Category Archives: midrange.com

Where is my Super Suit?

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Ok, talk about a panic.

A few weeks ago I attend the System i Innovation Award banquet at the COMMON conference.

This was a formal affair, suit and tie, but all my suits were pretty old … since I don’t wear them to work (only once or twice a year), there hasn’t been a driving need to get a new one.

So off to Nordstroms Ginny and I go … we find a really nice charcoal wool suit that requires minimal tailoring.

Fast forward to the COMMON conference … because I’m only going for the awards banquet … I wasn’t able to get MKS to pay for me to attend. I did a bit of wheeling & dealing, arranged to room with my friend Aaron (who is a vendor) , and paid my own airfare (Ginny was able to find me a pretty reasonable rate).

When I arrived at the hotel, I found Aarons room and dropped my stuff off … including hanging my suit up in the closet. A little while later, a friend of mine told me that he was in a suite at the hotel … and had an entire room available that he wasn’t using. He asked if I wanted to stay in that room instead. Obviously I said yes. He gave me the key and I went back to Aarons room to get my stuff (including my suit).

Fast forward again to Monday evening … about an hour before the awards banquet. I’m getting ready, pull out my suit … only to find my suit pants missing.

The first thing that flashed in my head was that I had forgotten my pants at home. I called Ginny to see if she could check the closet (not that she could do anything about it at that point). She wasn’t home. I tried calling Aaron, who would be on the expo floor, to see if he knew if they were still in the closet of his room. I got his voice-mail.

As a last ditch effort, I called Marty (who is a co-worker at MKS, and also on the expo floor) to see if he could go and ask Aaron to call me. I got a text message from Aaron saying that he couldn’t leave the expo, but I could come over and get a spare key.

I sprinted over to the expo (luckily it wasn’t far) and got the key … then ran back to Aaron’s room and checked his closet … THANKFULLY the pants were still in the closet. I had taken the pants off the hanger the jacket was on so they could hang separately.

I then ran back to my room and finished getting ready … took me a bit of time to cool down, but I was once again presentable … and the rest of the evening was a success (although I didn’t win the award 🙁 ).

Another Article!

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Heh … I’m going to be famous yet again!

A few weeks ago I was interviewed by a Neil Tardy of IBM Systems magazine about midrange.com.

The interview went well, and I was really pleased with the first draft Neil sent me.

Turns out the magazine wanted a photo of me for the article.

So, yesterday, they sent out a photographer to take the picture.

Since the article is about me and midrange.com, the best place to take the pictures was in the basement, Ginny and I had to actually CLEAN the basement up. Talk about a transformation. There’s actually ROOM down here.

Anyways the photographer, Chip, came by and took the picture. He tried a number of different setups … and found a few he liked. I liked working with Chip … he showed me a bit about using the histogram on the camera (although I’m not 100% certian I understood everything he told me, I am going to play around with it).

Obviously I’ll post a link (or at least a PDF) here when the article is published.

Another upgrade

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This weekend I’m going to attempt another hardware upgrade.

The main mail server for midrange.com (rivendell) is showing it’s age … mind you, it’s still performing fine, but it’s pretty loud and it’s maintenance contract expired last month. A new contract would have costed $300, while a new server only cost $600.

So I got a new Dell PowerEdge SC430 (Pentium D, 3ghz, dual core, 1gb ram, 80gb DASD) to replace the current Dell PowerEdge SC600.

My plan is to backup the drives (mirrored pair) to a USB hard drive and then transplant the drives into the new server.

The only hitch is that the new server primarily runs on SATA, while my current drives are PATA. This I’m solving by getting an add-on ATA/133 card. I’ll set the system to boot off of the drives on the add-on card and use the SATA drive as swap space and a backup drive.

In the past, this kind of hardware upgrade went very smoothly. Mainly because Linux was able to detect the changed hardware and reconfigure itself appropriately. This is why I upgraded rivendell to Fedora Core 4. Redhat 8 would not have been able to deal with the new hardware.

