Today was Matthews “half birthday” – he’s six months old today. It seems like just yesterday I was uploading the first pictures of him in the hospital. Here’s a pretty recent picture of Matthew sitting up on his changing table:
Also, he’s getting his first tooth. The tooth coming through has made him a little fussy lately, but I think we’re going to make it.
I said last night that I would talk about the other way that Linux helped us out on Monday.
Here it is…
This is probably a pretty common situation on business computers. We had just finished setting up our new Active Directory domain and we needed to make some configuration changes on all of our Windows 2000 and Windows XP workstations.
Normally, this is no big deal, just log on as the local Administrator and make the changes. Unfortunately, I didn’t set up all of the computers in the district (or maybe I should say thankfully). So for a lot of the computers, I didn’t know the Administrator password.
Here again it came down to possibly reloading Windows unless we could find a tool that would let us go in and reset the Administrator password. And again, a Linux tool saved the day.
A guy named Petter Nordahl-Hagen (I’m guessing he’s not from around here) came up with a handy boot disk called the Offline NT Password & Registry Editor. You can download an image for either a boot floppy or CD.
It’s a nice little script that walks you through the process of booting up Linux, mounting the hard drive, and then clearing the Administrator password. We’ve used it on about 40-50 computers so far and it’s worked on every one of them.
This is a very hand disk to carry around in the laptop case.
A while back I requested 10 copies of Ubuntu Linux. Ubuntu has a pretty good deal going. Not only is it free to download and install on as many computers as you want, they’ll also ship you as many copies of their software as you want for free. My CDs arrived in the mail last week. We’ll get back to them in a minute…
Friday, a transformer blew near the high school. This knocked out one leg of the power to the building. Basically, half of the circuits in the building were down. So instead of having four dedicated circuits for running everything in the server closet, we had two. I managed to patch things together and keep everything working over the weekend with the exception of one server.
The server that controls most of the network printers on the campus wouldn’t boot back up. It tried to boot then gave a blue screen of death with INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE. This is a really bad message.
On Saturday I found out that there were also some very important files on that server, so I would have to find some way to get those files back off. I spent some time the rest of the weekend researching how to fix this problem.
The best solution to this error is to reinstall windows. That means I would also have to download drivers for the RAID controller and network card since they aren’t included with Windows NT. This would’ve probably taken a few hours.
I didn’t want to dedicate that kind of time to a server that I was planning on turning off in a few days anyway so I looked around for another solution. Luckily, I had an Ubuntu LiveCD handy.
Yesterday morning I booted from the LiveCD and everthing just worked. Ubuntu automatically detected the RAID controller and the network card. Once it finished booting up, there were icons on the desktop for all three of the hard drives in the server. I was able to copy all of the files to another server and save myself a few hours of work.
Linux helped us out a second time yesterday. I’ll get to that tomorrow…
I haven’t posted any pictures of Matthew in a while. Here’s a pretty good one that Paige took of me and Matthew a few weeks ago.
I think I was showing him how to work iTunes on that Indigo iMac – or maybe he was showing me…
I got a new toy over the weekend, and so far I really like it. I couldn’t resist the lure of Apple computers anymore, so I bought myself a Mac mini.
I’ve only been using it for about 3 days and I already think it’s going to be my main computer from now on. Everything about it makes me happy. It’s practically silent and it’s extremely small.
That giant beige box in the background is my old computer. When it’s on you can hear it humming all the way down the hall in our bedroom. Maybe I just won’t turn it on anymore.
Even better than the computer itself is the software that comes with it – iMovie and GarageBand are amazing. I’ll be making movies and music in no time. I’ll probably even sell my old four track recorder now that I have this.
Mac OS X is solid as a rock and UNIX based which is perfect for me. All of the low level stuff I’m used to from Linux is still there only there’s this nice candy coating on top that makes it so easy to use.
Paige and I got married nine years ago today. It seems like just the other day when I was talking about seven years. Time does fly when you’re having fun.
Nine years ago it was just the two of us in a one bedroom apartment. We had old beat up cars and sometimes barely enough money to make it. But we were always happy.
Now, we share our three bedroom house with a dog, a cat, and our wonderful son, Matthew. We both have nice cars and I don’t worry about money anymore. Most importantly, we’re happier than ever.
