Rivendell is born
News, Technical, Guns ·Wednesday September 17, 2008 @ 20:47 EDT (link)
20080912: Registered at UWa. (CSE P 590, Accessibility, with Dr. Ladner, ID 97999) and paid tuition. (Had some trouble: they didn't have the correct notation in my file for the program, so I called David Rispoli, the program advisor, and he said he'd sent a list over to someone, and told me to ask for her by name; I called later and did, but she was out; called a half hour before they closed, and things finally worked out.)
Went to Duvall "Movies in the Park"; got there a little after 1900, they showed some cartoons (and then some real estate ads from the sponsor, yawn), and the movie, National Treasure 2, started about 2000, ended 2215?, we got home shortly after, since it shows at a park just down the hill from our house.
20080913: minas-tirith (primary outward-facing server) died overnight; turned out the graphics card was causing boot failure (POST, 8 beeps, and some lights which a kind chap at Hard Drives Northwest investigated for me). He also showed me where some capacitors on the motherboard were bulging and leaking acid; we decided to buy a new machine (rivendell; old one was imladris and before that minas-tirith; the wheel of time turns, and machines come and pass…). New box has a 500 Gb HD (also bought another 500 Gb HD, SATA in a USB 2.0 enclosure, for backups), AMD 64 X2 3.0 GHz, DVD±RW; no OS, no monitor.
Visted a few places nearby including a new (to me) gun store, Estate Arms Company, across from Bellevue Square, and took a look at the Springfield Armory XD(M) in .40. Installed a minimal Gentoo on the new machine when I got home; no problem connecting up my old HD as hdb, although the bearing sounds noisy so backups definitely need to be brought up to date.
After following the Gentoo Handbook, I had to copy over various settings: networking (/etc/conf.d.net and /etc/hosts), DHCP server (/etc/dhcp/dhcp.conf), NAT (/var/lib/iptables), NTP (/etc/ntp.conf), cron (/etc/cron*), and DNS (/var/dnscachex). This gets a basic system working, but no web or mail servers, which are a bit more work to migrate.
Along the way to setting up mail, it wanted a database server, so I decided it was a good time to reinstall and restore PostgreSQL. Unfortunately, copying the data directory didn't work ("FATAL: incorrect checksum in control file"; net wisdom suggests it's a 32-bit to 64-bit issue); fortunately, I was able to use chroot to run the old PostgreSQL server and run a dump (pg_dumpall). I have weekly dumps, but wanted the latest data. Copied over and restarted MySQL, too (I still have some old databases on it).
20080914: Went to the gun show in the morning, picked up 1000 rounds of ammo since I'm running low (9mm, 124 grain FMJ since it was the same price as the 115 grain). Mail server and IMAP is up; web server is getting there (note: moved logs from /home/server to /var/log). And… we're back.
Broadstripe decided to have a few long outages this evening, several hours so far, with only a few minutes of actual uptime. Note to anyone finding this is a search: don't get Broadstripe; get anyone else, even Verizon. Perhaps we'll be able to switch to SpeakEasy now; it's worth checking again, anyway.
20080916: Argh, Harmony remote issues. Its crappy configuration utility only communicates with the web site at the end (the web site produces a configuration file which is uploaded to the remote), and at that point it came back with an error (something useless like "unable to display page", not something more useful and true like "although we say we support sequences of commands, we really don't, so donÂt try to use them or we'll give you random errors").
Bad drivers: 1735: WA 086 XDY, Black Hyundia SUV, WA-520; 1803: WA B718 71A, white Ford truck, NE 124th St.
20080917: Cleaned up ZX's recent checkin: it's like he completely failed to read the Word coding conventions document, plus he could know C++ better. They oughtta let me do interview screening here…. Went shooting at SVRC with Honey after I got home from work.
Books finished: The Rook.DVDs finished: Ransom, The Saint.
