by srhuston

I Wish…

Not like there’s any holidays coming soon where it’s necessary, but I put my wish list back on teh Intarweb. I used to have it hosted on the same site as my old website, which was my desktop computer – and it’s actually still there, but that’s not www.srhuston.net anymore. So since WordPress makes page design as easy as I like it (namely, I don’t need to muck about with HTML), I figured I might as well move the wish list there too.

So if you feel like getting me something, have a look. Any donations appreciated :>

by srhuston

Look Ma, No SWRs!

Went down to Delaware yesterday afternoon to fuel two of my habits – one being served by Ham Radio Outlet, and the other by a store next door that sells things by the carton cheaper than in NJ or PA.  Of course, we got there at 16:28, two minutes before they closed, but I wasn’t really there to browse; I had a mission.  Asked for a soldered type N connector, but they’ve been out of them for four months.  Okay, how about a SWR meter that does 2m/440?  He asked how low in frequency I wanted it, and I admitted I’d like it to go to HF.  That one is $200.  Okay, how about just 2m/440?  That one’s $79.95.  So I bought the less expensive SX40C, made by Diamond (who coincidentally made my antenna as well).  Last question was about standoffs for mounting my antenna mast on the house.  Right now, I drove a good 2.5′ of it into the ground, and bolted it around 5′ from the ground, but I’d like another standoff near the top of the house so I could make it taller too – only problem is, the gutter sticks out more than the 4″ that the current standoff gives.  But, they didn’t have any of those either, so I’ll have to check the home improvement and hardware stores in the area I guess.

The good news is, when I got home and installed the SWR meter, I checked the antenna and have barely any reflected power, even when pushing out 100W on 2m or 440MHz.  So I guess that N connector adapter I used which I didn’t like very much is doing a good enough job.  Oh, and I’ll see if I can get some more photos uploaded today, since I haven’t been doing that much and we have a lot more done in the house now :>

by srhuston

Should’ve Stayed In Bed

Didn’t sleep well last night, didn’t wake up well this morning, wasn’t feeling well all morning, left later for work than I like to, knew I’d be out of smokes in a few hours and would have to walk over to get more, and realized halfway here that my wallet is sitting on the counter at home.

Some days it’s just better to turn off the alarm and roll over.

by srhuston

So What?

I went through all the old posts, and put them into categories finally.  And I realized something.  I started entirely too many of my posts with “so”.  Wasn’t quite as bad before I guess, but reading through them all now .. just sounds silly.  Oh well, don’t feel like editing them all to give nice fancy intros.

by srhuston

Whaddya Mean, It’s Not Broken?

That was an interesting few minutes.

This morning, I saw that one of the hosts at work, which is not mine (belongs to HVAC for the control system for the building – tells them about the status of the systems in here, and lets them change things remotely like the temperature of various rooms and such) had gone red and then green again. Now, it was red again, but when I got down there nobody was around next to it. Panel was left open, and you could see the ethernet, serial and power cables where the terminal server used to sit. So I waited, and as soon as I saw it went green I ran downstairs. Since the management station only checks every ~15 minutes for a host’s existance, I was hoping that it came online recently and someone was still sitting next to the box. Sure enough, when I got down there, Nate (I think that was his name, I’m terrible with names – and if somehow you’re reading this and it’s not your name, I apologize) was staring at the blinkenlights and wondering what to do next. I said hello, we exchanged formalities, and I said, “You know, that thing’s not broken.” “Well, we can see it’s there, but we can’t talk to it.” “Yes, I know. But it’s working just fine.”

Continue reading →

by srhuston

HVAC And Switches And Firewalls, Oh My

Well, this morning was a bit busy. We had friends over who left around 10 something, and I finally got to sleep around 1 or so. Then at 0250 my cell phone buzzed. “Main server air intake too high: 77 deg F” Well, let’s see what happens in the next few minutes… same message. As I’m getting dressed to come downstairs and have a look at things, it continues to buzz every few minutes as the environmental sensor sends new traps to the management station. I login to it, and sure enough it’s warm – and even one of the machines in the room complained that its drives were getting hot inside the case. While I’m looking at things, I get the magical page: “Server room *WAY* too hot, shutting down Hydra” [our Beowulf cluster]. After watching to be sure Hydra shut down properly, I put on my shoes and left to head into the office, arriving just before 0400.

Continue reading →

by srhuston

A Tale Of Two Outbacks

No, really, that’s the site name.  My friend and co-worker (okay, technically “employee”, though I do very little bossing around I think) setup a website to track his and our other friend’s new car stories.  Especially timely since they both bought their cars within a week of each other, and they’re identical.  Not perfectly identical, though – Keith had the pinstripe removed from his.  Yes, that’s the only difference.  For now anyway – Leigh is a performance monger, and doing things to get a few more HP out of the engine wouldn’t surprise me.

No, that doesn’t mean “hit points” either.

by srhuston

Big Red Check Screws Up Again – Nobody Surprised

Seems my ISP has once again screwed up my PTR record.. not that long ago, it pointed to the proper hostname for my IP address, and I discovered today that it’s back to pointing to some crappy “static-123-456-78-90” type of hostname.  And of course, there’s no place to email to get it fixed, so I have to dig out the phone number that someone gave me to call them back and try to get it fixed again.  Though at that point I might just demand that I get some kind of email address so I can deal with this on my terms in the future.

C’mon Speakeasy…

by srhuston

Backup? Sure, Where’s Reverse?

This evening marks another landmark in my home computer network setup – I’ve dug out my old tape drives, and am running a backup right now in fact. Been .. hmm, well, we moved to Ewing in October of 2003, so I guess that was my last backup. Never unpacked and hooked up the drives there, ’cause I didn’t have the room. So this evening I crawled behind the desk, again, and hooked up the cables to get the old DLT2000 plugged in. Grabbed one of my tapes and started a backup. Now I have to figure out a backup schedule, since there’s not nearly as much on the home computer anymore to worry about backing it up nightly. Though I could do other funny things, like running monthly and incremental dumps from the laptop over the network, but I’ll worry about that once I figure out what I’m doing with the desktop (Ideally I could backup the laptop to the desktop’s drive, but I don’t know that I have the room on – or faith in – this drive.) Also dug out and plugged in the DDS drive, but I need to tear that one apart like I did the DLT and get the dust out of it. Also hope to leave the drives off when I don’t need them, unlike before when they were on all the time and constantly sucking dust through. Which might explain the strange noises from the DLT right now, but I hope not since I think I got all the dust out of it. And finally I hope to bring home a couple other tape drives that were slated for trash, one of which is a DLT autoloader that holds 5 tapes at once. In theory, I can write a nice live-ish backup script that can shuffle tapes around as needed, and do everything on there.

Oh, and insight to my humor if you don’t know it already – the title of this post?  Old BBS tagline.  The name of my overkill backup script?  /usr/local/sbin/reverse.sh

by srhuston

FileVault Evil

Since my Macbook Pro was giving me some problems a little while ago, I had decided to turn on FileVault for my home directory. This basically takes your entire home directory, and encrypts it to your login password. So if someone gets ahold of the laptop, and they try to access the files in my home directory, they would all be encrypted (it actually does it by making your home directory an encrypted disk image which must be mounted when you login). Since I’d thought I may have to send it in for repair, I figured this was easier than going through and removing SSH keys, sensitive documents, and all things like that which I wouldn’t want someone else to see. Sounds good, right? Well, it was until around Friday night sometime.

Continue reading →