Monthly Archives: November 2008

Day 10 – Well, that was fun. In a not-so-fun kinda way

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So, I’m back to normal (ish) today. This weekend was interesting. My total awake count was 21 hours, till I got some sleep. Screwed up my bodyclock a bit, but I’ll be ok by the end of tomorrow.

Took the broken motherboard back to its originating shop in London today (http://www.yoyotech.co.uk). They’ll test it and let me know. I was half hoping they’d test it on the spot, but no such luck. So far they’ve not really impressed me – I probably won’t use them again unless I have to. (They’re website’s annoyed me too much – the ticketing system design is just plain clunky, and the session length is set stupidly low.)

Day 9 – Just gone through the feeling ill stage…

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Managaged to nabb a spare console in-between van’s of servers.

I hate staying up all night – the ‘feeling awful’ stage, the zombie like stage (which is starting to set in) especially. Its not so bad if you’re doing something interesting (like playing computer games), but I’m rarely up this late.

Now I’ve got bad short term memory to look forward to. Time awake so far: 19 hours.

Working…

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I’m sitting on the floor, in our new datacentre, tapping out a quick post. We’re moving servers from one datacentre to our nice shiny new one 🙂

This is the boring stage – waiting for the van to arrive. When it does, it will get manic here, till we calm back down. Unfortunately, I’ve managed to misplace works eeePC’s charger, so when it’s battery runs out I’m not going to be able to post anything till I get back tomorrow.

I’ll be working till 7am tomorrow morning.. By that time I’m going to be a zombie… Wahoo!

Time awake so far: 12 hours 42 minutes.

Day 8 – I’ve not gone to bed yet..

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But, it is 01:06 (And no, this post wasn’t scheduled to appear automatically), so technically, this is day 8!

I’ll probably be posting again later today, about what I’m up to tonight. (May not have the time, though, so this is my insurance 🙂 ) I realized, staring at the image, that I’ve not said anything about my About box.

I added an about box with some really basic information about me, as I saw some when I was wandering randomly through the NaBloPoMo’s blogroll, and thought it was a good idea. I did try searching for ages for a good, nice image of me, without any luck, so I decided to use an old photo I took randomly whilst I was in Wales. 1 There’s probably a half-decent one I can use on my external hard-drive, but I won’t use that until I’ve got my new computer set-up – it contains the only copy of data (and photos) held from my previous computer (till it died ’cause the SATA RAID2 card decided to go up the wall.3).

Also, as you’ve probably noticed, I’m using footnotes! A friend asked me to look over his blog, and I recommended that he explain some of the more `in the know` details with footnotes. So, I might as well use them here. I’m sure some of the people hitting my blog don’t know what RAID is. Even if they just hit it and then leave again.

I’ll link you to his blog – Warning – it is aimed at students of Theology / Pastors. Whilst they try to make things accessible, they won’t be easy. They *may*, if necessary drop into analysing the root greek or hebrew. Feel free to comment and ask questions about things you’re not sure about – they’re not monsters and won’t bite your hand off! Here it is: http://readbetterpreachbetter.com/

Heh, you can tell their blog was setup by a techie: the main domain is NOT www., but the plain domain 🙂 Ah, someone who understands the truth: there is no need for WWW.domain.com

Time awake so far: 17 hours, 30 minutes.

  1. I’d left the office of my then job, and wandered round a muddy, waterlogged park during my lunchtime. I got some good photos – the weir photos were taken then. But I made my shoes and trousers muddy 🙁 ↩
  2. Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks ↩
  3. It wasn’t using RAID at the time. ↩

Day 7 – A week & building pcs

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Wahoo! I’ve been able to post every day for a week! I wasn’t quite sure that I’d manage it. I’ve come quite close (half an hour) to failing.

