Patrick’s Rants

Scott Brown defeated Democratic candidate Martha Coakley in Massachusetts last night. Now we will get meaningful health care legislation. Fundamentalist Christian politicians are exactly what this country needs. Why could we have not had Sarah Palin and John McCain? Christians know that they must provide health care for the poorest of the poor, Jesus says so right in Matthew 25. In fact he goes so far as to say if you don’t, you are going to hell. Matt 25:41

Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels:
For I was an hungred, and ye gave me no meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me no drink:
I was a stranger, and ye took me not in: naked, and ye clothed me not: sick, and in prison, and ye visited me not.
Then shall they also answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungred, or athirst, or a stranger, or naked, or sick, or in prison and did not minister unto thee?
Then shall he answer them, saying, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these, ye did not to me.

So I am happy that conservative Christians will be able to wield their power. By letting one child go hungry or without health care, you are damning yourself to eternal fire and brimstone. It’s right there in Matthew, “that which you do unto the least of these you do unto me”. No less that God himself is watching what you plan to do to the most underprivileged, the least of these. Can you really look that poor, underprivileged and sick child in the eye and tell him he can’t go to the doctor, especially since you know that the eyes of God stare back at you when you do?

On January 5, I was having breakfast with J at Mike and Rhonda’s when my cell phone interrupted my casual coffee enjoyment. It was the office. The workstations were all off line. To me it sounded like a network issue. I stepped outside to finish my call, people talking on their cell phones in restaurants is one of my pet peeves (closely followed by people on their cell phone in any public place). To me it sounded like a network issue. Step by step each suggestion failed in turn. I resigned myself to cutting breakfast short and heading into the office before the paying job.

Once at the office I went through the steps that I was assured had already been taken. Power cycle the network switches, the server and then workstations. Nothing. Each phase that should have – could have – worked didn’t. I tailed the logs, watched as the workstations/clients booted up and nothing made sense. Then the screen went dark and the BIOS screen appeared. The server had just spontaneously rebooted; never a good sign. Nothing seemed to work and the office was shut down for the day. I went to my full time job for the remainder of the day.

After getting out of work at 7:00pm, I headed back to the tax office and again to read through the logs to see if there was anything that I missed. Workstations still would not PXE boot. The server spontaneously rebooted on me a couple more times and I resigned myself to the fact that the server at somewhere around 7 years old had reached the end of its life. The hard drives were reporting (using SMART) that they were aging, occasionally showing sectors not available. I knew at some point the server would need to be migrated, but I wasn’t ready. I really did hope to get another tax season out of that machine – it was not to be.

On January 6, I unstacked the stash in the corner. Imagine a tower of tower computers placed next to the wall width-wise and two lengths left to right. Imagine that tower at two to three high. Yep the bane of every geek’s non-geek wife (or non-geek husband as the case ma be). The overt hoarding of old computers just waiting for the day when they can be salvaged and recombined into a working machine. These machines are only awaiting the day when their geek overlord, master of their existence, has the chance to evaluate and resurrect them. I unpiled that stack looking for a gem that I knew was there – the beige beast.

The beige beast is pretty impressive. It houses the Intel® Server Board SE7501BR2, has dual hot swap power supplies, 5 hot swap fans with internal wind tunnels (firing this puppy up gave me wind chill) 5 scsi hard drives (well, 5 possible. Only one actually was installed a comparatively small 18g Ultra 320 drive), intrusion detection, dual Xeon 2.4ghz chips. Now this was a hand me down (thanks Steve) so there are no complaints. Some of the hardware is absolutely impressive – dual Xeons in a box that was decommissioned sometime around 2007 and ran Windows 2000 Server. That box cost a pretty penny when it was originally deployed. Today you could grab the board (used) on ebay for less than $20.00. Of course the case is not included at that price.

Wednesday night I began my installation journey. I burned the K12LTSP v5EL dvd. I let the drive select the speed and it warned there might be an underburn . Naturally I stuck it in the drive and booted – what could go wrong? It did not see the disk. It did not boot. That’s what could go wrong. I grabbed another blank dvd and set the drive speed to 5x. No warnings. Excellent. I swapped the dvds in the drive and… same thing. Then it dawned on me. The drive in the machine was CDROM. I pulled a dvd drive that I have on the shelf, powered the server off, and temporarily installed the dvd drive. I powered up the server and it still choked. (more…)

It’s got to be national news. Rumors are flying about how much snow we are supposed to get this week. El Nino weather patterns are supposed to hit Northern Arizona like it’s 1967. Three storms are lined up to completely dump on us. Monday it’s anywhere from 5 to 16 depending upon elevation, Tuesday is supposed to add another 5 to 10 inches of snow. And following that is another “stronger” storm that there is no prediction for yet coming in Thursday night. It’s anyone’s guess at this point, but it’s entirely possible that this web site, hosted the way it is, might go dark for a few days. I’m hoping not. It’s also entirely possible that school will be canceled for all of next week. With my Sonata, I’m not gonna leave the apartment if that’s the case.

Oh, and nobody tell Rush, because for him this is proof that there is no such thing as global warming. I mean, look what finding out the Obamas were vacationing in Hawaii at the same time he was did to him.

Anyone who has any number of servers that they manage will eventually see failures. It’s just natural, hardware gets old and dies. Or you run completely over the hardware’s ability to keep up with demand.
Both of those things happened this year.

First – and I have to say this, forgive me – Windows Server 2003 has served me well. But the hardware just would not keep up with three to five users who kept three to five programs open each. This is a machine that has dual PIII 1ghz chips and a whopping 1.5gb ram. Three full time users on Windows 2003 Server, even I’m a little impressed. But it was straining under the heavy load. And the load was heavy.

My partner ordered the new Dell to replace the VisionMan gray box server that served us so well for these last several years. The server itself – hardware – is still up and strong. I have had to replace CPU fans on one of our machines, but that happens sometimes.

The migration from Windows 2003 Server (using Terminal Services for Windows based software access) to Windows Server 2008 64bit (also with Terminal Services) has been a little bumpy.¹ I nearly fell out of my chair when the current year tax software installed without any major hitches. Our Windows Server is now online – all major software has been migrated and the Windows 2003 server has been powered off awaiting the day it is wiped clean.

1. Mostly chronicled in Geek News and Stuff