My life has improved so much in the last nine years that I can’t even imagine what things will be like in another nine. Matthew will be in third grade, Paige will have her degree and a new job, we’ll have a new house, maybe another son or daughter…
I could keep going, but I know I wouldn’t even come close to how great things will really be.
Today was the last day of school for all of the students, so obviously yesterday was the day that everything went wrong…
It began around 10:30am yesterday morning. I started getting calls that e-mail wasn’t working. It had been working earlier, so I just assumed that we were being flooded with viruses from the outside again (it seems like this happens weekly).
A while later I realized that I couldn’t even get into the server over the network. So I drove to the high school to check it out. Once I got there, I realized the C: drive on the mail server was full. Windows isn’t smart enough to rotate log files automatically, so I had to delete a few hundred megs of log files. It was almost lunch time by now, and I figured everything would be fine, so I went to lunch.
When I got back to my office, the server still wasn’t working right. So I tried the next logical thing with a Windows server, I rebooted. After the server rebooted I recieved a few e-mails from earlier in the day. I called a few people and let them know that we were back in business.
Then, about 5 minutes later, everything went down – the mail server was gone, the internet was down, big problems. So I drove back to the high school. The problem was obvious as soon as I opened the door to the server closet. Instead of the deafening roar of a thousand cooling fans, I was greeted with absolute silence. The power was off.
Everything in our server closet was plugged into one circuit and it was overloaded. Some guys from our maintenance department came over and reset the breaker, but it immediately tripped again. So I started borrowing extension cords and power strips and trying to get things moved over to outlets on different circuits.
In the end, I split everthing between three different circuits and got things going again. This involved an extension cord strung accross the floor of the library, and a few power strips plugged into power strips to reach the other side of the server closet, but at least we were operational.
Thankfully, we were able to find an electrician who could help us out right away. They put in four new dedicated circuits in the server closet yesterday. The were finished by around 5:30pm so I was able to get everything moved back around and ready to go for today.
Everything was smooth sailing today and we should be in good shape for a while now. Oddly enough, I don’t think the students even knew there was a problem. They all got out at 12:30 yesterday and things were back to normal today.
It’s days like this that make me miss Dr Pepper…
Tomorrow is my last day of teaching a class for this school year. It’s been quite a learning experience for me. “Make it up as you go along” is not a good teaching style for a first-time teacher. Hopefully next year I’ll have a textbook, that would’ve really helped. Besides that, I guess I just got tired as the year went on.
I think I’ve been just as burned out as the students for the last few weeks. Teaching the class was fun, but I’m glad it’s over. I’ll be doing it again next year, but I’ve vowed to not teach it from 12:00 – 1:00. That’s the worst possible time for me. By noon I have to come home and relax for a least a few minutes or I just can’t make it through the day. I don’t see how real teachers do it.
You can always tell the new people on eBay, they tend to bid like this:
Here’s a tip for you if you’re also new to eBay – it’s not the one who bids most frequently that wins, but the one who bids the most money.
Decide what you want to spend on something and put in that amount. Otherwise, you get caught up in the game of always trying to outbid everyone else. That’s how people end up spending more for something used on eBay than it would’ve cost them to just go buy it new.
Here’s how I tend to buy things on eBay. It works pretty well for me.
If there are no bids on an item and I know exactly what I’m willing to pay for it, I’ll just go ahead and bid that amount. If I get outbid, I just forget it. Everything comes back around on eBay, just wait a few days.
If there are bids already, I’ll watch the item and wait until the auction is almost over. If someone else has already bid and you bid against them, you’ll often end up with a situation like the one above.
I really don’t like being the high bidder during the last few minutes of the auction. I would much rather just walk in with about 10 seconds to go and put in the amount I’d like to pay for the item. That way I might win and I might lose, but I know I won’t go crazy and spend too much. There’s much less stress that way.
Also, this is my 300th post…
I’m selling off another batch of things on eBay. Besides simplifying my life and cleaning out my closets, I’m also saving up to buy a PowerBook. All the cool kids are using PowerBooks these days, and I want one, too.
If anyone asks, I’ll probably tell them that I’m selling all of this stuff to pay for Matthew’s diapers and formula. People are usually more willing to pay more to support a child than they are to support my computer addiction…