Category: Life News

Server Down and Snow Gone

Some of you may have noticed the server and my other hosted sites were down all day yesterday. I apologize, but now at least I know what the problem was. My RAID card is flaky. There’s no other way around it. I need to replace it. We’ll have to see how it goes, and I’ll have to figure out how I want to do things.

In other news, the snow that has been piled up for so long has now mostly melted away. Except for the brisk temperature today, we look like we’re slowly on our way to Spring. The flowers are even blooming now… well, the early ones are anyway. It may freeze again, but that will be on the way to a more long-lasting warmth.

Has Spring Come?

It’s now 61 degrees outside and the last of the ice and snow are finally melting. Are we headed into Spring? Maybe so. If so, some good motorcycle road trips might start to happen. I’ve been riding to work for most of the week – enjoying the nice mild weather. [By “mild”, I mean warmer than freezing which could entail the upper 30s or lower 40s]
In fact, I’m really tempted to leave the office early to go home by way of a two-hour side trip… even though my total commute time from the office is really less than 10 minutes. I don’t think I will though. I’d rather go home and hang out with Laura. 🙂

More Server Trouble

2012-01-08 23:29:58

For some time now, I have been attempting to explain the seemingly random reboots of my email server [this doesn’t include or affect the web server]. I’ve narrowed it down to a few remaining hardware devices and their related drivers. It’s not the CPU, nor RAM, and maybe not the Motherboard, although I’m not quite sold on that one. What is left after you remove all of those [and HDDs and power supplies don’t cause these kinds of crashes] is the video adapter and the RAID card, not the on-board RAID.

So: in order to eliminate another factor, I moved the system drive from the on-board SATA controller to the RAID card last night. I had one glitch – it rebooted 30 minutes after I set it up, but that may be other factors. I flashed the motherboard BIOS, and updated the RAID drivers to the most current version. After that last reboot, I’ve seen no change or reboot so far. I was concerned that I’d come down this morning to a blue screen, but that didn’t happen. If it did, I would know that the RAID card has been the problem the whole time. However, all is sill up in the air.

Again, I wait. I wait and see if the server crashes. I wait and see if I have to either replace the motherboard or RAID card. If it works like it did before, rebooting on occasion, moving the drives tells me nothing. If it stops rebooting all together, moving the drives tells me the motheboard is bad. Perhaps if nothing changes, the problem is the RAID card. I don’t know.

I’m going to check the warranty and see what the time limit is. Maybe I can send it back for replacement…

Less Is More

I’ve now gone through a few more directories of pictures in my backlog, and I have to say that Lightroom is most helpful in letting me do this in one application. I was able to process and post several pictures including some pictures from the most recent ice storm.

So, now, I have a few less pictures than 11,261 after deleting some bad ones. It’s now closer to 11,178… That’s some progress, at least.

Uh-Oh…

The snow has stopped, so I went out to shovel the driveway and porch. Just as I was finishing, there was renewed percipitation. It was a wet frozen rain. So – now that we’ve gotten the snow out of our driveways in my street, we have to wait and wonder if the streets will ice up with this new layer of slickness that’s out there.

And I really hope it doesn’t affect the inbound flights – so far, we’re okay.

Blizzard!

Today, Laura is due to fly back from Texas, but I’m worried. I’m worried because the ground and roads look worse than the picture above and it’s still coming down. I have Continental and Dulles Airport web pages open for easy refresh to give me status, but I’m doubtful that they can stay ahead of as much snow is coming down. They said we were only supposed to have 1 inch or so. We’ve passed 6 or 7 so far.

There’s so much snow, that I can’t even pick up the Weather Channel – so much for satelite TV.

11,261

That’s how many digital pictures I have – and those aren’t the copies, just single shots – all originals. If you add the copies, well, maybe triple that number.

I’ve been playing with Adobe Lightroom and it has this wonderful feature which counts all the pictures you load into it, and I’ve loaded all of mine. I think… So I’m working on my backlog and I’ve already processed a couple of directories, but I have over 30 to go before I even begin to go back to the main archive to start taging, or labeling my photos with categories for easy searching.

Of course, this doesn’t include most of my film shots. Although some are scanned, most are not. Well, maybe later I’ll do some scanning. Much later.

Down It Comes… Again.

Today, there were supposed to be “light flurries”, but what is going on outside is far from light. We’ve got what looks like an inch of snow so far with more coming – and fast too. It’s coming down so hard, it is like fog: I can’t see the other side of the street.

It’s slowed down since I wrote that, but it’s still coming down. Maybe I’ll have to work from home tomorrow. After all – it is a holiday.