Had some advise and help from a colleague working on my new desktop – pulled the motherboard back out of the case, and rested it on the anti-static bag. Plugging it back into the PSU, and then using the on-board power button (Yay, don’t need to use a screwdriver 😉 ) to initiate it. But, the same thing that happened as in the case – power flicked the CPU fan and on-board led lit up, but the system didn’t POST.

So, with the CPU socket clear, the board is DOA1. So, I guess I won’t be playing RA3 for a while.

Here’s two photos, as asked 🙂

  1. Dead On Arrival aka never worked properly ↩

Day 6 – Kicking hardware into working

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I spent this evening building my new computer, getting it all plugged in with the cables tidied away in a small (read a little too small) case.

3 hours later, everything is connected. Moment of truth… and nothing happens. Red light on the motherboard, not POSTing. 1 On initial power, the CPU fan twitches.

I’ve seen this one happen once before – the motherboard is probably touching the case. (A hardware guy at work also suggested that it might be fluff in the CPU socket, bent or damaged pin.) You can get plastic sheets to put under the motherboard. Last time, I and my brother used sellatape – put it over the pillers the motherboard is raised on, and then screwed through the sellatape. Before I try something quite that drastic though, tomorrow evening I’ll try taking the board out and check its raise clear from the case. I’ll probably also remove one or two of the pillers.

I did mean to take pictures of building it, but then I though, who would be interested?!  Heh, I’m just dumping this from my mind as I haven’t had time to prepare anything else… If this is actually interesting to you, please comment 😉

  1. The Power On Self Test is the basic test a computer goes through when you switch it on. Hardware information is displayed on the screen (unless its been replaced with a logo), and at the end of it, it normally beeps if its OK. Otherwise, it doesn’t make a sound. ↩

Day 5 – Datacentre work

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Today, I was planning on scanning through NaBlogPoMo’s blogroll and pick out a couple of good ones. However, life always likes to intervene, and at about 1730 a server decided to fail. Wouldn’t boot up, nothing on the console.

As I’m on call this week, it was my turn to head into the datacentre, to have a look and try to fix it. For some reason, whilst it was showing network lights (so the network card was obviously initialized), it wouldn’t show anything, nor would it respond at all to server commands. I was planning to switch the hard-drives into a spare server, but a colleague of mine called to say that I should first reset the BIOS. (Take the battery out, short the contacts).

In the end, doing that cleared the problem, and the server came back online OK. A little confused – it thought it was 1400, rather than 2100, but apart from that it was fine.

I’ve only ever seen that trick work once before, on an old desktop machine. Still, that’s a good thing to try – if the BIOS confuses itself into oblivion, you can reset it by taking the battery out and shorting the contacts. (With a screwdriver is normally easiest – you’ll probably just have used it to open the case.)

Another hardware trick I often use, I’m not sure how relevant this will be if you’re not in the UK – Plug the computer you’re going to work on into a power socket, but make sure the socket is off at the switch. The earth pin is never disconnected – the switch will only ever interrupt the power flow, not the earth. So, if you’re not sure about static electricity in your environment, its a good way of making sure you’re clean – as the earth will be connected to the computer’s case via the PSU 🙂

A quick spelling / grammar question to those reading – is “online” a valid word, or should it be written “on-line”? I’m never certain, but my spell checker seems to think that it should be “on-line”…

Day 4 – Falling back to the meta-referance

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Last night I posted on twitter that I was struggling to find stuff to post about. jkblacker (Not bassets, sorry Josh!) suggested that I post about how I’m finding it hard to find stuff to post about… so here it is 😉

Not exactly the most spectacular day 4, especially since I’ve got 26 left to go, but we’ll see what happens.

