A Day Late

Nate, my old roommate, has finally come around and setup a weblog. He also has ambitions to create quite the personal website, from what I can gather. Nate advised me to expect “great things” to come to “the wolfley.com.” It’ll be one to keep an eye on. Nate brings with him a wealth of knowledge about music and art (after all he has worked at the Barnes and Noble music department for a few years now). How much does Nate know about music? Well…let’s put it this way. You know the 15gb iPod? I think Nate could easily fill the 30gb model with his collection. Not too mention I’m sure the largest item he moved from our apartment was his box(es) of CD’s. Nate, we expect great things from you.

Over the past week I’ve come to the conclusion that I really don’t like those “friendly” virus notifications some admins have setup on their SMTP servers. You know the ones that show up in your inbox with “A virus was sent from your email address myaddressxy@mydomainxy.com to addressxy@anotherdomainxy.com. Notify your system admin blah blah blah.” Since spoofing the from address in an email is trivial to say the least, I really don’t see the value in these notifications. Assuming they’re kind enough to forward the original message back it takes all of 30 seconds to look at the original header and determine it wasn’t sent from any of my users.

So I end up with calls from panicked users who’ve received these notifications. Most are skeptical when I tell them nothings wrong with their computer, since they continue to receive the notifications. Like I said, I really don’t see any value in these. They just make a bad problem worse. Email worms create enough bandwidth/storage problems, why add to it with worthless, ineffective notifications?

I’m finally rid of the kdebase package I couldn’t seem to get off my server. At first I thought the kernel panic was possibly caused by the multiprocessor kernel. From the searching I did on kernel panics, a lot seem to deal with the smp kernel. I booted into the kernel without smp support and tried to remove the package again, still ended up with a kernel panic. Next I wondered if it could be caused by some file system corruption so I booted to a prompt and ran fsck which uncovered a bunch of errors, one of which dealt with a kde file. I initiated a repair, rebooted and tried the remove again only this time everything seemed to work.

Oh yeah, I also upgraded the kernel. Now I just need to get the UPS system hooked up and I’ll be in good shape.

Mike Jones, another one of my past Professors (an excellent one, by the way) from BYU has a weblog setup. I also had a class from his wife. I see he’s chosen Movable Type, an excellent choice.

I’ve decided I really don’t care for moving, in all aspects. Helping someone else move isn’t great cause it usually means friends or family members are moving away. Of course, if they’re not moving away, just to a different location in the same vicinity it seems like work without much benefit. They’re still here, you’re still here, everyones happy that way, but there happened to be a lot of packing of boxes, moving of furniture, etc that’s just not enjoyable. Well, that’s not it, cause the actual moving can be enjoyable by the association and conversation with friends and family. I guess it’s the fact that when you’re finished it doesn’t feel like you’ve accomplished much. The goal of moving is to essentially end up with the same setup you started with, just in a different place.

Moving on, then there’s the even worse scenario; you’re the one moving. I moved out of my apartment yesterday and I’m still shocked at how much “stuff” I accumulated over the year I lived there. To make the moving process as painless as possible I started gradually moving things over the last few weeks until I reached the “bare essentials” for living. Yesterday I finally decided to bite the bullet and move those “bare essentials” out, leaving my room as empty as when I found it. I ended up filling my explorer from top to bottom. What I thought would take 1 hour to move and unpack has turned into 3+ (I’m not done yet). The thing is, I honestly didn’t have that much stuff to move (compared to some). I can only imagine (in horror) what it’ll be like to move when I’ve accumulated real stuff like furniture and such. That day could be in the not too distant future, scary.

Both my students are gone on vacation which leaves the weekly system backup in my hands. So, here I am on a perfectly good Friday night, loading tapes. Ok, I’ll be honest it’s not like I’d be doing anything better if I didn’t have to work. Now I’m left with the dilemna of what to do for the next four hours (9pm-1am). I thought about renting a movie but I can’t think of much I want to see right now. I bought a new book the other day, Linux Server Hacks, and haven’t had much time to look through it so that’s an option. I’ll probably end up working on my powerbook. I need to setup a simple script using rsync and ssh to synchronize my public web folder on the server with a directory on my powerbook, but I’m guessing that’ll take all of 15 minutes. I just remembered I didn’t eat dinner, so a walk down to Wendy’s, or the DQ (”always a place for me at the DQ”, those who can name that movie get extra points) or one of the many other eating establishments might be called for. Ah the joys of working the Friday night backup shift. Although it’s not something I like to do on a regular basis I have to admit it’s nice to have the place to myself.

I’m moving out of my apartment in about a week. So I’ve been going through the process of changing my address for all my credit cards, magazines, etc. With the web, this has become a relatively easy and painless task. Or at least it was till I went to the AT&T Wireless’ site. After much searching and clicking I couldn’t find anywhere to change the address on my account. I finally decided I’d just have to call or mail something in. I also tried checking the details on my last bill but ended up with a bunch of page errors instead. It would be one thing if this was uncommon but it seems like everytime I login there’s always something broken on the site. Last month I tried to pay my bill and it took a few days to finally get it done cause the payment module wasn’t working the previous 2 days.

For the most part I’ve been satisfied with my service. For some reason the reception around my apartment has had some issues starting about a month ago, but it’s still better than the service I had with Sprint PCS. I will give Sprint credit though, they had a functional and impressive customer account site. AT&T’s could use a little work.

I converted my blog index page from .html to .php and added a little php script to display the server uptime on the index page. Not for any particular reason, just cause I felt like doing it. Obviously my 33 days uptime isn’t that impressive but when you’re susceptible to regular residential power outages there’s only so much you can do.

With that in mind I invested in a UPS for the server. I decided to go with the APC Back-UPS RS 1500VA model. I plan to connect it to the server, DSL modem and switch so hopefully in the event of a power outage not only will the server stay up the internet connection will too. I figure it should provide about an hour of backup power. I went with APC specifically because they provide linux software to enable the server to automatically shutdown when the battery power gets too low. Very nice.

To hook up the battery I’ll obviously need to take the server down (goodbye uptime). While I’m at it I figure I may as well knock a few other things off the todo list. Like getting rid of that kdebase package that causes a kernel panic everytime I try and remove it using rpm. I figure I may as well upgrade the kernel also. I’m not sure when I’ll do all this. Maybe this weekend maybe the next. It all depends on how much free time I have.