Month: April 2008

Work Upon Work

2012-01-08 23:30:26

It’s Saturday and our class is over for the day, but I’m still at the office. Why, you ask? Well, it’s like this: I’d like to do some work on our photo backlog [which is still very large, especially since we got our scans back from ScanCafe] and post some pictures to the site. However, doing that from the hotel room is very slow since their link is weak.

it’s much faster here at the office, so here is where I sit and upload pictures.

Of course, I don’t want to leave the building while they’re grading my exam. I’m pretty sure I passed, but I don’t want to leave in case I hear the good news!

So, I upload pictures and bite my nails while I wait…

Temporary Insanity?

2012-01-08 23:30:26

Many of you might have noticed that there was an outage today… Yes, it was my fault. I was too anxious and didn’t wait the proper amount of time.

Let me ‘splain.

For the last year or so, I’ve been using GoDaddy.com as my registrar. Before that, I used a service called easyDNS.com. EasyDNS.com not only was my registrar, but they provided some additional services, the critical one of which was a backup MX service. What this does is that if your main email server is down, they will hold the emails until it comes back up. But, last year I decided to move to GoDaddy.com due to cost. They are much cheaper, but they don’t offer the backup MX service. That means that every time my server reboots or is offline due to a power outage or whatever reason, email doesn’t get delivered. In fact, it gets rejected. When I had easyDNS, this was not a problem.

I have been doing work on the network lately and have been noticing that people were sending us email and we’d never get it. So, today, I re-enabled my old account. I didn’t transfer my registrations, but just signed up for the DNS service. I then immediately turned my DNS server records to point to easyDNS from GoDaddy. This broke everything since I didn’t wait the prescribed six hours. I turned them back and waited after I finished reading to the bottom of the email…

It’s back now and everything is working just fine.

Sorry!

A Glutton For Punishment

2012-01-08 23:30:26

I’m back out in Redmond today [actually, I flew out late Thursday night] so that I could re-take the certification test for the first half of the Directory Ranger program [which, I believe is going to be called “Microsoft Certified Master: Windows Server 2008 Advanced Infrastructure” or some such onerous title]. I think I passed it this time. Last time, I missed a certain topic because I was sick for the first half of the first week.

But, I didn’t just fly out for the test. I came EARLY for the test. I came out because I’m going to sit in the same room with mostly the same people and go through the second half of the program, which I’m told will be the Directory-specific portion of the program. I’m really looking forward to that.

So now I’m tired: tired of being in this room for 12 hours; tired of smelling whatever that smell is; and tired of looking at this screen. I’m just tired, too. I’m going now. I’ll be going back to the hotel and then to get some food.

And sleep… Especially sleep.

I miss Laura, too. 😦

Virtually Configured

You may have noticed a short (3 hour) outage tonight… or not. The web server, as you know, was virtualized a couple of weeks ago. However, it was taking up space on my file server – over 250GB of space. So, I took the old hard drive out of the physical web server and installed it in the Virtual Server machine and moved the virtual hard drive files to that disk, making it dedicated for the web server only.

Voila! It’s a little faster now as well.

When It Rains…

Now that the Fridge is fixed, what should break but the car?

Driving home, Laura noticed some strange problems like the radio/CD player cutting out and the AC shutting off. Worse things happened as the day wore on, so we took it in yesterday. I hope the damage is not too bad.

At least we get a loaner car. It’s rather nice. Ours is nicer, but they gave us a green 323i.

Dead Fridge and Virtualization

2012-01-08 23:30:25

This Sunday, while we had a visitor staying with us, our refrigerator [not really ours, per se – it comes with the house] died a slow, quiet death. We first noticed about lunch time when the ice seemed to be low and the cubes not as hard as usual. This was followed by a series of significant glances at each other and the mopping up of excess glacier melt in the kitchen over the next hour. Fortunately, our neighbors volunteered to host our frozen stash until such time as the box gets repaired. That supposedly happened today. I say supposedly since it takes time for the interior to get cold again.

I don’t think we lost much since we put most frozen things in our neighbors’ freezer and the cool items in coolers with ice. We’ll see soon, though.

In the mean time, I’ve decided to further virtualize my home network by migrating the web server over to a virtual machine. That’s right: you’re now reading this web page not on a physical server, but on a virtual one [actually, it’s possible you’re still reading this on the old server if you read this within 30 minutes of the post since I’m still running the conversion as I type]. This means that I will have virtualized 3 servers and been able to remove two whole boxes from my network. That’s more electricity saved – and more fun had doing it!

Now, I must return to the geekfest…