Keep your fingers crossed.

Update 3/25 @ 3pm

Looks like the upgrade was a success!

There were a few minor glitches with the file system table (fstab) … since I put the main drives on the ATA/133 adapter card, they changed from being /dev/hda to /dev/hdc. I had to twiddle with the config to get it to boot properly.

And, in case you’re wondering, I did back it up to the USB drive. That took a bit of doing though, because the USB ports on the old system are ‘full’ speed (10mps). I had to put the USB drive on gondor and do the backup via the network in order to get it done in a reasonable amount of time.

[tags]Linux, Fedora, Dell, Poweredge, Upgrade[/tags]

Recognition

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There is definitely something to be said for being recognized by people … even if they don’t know your face, knowing your name is enough.

At the Spring ’05 Common conference I’ve been recognized by quite a number of people … and it’s quite flattering.

My intentions with midrange.com are not to be a glory hound … but when people appreciate what you do, it’s quite satisfying.

Partnership?

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I just got an email from a UK terminal emulation company … they were complementing me on my website and talking about how they were really interested in ‘partnering’ with me.

Correct me if I’m wrong … but I really don’t see how a terminal emulation company could partner with me in any way. It’s not like we’re in the same line of business.

Unfortunately, I was kind of short with the guy … I really should have at least found out what kind of partnership he was interested in. I tend to view such email contacts with quite a bit of skepticism. Heck, I almost reported the email as spam.

This was a bad weekend

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This weekend was supposed to be a nice quiet, calm, time… I had planned to spend it getting some files organized in the two filing cabinets I purchased from MKS (getting rid of old stuff in anticipation of our move to new digs).

Friday was the company holiday party … it’s always been enjoyable … even if I don’t like dancing (Ginny ends up dragging me onto the dance floor a few times). This time, unfortunately, Ginny’s dinner didn’t agree with her… so we headed home early.

Once home, I made sure Ginny was comfortable … and went downstairs to dink around with the computers.

I then made my fatal error.

I decided to upgrade the main linux system to Fedora Core 3. I figured it would be fairly straight forward to upgrade from Redhat 8 to FC3.
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New Server

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I got a new server … it’s a Dell PowerEdge 420SC … I’ve named it Gondor.

I originally tried to install Fedora Core 3 on it via NFS mount, booting from a compact flash disk, but it didn’t take. Not sure why.

So I burned the CD’s and installed from there. Worked like a champ.

I think I screwed up the Dell diagnostic partition though … or the master boot record. I’ll have to play around with that.

I’m going to slowly migrate stuff over to the new server … it’s not going to be an easy pick-up and drop-off like it was with the last server migration.

Mailing list runs afoul of Rolex

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As a mailing list operator, I found this item quite interesting …

Rolex wants spam removed from list archives.

It has come to Rolex’s attention that your company is the Bulletin
Board operator for http://lists.freeswan.org. Your Web Page enables the
following vendors to advertise and conduct sales of counterfeit and
infringing Rolex watches bearing the Rolex Trademarks:

Vendor Exact Location of Counterfeit Rolex
Watch Posting on
http://lists.freeswan.org Web Site/
Bulletin Board

Now two things immediately come to mind about this…

  1. Obviously Rolex’s attorney’s lack clue one when it comes to the source of this ‘violation’. I suspect they are using some kind of web robot (or even Google) to find references to ‘Rolex’ spam on web pages and, thinking the site is actually responsible for the spam, tries to strong arm the content off.
  2. Why do mailing list operators leave their posting policy wide open? It’s really not unreasonable to require that only people who subscribe to the list are allowed to post. This is the policy for ALL my mailing lists.

Obviously this kind of thing isn’t going to effect me … as non-subscribers are not allowed to post on my lists. But the total lack of knowledge on the part of Rolex is disturbing.