labeled "ORLY")



Electronics technicians love to see stuff go bad in multiples of 4 and 8 because it makes it insanely easy to figure out which part has gone south. Somewhere in the keyboard input circuitry there is an IC chip with 4 sets of inputs/outputs that needs to be replaced. It should be relatively easy to tell which one it is by taking an oscilloscope and comparing the signals on the working one and the non-working one. Before I take the switch apart though I need to test the mouse functionality, so I have a concise list of everything that is wrong. All of the monitor circuits work.

Of course, I could also just wait. Once the old primary system comes home from Minneapolis, I'll have a very nice 16 circuit switch of the same brand that works perfectly. Hehe.

This morning I worked on the ongoing project of preserving the bounty from the Chequamegon CSA. In this case I was freezing pre-cooked corn (having removed it from the cob) and carrots, as well as loose raspberries. I also did some research and decided placing all the paper bags of potatoes in the coldest part of the basement, still in the bags, was going to be the best bet for those. Unfortunately no part of our basement is really going to be under 55 all winter. In the future we may need to set aside a corner of it for root cellaring and make sure it doesn't get too much heat over there.

I found evidence in the basement of this sad little guy who did not make it after the wood loading of yesterday. Aw! :(  I realize slugs are the enemies of gardeners, but what a horrible way to die... all alone on an endless concrete desert with only your own footprint(s) as witness.



For the bulk of the day I worked on server stuff. It was actually kind of frustrating. My efforts were centered on a pair of very nice old Pentium 1 machines that were going to be "wtf" and "omg", the primary and secondary mail and DNS servers for the network here at the house, and I only found out very late in the process that it was not going to be possible to use P1's. The latest 2.6.x Linux kernels will not install on a P1 which I had already known, so I had gone back to a 2.4.x kernel from a couple Slackware releases back, then was manually updating all of the apps. I had done my research in advance to make sure all the latest versions of the apps were compatible with a 2.4 kernel and none of them claimed they weren't. Unfortunately though, it turns out openssh requires glibc 2.4 or better, and that requires a 2.6 kernel. Gack!

The only pair of regular production PII machines I had lying around were, to put it bluntly, dogs. Passed over a dozen times for other projects, they were both gutted of parts. One had an ill-advised unique drive rail system that had clearly never caught on in the industry and that I had never found a way to mount drives to that did not involve duct tape and cardboard. In my experience nothing good ever comes from wasting days trying to gimp along a machine like that, which had in fact happened before with that very box, so I was leery to go there.



The other was a Dell Dimension that was never terribly reliable even as a brand new Windows machine. I didn't really wanna go there either.



That meant my options were to go out and buy more production machines (which would stop me for the day, since there's no place nearer than Duluth/Superior to do that, and nowhere on a Sunday) or use the pair of old Compaq Proliant rackmount servers I had on hand. I really hadn't wanted to waste those on the tiniest jobs of the system, but it appears I will need to redefine those as the tiniest usable machines I own, and start looking into buying better stuff long term on eBay. The good news is, there are some really nice machines out there for cheap. I am particularly a fan of the older (circa 1998-2002) Dell Precision Workstations. They make kickass Linux boxes! The former Big Pig (now renamed "orly" in the theme of kfap.net servers being named for online-speak words) is one of those.



Well. I started tearing into the Compaq Proliants around 8 at night, so I knew I would not be able to do a lot before the day was over. These were really nice machines about 10 years ago. I buy mine on eBay but to get them at a very cheap price, about $100 apiece, they have to be kind of messed up. I had got these right before our house sold in Colorado, so I had to basically open the box, look inside, then tape the box back up at the time. This is the first opportunity I've had to really investigate my finds properly.

Most of the issues so far have been related to misconfiguration and old firmware, which could be solved by obtaining software tools for free off the HP website. I really like the HP site and Compaq Proliant is excellently and firmly supported despite being an old product now. I'll just take the issues one at a time until I have completely gotten the BIOS and firmware straight and all hardware appears to be working. Then there is a lot of rigamarole needed to get a Linux system onto one of these but I have done that part before so I am not too worried there.

