Journal of a Sysadmin

Fedora Core 3-test1

Installed it on rio tonight, only 3 glitches (one fairly major one, two annoying ones). Otherwise everything else came up fine (happy happy joy joy) and rio is purring like a kitten =)

Linux rio.clgy.hardrock.org 2.6.7-1.478 #1 Thu Jul 8 15:02:38 EDT 2004 i686 athlon i386 GNU/Linux
Fedora Core release 2.90 (FC3 Test 1)
00:35:22 up 37 min, 5 users, load average: 0.08, 0.13, 0.11

The day after

Today, no Buffy.

Went for a 10 mile (well, almost 10 miles, 9.6 or something) bike ride, weeded the flower beds, mowed the lawn in the back and trimmed it all. I was even awake at a decent time this morning (8am or so) so all in all I’m feeling really good about myself =)

Only problem is, I’m so bagged now I don’t know if I’ll be able to cook dinner!

Season 7, so that’s that

What are we going to do now jhb?

Buffy Season 6

So, finished Buffy season 6 last night and now we’re on to season 7. I might note that it does get much darker in season 5 and it looks like it’s not going to recover at all… I like my sci-fi-fantasy-comedy-tongue-in-cheek-tv-series to stay that way, turning it into a dark-vampirish-version-of-xfiles show doesn’t do the same thing for me. Although, I do still like the series and we’ll watch season 7 (and the bits of 1 we didn’t watch). In total less then 30 episodes left!

The problem with Linux

One of the problems I find with Linux is that it runs on such a broad range of hardware that you end up keeping old hardware alive and running Linux on it for years, saving you the expense of buying new hardware and of course, getting the last dollar out of every piece of hardware you buy.

Case in point, my main server cafe, or bama, or www, or mail, or what every other name you wish to call it.

[Please note, I am fuzzy on dates here]
This system was put together in stages, over the past 10 years or so. It started its existence in 1994 as a 486DX2, replacing the 386sx16 with 4M and a herc. amber video card. It had 32M of RAM (IIRC) and a 9G quantum drive. All the parts except the memory, drive controller, and drive were used of course. I had (I think it’s still here someplace) an EISA IDE controller card for it which was pretty cool for ‘94, and later picked up a video card to replace the trident ISA card I was using. It was a good system. I also dragged an ISA GVC modem into the mix (28.8) later to replace the internal 2400 baud I had.

It ran X, and all the stuff I needed for school and work, did cslip to work of course and sometime in ‘94 I installed Red Hat 2.1 on it, no not RHEL 2.1 (WS/ES/AS) but the original Red Hat 2.1, released right after 2.0, etc etc. The system has been upgraded or migrated from RH 2.1, to 3, to 4 and through 4, 5, 6, 7, and is now running FC1. There was a stint where I installed other dists as well, Suse (5ish?), and Corel Linux to be specific. I obviously went back to RH, and now Fedora… I like it, it’s comfy and it’s home.

Hardware wise in about ‘97 I found a large tower case with a bigger p/s then the one (250W in a mini-at tower case) I was using. So, I migrated all the hardware to that and bought, a used motherboard and CPU (DX4/100), more ram (64M IIRC) and a pci ATI video card. Really cool.

In ‘99 I needed to replace the DX4 MB so I bought a Redfox upgrade AT motherboard and AMD k6 450 processor and Banshee voodoo video card. Drives had been upgraded and I think I had about 20 or 30G of drive in it at that point. It was again on dialup using the GVC modem (I’d moved to the country where dialup and frame relay were the only available options) and it etrn’d the mail off a mail server and did all those things it needed to do.

At this point, it still has that motherboard, cpu, and video card. I’ve added another 128M of ram to it (now it has 196) and there are 2×60G IBM drives mirrored. It does pretty much everything server side and works…. most of the time.

2 years ago I had a power surge that killed the power conditioning caps on the motherboard. I replaced those with slightly larger ones but they have been working well anyway. I’ve replaced about 4 drives, likely dead because they are IDE and sometimes get a little warm. Yesterday we had a power bump and now the board fails to detect the drives in the bios, although the 2 IBM drives work, and the maxtor 40G drive would be detected on post, but the OS couldn’t see it… To top it off, the keyboard isn’t working right now… cafe is *not* a happy camper.

The 40G maxtor drive is fine, it’s in my workstation now, and so are the 2 mirrored IBM drives, but I think cafe is nearing it’s EOL. See, it’s only been a few years (5 since the last MB upgrade, 2 since the last HDD upgrade, the modem is only about 8 years old, and the power supply is something like about 10 or 11 years old), but of course if I had been running some *other* os I wouldn’t have a problem now. I’d have been forced to upgrade my hardware a long time ago to something current and fast. I would have been required to put a gig or ram in it already (I mean, it does run bind, apache, sendmail, pop/imap, nfs, ldap, kerberos, ftp, xfs, and postgres), and the CPU would have been at least at 1GHz…

Of course, in retrospect I shouldn’t complain… Between the spare parts, used stuff, and bits and bobs in the past 10 years, I’ve spent less on my main server then I would have to spend on a copy of windows XP…

Priced out a new system today, $401.81 (counting parts I can migrate), should get me an AMD athlon, 512M, and new case…. Hope it get’s me along for another 10 years =)

Season 5

Finished season 5, and we’re officially over the 1/2 way point. Only question I have is, wtf will they do with season 6? Today will tell.

Buffy-A-Thon

What’s the best way to start a month long vacation?

Watching some show, now on dvd, that you’ve never seen before of course. So time is spent walking to the vid store, selecting the episodes (in order of course) and downloading those that are no easily findable then the whole task culminates in a week long fest of lying about on the couch and laughing at actresses and actors on the TV. Yes, this years first task is to watch all the episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, from seasons 1 through 7.

At this point we’ve watched all of season 2 and 3, part of season 4 (should finish that one tomorrow night) and part of season 1 (Sunday night maybe?). The video store only has seasons 1 through 4 so we’re downloading 5-7 instead of renting those. The way we see it, 22 episodes in seasons 2 to 7, and 12 in season 1 is a total of 144 episodes at about 45 minutes each is a total of 108 hours of Buffy… At 6 hours average per day it will take us about 18 days total to complete it. Since we’ve already watched 2, 3, and 1/2 of 4 (total of 6.9 days worth) we are someplace around 11 or 12 days left until we finish the entire set. I’ve not watched this much TV since I was a teen at my friends place with his parents satelite dish!

Of course, it’s no fun watching this kind of thing on the computer (since we are downloading some of it) so I rigged the GeForce FX5200 card in rio to have it’s video out go to the VCR and of course sound as well. Works really well, when I’m in normal video mode (1024×768) it doesn’t display to the tv, but if I change to 800×600 or 640×480 it does. Then, I use mplayer in full screen mode and viola, instant digital video to TV. I’ll just have to watch and try and find a video capture card now too, that would be cool, as we’d basically have a digital record/playback system…

Anyway, too much Buffy to watch right now, so that’ll have to wait.