Parts for my new computer started arriving today. I’d hoped that it would all arrive, but unfortunately not. So, right now I’ve got RAM, the PSU, Motherboard, CPU cooler and a copy of Windows. (Yes, I know, horrible, but I’m building a gaming machine, wine isn’t there yet, and Linux hasn’t reached critical mass 🙁 )

Sporadically over the past week or so, I’ve been trying to use search and replace in vi/vim. Finally got it drummed into my head! Here’s the syntax for single item search and replace:

:%s/OLDSTRING/NEWSTRING/

If you want to replace every item in a document, then add “g” to the very end. “g” in this context means “greedy” – i.e. replace everything. (Thanks JPE – I did learn it after all!)

This is the same sort of syntax as usable in the command line tool “sed”. For example, if you wanted to replace a space in a file with a comma, then you’d do:

sed 's/ /,/g' oldfile > newfile

I’m sure there’s a better way to specify that syntax… please feel free to comment 🙂

Day 3 – Web Comics

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Good Evening happy people 🙂 I do so like Mondays 😀

For those of you who are reading this from the Ubuntu-UK planet – I’ve limited my blogs feed, so that I don’t spam you all with rambling on other subjects than Ubuntu (mainly), especially whilst I’m trying to blog once a day this month. I’ve sent this one, as I think it might be interesting to you. If you want to read my full writings, head here: https://kirrus.co.uk/ or get your RSS here: https://kirrus.co.uk/feed/

So, Web Comics. This is going to be a list of the ones I read. If you know of any good ones I’ve missed out, let me know!

http://www.xkcd.com – Nice fun stick men comic, which has a large following amongst geeks. I expect that most people reading this blog will have already seen this. (sudo sandwich!) Updates Monday / Wednesday / Friday.

http://www.cad-comic.com – Gaming / Youth / Odd / Interesting. That about sums it up. Updates Monday / Wednesday / Friday

http://www.crimsondark.com – Sci-Fi comic, another basically CG, but lots more hand-work involved than dreamland. Has got a very catching storyline. Updates Mondays

http://www.freakangels.com/ – Updates Fridays with 5-6 pages, nice one to end the working week with. Created by a professional, and is very good.

http://www.thedreamlandchronicles.com – Basic good v.s evil storyline, graphics are all CG. Updates Monday – Friday.

http://www.jaydenandcrusader.com – Hosted by me (so I’m biased), but still, its very good. Its also quite fun watching as the artist getting better at his work. (And quite amazing – look at the first comic, and the last!) Updates Mondays.

http://www.gpf-comics.com – A good comic by a sysadmin. Expect lots of technical computing themes and references. Of late, I’ve been ignoring the updates – the current storyline just doesn’t catch me. Maybe I’ve read Harry Potter too many times 😉 Updates Monday / Wednesday / Friday

A couple of comics, I’ve started reading and dropped. Two examples would be misfile and earthsong.

Day 2: Church

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Yay! I’m actually going to get to church this week, for the first time in 4 weeks 🙂

(Yes, for those readers who don’t know, I’m a Christian)

Reasons I haven’t been to church the past 3 weeks:

  • Week 1: Moving servers from old datacentre to new one
  • Week 2: On-call busy weekend. Worked 22 hours in 24, I was asleep Sunday morning. There’s a story in that itself…
  • Week 3: Moving servers again. Yay, 2 down, 1 to go.

So this week I get to go to church, and next weekend I don’t, as we’ve got the last server move. I’ve been trying to find a new church at the moment, which is harder than it sounds in London. At the moment, I’m going to one that my friend (and old youthleader) Roger is working for 🙂

If anyone reading knows Rog and Terry – Roger has picked up Terry’s ‘Bones’ 😉

Week 2’s story… A server failed during the day (partitions went read-only) and so I had to go to the datacentre, to replace the hardware. (That was when I was twittering about a debian install being stubborn about picking up mirrors. In the end, a reboot and reinstall from scratch sorted it – its routing table was stuffed.) Started to go in at 2000 Saturday, arrived back in town at about 0030 Sunday. ish.

Anyway, that’s enough rambling. I need to run to catch the tube 🙂 Hopefully tomorow’s blog will have a bit more content and a little less rambling 🙂