See, isn't this exciting stuff? :-p

Here's a cute picture of Daisy and Zinger snuggling on the couch, where I would go to watch TV while stuff was compiling/rebooting/etc:



As I was going to bed I noticed that it was raining... I knew that would happen. The wood pile was still covered though. Ha ha! I win!

Hello!

Sorry about not posting for the last couple of days. I have been working on a lot of computer stuff that isn't particularly easy to speak about in such a way that it sounds exciting ;-)

Here's a picture from yesterday showing the wood room 1 day from completion. The final 2 short rows are set up to be stacked perpendicularly to the rest, filling in a little more of the room. The ramp was in place right up until the very end.



Today I filled in the last short row-and-a-half while listening to my podcasts. It went so quickly I did not get to the Presidential Debates which were right at the end of the playlist. Guess I'll be hearing those tomorrow instead! Afterward I sucked the ramp right up out of the wood hole (which it fits through nicely, probably having been designed to bridge from the tailgate of a truck down to the hole). Note to self: when re-doing wood room ceiling, replace the bare light bulb with a cage light. Sorry this picture is so blurry, I couldn't get it to focus to save my life. Probably because I was in too much of a hurry to screw around with it for longer than a few seconds.



The wood ramp will live in the garage, which is right nearby, until such a time as I have used all the wood in the wood room and am ready to throw the rest of it down there. That probably won't be until sometime in 2009. Tomorrow I will begin stacking the remaining outdoors wood on pallets. I suspect that will go way faster because I won't have to move it all twice! Well, not right away anyway. Hehe.



This is a view of our tinder supply, as seen with ones back to the wood room door. The boilers are directly to the left, across the aisle from the tinder. The log spray station will be to the right when it's finished. I will probably end up building a small, rolling rack just for tinder so it takes up less floor space and can be moved quickly if it has to be. I didn't really have a lot of trouble with sparks flying out of the open wood boiler last year, but you never know.

As for computer stuff, I have been working on getting the basic servers (DNS, mail, etc.) for this new network up and running so they are all ready to take over the workload when I shut down the old system on Oct 12th or thereabouts. Those of you with email and web accounts with me are likely to get some mail regarding this soon.

The one I was working on tonight, wtf.kfap.net, is to be for mail and DNS. It is annoying that some of my nice workhorse machines are getting too old to run the latest Linux kernels. I suppose that means my concept of what is a "nice workhorse" needs to be updated, but I feel bad throwing out old friends. LOL. I've been running some of these machines as servers one way or another since 1998.

Hello, this post does have pictures that go with it, but I won't be adding them in until later. No reason I can't type the text part now though! Good news! The pictures are now added into this post, if a bit belatedlly.

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I didn't load in quite all of the remaining wood on Friday night and left it uncovered overnight thinking I'd finish it off this morning. Naturally it rained buckets all night last night as a result. It has also been drizzling all day today. I guess I will go ahead and throw it down later even though it is wet. It is still seasoned and the surface moisture will have had weeks or months to dry out before it's burned.

It rained enough to make the south basement wall leak and I noticed late last night that the aluminum L strips I glued down to channel the water did leak also all along their length. I kind of figured this would happen and that was the confirmation. It was interesting to note that even though it leaked, the water remained close in to the area and progressed down to the drain never getting more than 2-3 feet from the wall. So apparently the strip provided some direction even to the water that had passed outside of it... perhaps through surface tension? Unfortunately I do not have a photo of this phenomenon because our trusty dehumidifiers had dried it out thoroughly by this morning but I do have one that shows the line left on the floor by the edge of the erstwhile puddle. I think it'll illustrate what I meant about staying 2-3 feet from the wall:



I went and got some clear tub and tile caulk and caulked both the inside and outside of the strip so it should not leak next time, cross fingers. The caulk will supposedly try clear but when it was fresh it was pure white. Don't laugh at my un-smooth caulk application! At least I didn't get it all over everything!



