Had a great night Friday with the Trivia Night, and lost badly. Saturday night went to the youth Mass at St Peter Julian’s in Mooroolbark and then round to one of the parishoners for dinner afterwards. Sunday spent the day relaxing until it was time to go to Cornerstone (our music ministry) & Mass.
Tomorow I’m off to a Trivia night with our friend Dianne. I’ve been on the winning team at 2 of the last three Trivia nights I’ve been to, though the prize I won at the last one was a bottle of Queen Adelaide Chardonnay. 🙁
I’ve been rather busy running WebBench tests on all the servers. I had to end up running the CGI benchmarks as well, because the static tests were pushing the limits of the switch. I unboxed one of the vendors machines and was rather happy to find they had installed Red Hat Linux. I’m going to take one of the machines that has 2000 on it and reinstall with Red Hat, so I can compare both on the same hardware. I’m most of the way through installing all the Win32 software on my machine. When I finish, I’ll Ghost it onto my new 20GB disk and the install Linux on the other half.
Oh My God, I’m soooo embarrassed.. I just sent a letter sized print job to the printer, and wondered why it never came out! Now I know this is a bad day. Having said that, the WebBench tests are running much better now that we chucked out some of the older machines we were using as clients and replaces them with a few newer machines we had lying around. My desktop is running again, there were a few problems earlier, you have to run some of the critical updates to Windows ME before you can install the Netware client. Now it all works fine.
Maybe I should just not be near anything electronic at all. WebBench is still not working, but the most painful thing of all is that the hard disk on my main computer at work failed totally during the night. The machine was just sitting there with Invalid boot disk” on the screen and I knew something was up!! I turned the machine off and back on again, and the hard disk gave a nice loud CLICK and that was about it. I did manage to get it to try and start once, but it failed again after a minute or so. Oh well, another hard disk and a re-install is proceeding
Hmm, today must be a bad day for electricity. 🙁 While recompiling the kernel and doing some surfing, I decided to put the little heater on in the office because it is about 5 Degrees (Celsius). I came back from helping to make dinner to find that the heater had blown the circuit breaker on the power board that the power board for the heater was plugged into (YES, two power boards..) This caused my desktop machine and the server to die horribly, so I had to hit the reset button on the powerboard and start everything back up again. The server was happily compiling again when I left for Jase & Mon’s house
Today I decided to recompile the kernel on my home server, seeing as I am no longer relying on it for dial-up. Hopefully this time I can get it right. Last time there were no new modules, but this time I’ve gone from the top with: make menuconfig, make dep, make clean, make bzImage, make modules, make modules_install that I got from http://www.linuxnewbie.org/nhf/intel/compiling/kernelcomp.html. It takes rather a long time on the P66 with 24MB RAM that I use as a server, but basically that was enough hardware to route my old dialup and act as a file server.
I hate Ziff Davis Media’s Web Bench! I’ve spent 2 1/2 days trying to benchmark just one server, but the clients keep falling over. If I ever get it to work, I’ve got 5 more servers to do after that. On the up side, I’ve had 30 odd minutes between starting each test and when it crashes, so it means I can do things like working out how to create this blog and moving all my web pages to the www.geekzone.com.au server . I also worked out how to do a redirect in Apache, so if you go to the old page, you will get the new page.
Well, I’ve got my test ADSL connection up and running, after a little bit of playing around last night. The speeds seem pretty good, though I’m spoilt by having a 100Mb/sec connection in the office.. Then I had to turn all my computers off anyway because we are having the entire electrical switchboard in our house replaced so that we can have a fan/heater/light installed in the bathroom. After spending $5500 on the underpinning, what is another $6-700 for some electrical work?
I found a site that teaches basic electronic theory, which has always been an interest of mine. Be warned though, it is pretty heavy going and I had to stop after just 2 pages!!