I put in 12 hrs (not including lunch) yesterday. When I got home, I ate and played with spam filtering for about 2 hrs (amavis-new and spamassassin). Couldn’t get filtering to work but I think I am further than I was.
Archive for August, 2003
I spent another day at work today (11-1/2 hrs). This morning I worked on templates and scripting stuff. This afternoon I spent in the Ed Tech Center setting up computers. That didn’t go as fast or as well as I had hoped. We only got 8 of 14 machines set up. And even those don’t have the software set up on them yet because we ran into a problem imaging them. Not fun. I may have a solution, which I need to finish testing tomorrow. This evening I got some more scripting stuff done and did some troubleshooting on the imaging problem for the ETC.
As much as I got accomplished this weekend, I am going to keep the Mac labs closed tomorrow so I can do some more tidying up. Tonight I got niceties like a logout icon on the desktop working and some tweaking of shortcuts.
Well, I made notable progress at work today. Joshua and I got MacOS X installed on all but 5 of the 64 computers located in our computer labs. The Red lab went fairly smoothly, but the Green lab sucked. A quarter or a third of the machines in the Green lab had issues getting the OS installed from CD and required cloning a portable drive to get them going. Unfortunately, we only have one portable drive like that, so it took quite a while.
The radmind server held up well. I watched the load and when building the Red lab, the load average peaked at 2.50. For some reason, it hit 7.50 or so when we were building the Green lab. In any case, I don’t think it’ll have a problem handling the load of 80 or so machines by itself for a while. Today was the tough one, as the lab computers had to pull down about 3GB each from the server.
Tomorrow we tackle the Ed Tech Center. That’s going to be even more fun, since we have to set up the new computers before building them. Hopefully they don’t have issues with the software loadset. Hopefully I get some free time tomorrow too … today I left for work at 9:30am and returned home at 8:30pm. I need zzzzzz…..
Okay… it’s 4am and I’m awake. I don’t want to be awake. I woke up shortly after two and got stressed about work. It got to the point where I didn’t think I’d fall back asleep and needed to relax. So, I got up and decided to play with my server for a while. So that’s what I’ve been doing. I got netatalk up and running so I can access the server from my workstations. It’s nice to see the number “121 GB free.
Yesterday I helped liz4jc4ever and flutterbyefred finish moving out of their apartment so it could be cleaned so they can move back in. Thankfully a co-worker was nice enough to let us use her full-size truck (F-250) to move some things like beds. We’re going to do something for her.
flutterbyefred brought along her boyfriend. He’s a really nice guy and I’m very happy for her. I think her being alone has really bothered me. I hope that he can be there for her. One thing that was a little odd is that he’s 6ft 7 …and I’m not really used to looking up at people that much. 
I look forward to getting to know him better … we’re all going to see Blast! at the Ordway on Oct 4th. It should be a blast (pun intended).
Today was spent in St Paul. We swung by the apartment to clean some stuff out from under then sink, then headed to Maplewood Mall so Liz could get some shoes. I got my watch fixed there too (back wasn’t on) … had to replace the battery even though it was nearly brand new. I suspect the battery got shorted while it was in the baggie with the watch. Anyway, it’s working again, and my wrist no longer feels empty. I also got a start on my Christmas shopping!!! Have stuff for my older sister and my mother. We then went to Har Mar Mall, where I got a cookbook that Jake and Brandy had recommended when we visited them a few weeks ago. From there we went to JCPenney in Rosedale Mall, where I finally found jeans that fit me, so I bought 5 pairs.
On the way home, we stopped in Hudson at Papa Murphy’s so Liz could update her phone number since she won’t be in her apt for 2 weeks. Lo and behold the owner was there and had tried calling her today. Now she has a job!! Yay! We grabbed a pizza, then some groceries, then headed home. 
Well, I promised a post relating to work stuff not going so well … and while this is late, better late than never I think.
One of my summer projects has been to upgrade the core Macintosh labs and the Educational Technology Center to Mac OS X. This required basically re-working everything that makes the Mac labs work, including rebuilding the servers that the software is stored on. I had to learn a new software package called ‘radmind’ that was developed by the Univ. of Michigan. I built a development server so I could start building things. I wanted the production server ready-to-go by Aug 1st … this was something the networking staff had to do. Well, it’s Aug 17th and the server isn’t done. The person who has primary responsibility for it is on vacation this week, so it falls to one of the other already horribly overworked staff to deal with (mn). I did have a chance to talk to her about it and indicated that I really did need it real soon because I couldn’t start doing software upgrades until it was in place. Anyway, it is looking like I will be working next weekend since I won’t have the chance to start anything this week due to server non-readiness. Installing Mac OS X on 80 computers isn’t my idea of fun.
In other work news, the faculty/staff file server was upgraded last weekend. Unfortunately, not all the data was transferred to the new server correctly, so I’ve had to spend time working with networking staff to figure out how we can fix it. I have a good idea of how to do it, but it will take a little while and I need to upgrade the machine that will be doing the copying ‘cuz 10mbits/sec ain’t gonna cut it for this task.
I do have some good work-related news. I finally got my KVM switch so I could re-arrange my office. I need to get hold of tech support ‘cuz my keyboard isn’t working real reliably with it, but I like my new office arrangement. I need to finish tidying up in there of course.
My server project is progressing well. I have XFree86 w/Enlightenment up and running (for those who don’t know, this gives me pretty windows to use). I have DNS and DHCP up and running as well. I discovered tonight that I lost the file I was keeping my configure options for various packages (apache, php) in, so I have to figure those out again from scratch. 
Tomorrow’s project will be getting the web server back up and running (DNS was needed for this). I think I might skip MySQL support in PHP for the first pass and just re-compile and re-install it later. Oh yeah … and I built Mozilla Firebird.
Hopefully early next week I should have mail moved back over to the new system and I can ditch the temp box.
