sitzmar! do what now?

a simple agreement

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Okay, I promise. Can I please have a replacement drive now?

vista peeves

I finally googled one of my biggest annoyances in vista: automatic reboots after windows updates.
Turns out it's a simple change using the group policy editor.

Here's the details:

http://4sysops.com/archives/disable-restart-after-windows-automatic-updates/

channel surfing

Last night I used netstumbler to scan for wireless access points in my neighborhood. I found about 6 right away, and then another 5 after moving my wifi usb key closer to the window.

The original reason for my scan was to find out which channels were being used in the area. Not surprising 6, 9 and 11 were the popular options. Also, I was surprised to find that most of them had encryption turned on.

I switched my AP to channel 3, and was pleased to get an extra megabyte/s in throughput, putting me right around 2.2MB/s. I'm curious what performance will be like once we get the other computers upgraded from B to G.

a tale of woe

I came home from work on Tuesday to find our internet connection was down once again. This has been happening with disappointing frequency since we moved into the new house. It always comes back after a few hours, so I busy myself with other things for the rest of the evening.

Wednesday morning, no internet.

Wednesday evening, still no internet.

This is ridiculous, so I decide to call comcast. Mostly to rant, because my previous conversations with their tech support have been oh so helpful. Comcast dude tells me that there's currently an outage in my area and that it should be resolved within 24-48 hours of the initial outage. He credits the account for 3 days of service, so I'm placated for the moment.

Jump ahead two days.

I get home from work on Friday, and we still don't have a working connection. The damn modem continues to taunt me with it's blinking lights. I call comcast again, and this time I'm told that there currently is no outage in my area and, here's the kicker, their logs don't indicate any outages at all this week.

Buh... say what?

After declining his offer to send a technician out to check our lines, I decide to do a little testing of my own. I count no less than 3 splitters between the main feed to our house and the line running inside to the modem. Cripes... who the hell wired this place?? Mounted in the center of the wiring box sits a small grey signal booster. I rig up various configurations, moving cables, removing splitters, trying to find some combination that will bring the internet back into my home. Finally, I simply remove the signal booster from the path, and magically service returned! I reconnect everything back to the original configuration, sans booster, and check again to make sure I wasn't imagining it.

It was no delusion, just sweet sweet success!

So let this be a lesson kids, cable modems hate signal boosters. And if the technician installing your cable internet tells you that a signal booster "doesn't really hurt anything", you call him a liar, kick him in the nuts, and rip the damn thing out.
You will be much, much happier. Trust me.

another one bites the dust

Looking back through my old posts, it was September when I last had troubles with the primary HD in my bsd box. Well, it started acting up again a few days ago, hardlocking the machine at least once a day, and finally refusing to boot, much like the previous time. So I decided to retire the little guy.

I intended to pickup a cheap drive at a local retailer, but found that even the lower capacity 60 and 80 gig drives cost just as much as a good 250 gig drive does online. Sheesh, what a ripoff!

So I popped over to newegg and picked out a shiny new Hitachi, and then on a whim checked out the canon S3 IS. Whaaa? $40 instant savings?!? Into the cart ya go! I have been meaning to get one of these for a few months now, but that cinched it.

In other news, work is going well. Looking to get my NetApp NACE cert here in the next few weeks. I'll be getting VMWare training sometime in February and Solaris 10 admin cert in March.

Upgraded to Wordpress 2.1 this weekend, and also found a nifty plugin that pulls my most recent flickr photos and sticks them at the top of my main blog feed. I much prefer this to the flickr badge I had in the sidebar. Once my new camera arrives, I'll be putting a lot more stuff up, so keep an eye out.

my friend makes odd requests

yes, I mean you Anders

Installation is…

Ironically enough, it crashed shortly after. So much for progress...

side projects

Over the last few weeks I've been working on a couple projects along with trying to find a job.

First off, the main HD in my BSD box decided to misbehave, and wouldn't boot. This drive is one of the infamous IBM 'deathstar' drives, so I was rather worried that it was done for. But after the Hitachi drive fitness tests came back clean, I started to gain some hope. I was able to successfully mount every slice on the drive except for the root, so the kernel and /etc were toast, but thankfully home directories (the important stuff) was all safe, and I was able to copy everything to a different drive.

I tried to do a repair install on top of the existing one, but was still unable to boot the kernel. It was only after reformatting the drive did the new install 'stick' and I was able to boot. Then came the fun task of getting all of my services back up and running, and setting up a better backup routine. Next time that drive freaks out, I'll be prepared for it.

One thing is for certain though, the best way to learn about something, is to have it break (accidentally or intentionally) and then try to fix it. People wonder how I got so good at this stuff, well... It's because I've been breakingfixing computers for years.

I also spent some time putting together a media box using unused components we had around the house. Here's the rundown:

• Dell XPS R450, Upgraded to a 1.4Ghz P3
• 8.4 GB Hard Drive
• Nvidia GeForce Ti200
• 802.11b wireless usb key (syntax usb-400)
• Creative IR Reciever
• Windows XP
• Media Portal Software
  
• uICE IR Control Software
  

It's nothing fancy, but it gets the job done. The Media Portal software is really quite nice, and was really easy to setup. Only complaints so far is the speed of the interface and the lack of video buffering. I'm not exactly using ancient hardware, but things could be a little snappier, or at the very least there should be an indicator so that I know something is going on. The lack of video buffering can be rather disruptive when streaming over a wireless connection. Any interference (like the microwave) and frames start dropping all over the place.

Using uICE I was able to take the remote that we already use for controlling the receiver and tv, and use its satellite/cable box mode for media box commands. I was impressed how easy uICE made it to capture the remote codes and then assign actions. The only problem I'm still struggling with is getting the network shares mapped properly. Windows tries to reattach mapped drives at login, BUT the wifi connection isn't ready at that point, and so the drives remain in a disconnected state. The media portal software, for whatever reason, doesn't trigger a reconnect attempt, and displays an empty folder. Totally not helpful.

So, what I'm trying to do for a solution is write a batch file that will continually try to ping the router, then when it gets a response, kicks out of the loop and then maps the drives. I've seen some scripts do similar things, so it's just going to take some effort to put them together to do what I want.