New Coke: The Home Network

We've got some new machines for the inventory:

• 192.168.22.3: IRIE bare metal, an HP Pavilion Slimline configured to run either CentOS Xen or Windows XP SP3 from the RIT CS Department. Running Xen is a preferred configuration, but with one major deficiency: after all driver issues have been resolved, I'm left with a setup that can't play movies and boots flash videos! Bummer. At least it makes a good fileserver.
  
• 192.168.22.48: WinXPSP3 xen cfg, boots under CentOS 5.3 Xen dom0 where everything works fine but network video performance is slow. One minor problem is a clock skew: the system reads UTC time properly from a registry hack, but when the system is left alone for a while, the clock flies ahead by four hours and has to be reset before kerberos authentication can connect to the OpenAFS cell hosted on debunst.rit.edu
  
• 192.168.22.1: The router that needs to do the magic so you can connect to either of those new machines on my home network. It's a Linksys RVS4000!
  
• 74.74.157.120: The public IP address of my home network.

The list of machines at the office needs to be updated, and a service catalog is soon to be extant.
Customers inquiring about the current state of the system: you can understand that the system is currently in use, and that a new shared instance can be provided at your request, but you should expect an expense of $300-600 for a server of similar quality delivered to your location. Configuration is a further expense that pertains to the state of the system, and I earmark this task at $200 per machine. You can run linux, you can resell services, and you ought to, if you like to help people and make money!

Shoes from China

I have agreed to purchase some shoes from a vendor in China. The check is in the mail, as soon as the bank holiday is over I intend to cash it and the money will be delivered via Western Union. I hope there's nothing illegal about this, it feels somehow scandalous in my experience! Think about cleaning houses...

My favorite house was the one which contained so much dirt beneath the rugs, I was nearly certain that I had begun pulling up foundation from beneath the floorboards! I pulled quite easily 10 bags of hair, dirt and sand from beneath an area rug no bigger than an 10x10' area! The family owned a Dyson if I remember correctly, and the maiden of the house was so happy with her previous purchase that I didn't have the heart to sell her another vacuum cleaner that I knew she wouldn't use anyway.

As I was saying before, when you clean your house, you want to finish at the end of the day and have a clean house! It's not like weeding a garden, especially if you've planted something from seed and you don't know what to expect the sprouts to look like. I have to familiarize myself with the appearance of Zucchini, Lavender, Catnip, Eggplant, Spinach, Tomato, and one other plant whose name escapes me. If I fail, I risk pulling the very seeds I wish to sow! Then what will these animals eat?

More notes on immigration reform soon.

Yours truly,
Kingdon

Essential Network Services

OK been living without things I once considered to be critical network services for well over a week at this point, now it's time for a state of the network address:

• Revision Control SVN: UP
• RAID5 Samba Shares: DOWN
• LVM Samba Shares: DOWN
• Futuristic Video Portal: UP
• Mac Mini VPN Router: DOWN
  

Called out a raindance on my facebook Posted Items, and I've got my umbrella shared in Google Reader. Thanks for all of the websites!

• RSS Workspace: UP
  
• Rain on Garden: UP

• Headphones: OK

The headphones are actually still chilling in main office with the broken keyboard. I want to get a Chat50 for my home, the headphones are goofy looking.

In the office: three machines are up and running on a production basis: Sheng, Hobo11, and Grandma. Grandma is the new router, and Whiteruby is in pieces scattered across the floor. Blackruby is similarly disconnected, both have no apparent purpose and will make fine workstations. Akhira is not booting for reasons still unknown, and the Indigo2 is chilling in the corner, working just fine but nobody knows the password to see what it's doing.

VMWare Server is still down, on account of the SAMBA breakage has taken out access to all of the Virtual Machine images.

Subversion is back up and running, and we have bypassed LAMP. Hobo11 is the primary Apache Server for now.

Tomorrow, install Ubuntu on Blackruby and see how much space we can muster across a VPN, and how much data we can recover onto reliable disks. Hopefully Wednesday has not lost anything permanently!