In places the transparent glue attaching the aluminum to the floor was clearly providing a good seal so I didn't caulk those spots. It worked out pretty well I think:



Another project I did today was I took apart the laundry dryer vent to find out what was clogging it. Everything looked good in the long vertical portion of the pipe, as well as the elbow bend at the top. But when I removed the elbow I could see... gasp!!!




The pipe passing to the outside and that had an enormous wad of very dense fuzz in it. The beige fibers weren't like anything we own so it must date back to before we bought the house. It resembles nothing so much as tiny wiry fragments of a doormat or something.



I reached in with my hand and very bravely removed the stuff, which looked like this. The ruler is to illustrate I am not exaggerating when I say there was ten inches of it!



Upon removing this monstrosity I made a perplexing discovery. The vent appared to be a dead end, rather than leading outside. Huh???



Banging on this metal surface, it appeared to be fixed solidly in place. So I went outside to see WTF was going on. I knew the rear deck of the house was in the way but I had always assumed the dryer vent came out underneath the deck.



There's the basement window the vent passes through. As you can see it's entirely blocked by the deck, which is actually at the same level as the vent. Here's a closeup of the vent, if you can call it that at this point:



I wasn't able to get a photo from an angle that showed it, but the vent is the fixed kind that is closed at the top and sloped outward to allow a slim opening at the bottom. So armed with this knowledge I went back in and fished around with my handy dandy Bathroom Sink Glop Hook ™ ™.



With this I was able to probe all blocked areas and ultimately excavated a tiny opening that is shaped like a human eye and perhaps 1" tall by 2" wide.



Clearly this is the bottleneck of the system and we will need to be vigilant about keeping that cleaned out until we remodel the deck area. The good news is though, that the entire area outside of that small opening is very large and clear. I had originally been afraid that that portion under the deck would be stuffed with a rabbit-nest, as there is a rabbit who lives under there.

The laundry area all put back together... very civilized!



I am in the middle of a big computer-related switcheroo. The plan involves:

1. Removing my server presence at my parents' house in Minneapolis, and shutting down the DSL line and ISP service there. All functionality would be moved to the DSL line here as well as any equipment I intended to keep.

2. Combining our Wireless and LAN here at the house into 1 network to end the routing headaches, which does mean basically redesigning the entire network logic-wise.

3. Adding a powerful Windows-based machine to the local LAN to handle things like the weather station, voice over IP, WINS resolution, and backup storage wrangling.

4. Finishing the A/V and Home Automation installations in the server room.

Item 1 is in the early stages. My mother is getting her own DSL line up and running at her place, so as not to depend on mine anymore, and I am in the process of getting new servers running here to take up the user load in as seamless a fashion as possible. My hope is to travel to the Twin Cities to drop off computer recycling and pick up all the servers around Oct. 12th. Item 2 is fully planned out and is basically awaiting 3 and 4 to be done first so that I don't make myself crazy. Item 3 is why I can't post the pictures for this LJ entry quite yet. I decided to use my own desktop "Big Pig" for the powerful new Windows utility machine and am kind of midway through transferring my junk to a different machine. I am not entirely certain Big Pig is reliable enough for the job anymore, but it does have the power I was looking for. If it turns out to be worn out, I will substitute in the old previous incarnation of Big Pig when it comes back from my mother's house. And, as for item 4 it was held up by my missing a few key components but I did go buy those today so I should be able to finish it up with just a day or two's work.

While I was out buying A/V parts I did buy a Skype adapter for Big Pig which I set up and tested today. It works great! Once I have finished moving Big Pig downstairs to the server room we will have 2 black wireless phones (one in my office, and one downstairs) that answer to both Skype and the regular PSTN. Which Skype address they answer to depends purely on whose account is running on Big Pig at the time. Will probably always be mine when I am alone here of course.

When I was out and about my first choice for buying the clear caulk was to go to Forslund, a contractor-oriented Do it Best store that I have been about 99% loyal to since moving here. Unfortunately they were closed and dark during their normal business hours, with no explanation other than the closed sign. I really hope they have not gone out of business.