This weekend...

I managed to get a lot done this weekend...

The HP 6500 inkjet printer we've been using for about 2 years now has suprisingly started having fits - It's misfeeding, generating skewed images on the paper and sometimes taking too many sheets. Hopefully it just needs a cleanup.

This printer has hung on Lucy, a little PC sitting in my wifes office that also runs the flat bed scanner. I tried to remote into Lucy when this problem first occured, and also when I was rolling out the monowall and she wouldn't respond - seeing as lucy didn't have a monitor or keyboard plugged into her this required I pull the whole box.

I pulled her out and brought her down to the lab - managed to log in locally with no problem - only to find the FUCKING WINDOWS FIREWALL had been enabled on the LAN connection - I didn't do it, my wife didn't do it - fuck you microsoft!

Anyway - I was able to shut it down and remote in as usual with few modifications. I also blew out the hardware while I had it down just for good measure and configured all the new routing/IP stuff for the new network configuration.

I installed an HP 5500 printer I'd gotten from someone else and stuffed it all back into the corner of the office. Seems to be running great until MS decides how to configure their software on my machine again without telling me...sigh... Is it REALLY necessary to run a group policy to disable the firewall on my AD? I mean, c'mon!

While Lucy was purring away I saw an opportunity to get some more work done on the rack. I mounted the two new 8 switch/outlet power strips. It started getting confusing when I realized that Cricket plugged into LAN port 9, Power Switch 4 and KVM Port 1 - So I pretty much stripped the rack again - Now Cricket is on 1 - Magrathea on 2 and so on - they all match up and is much cleaner, I think, than my previous plan of printing out little labels for everything...lol.

I got the small hard drive swapped out of magrathea, grabbed a 4GB drive from the graveyard and got it up and running in short order - copied everything across. Got up the next morning and tried to connect to it - errors? Checked the application - apparently the Software RAID had failed. Could of happened for a couple of reasons:

1) I set the drives to power down after 30 minutes - I'm thinking they are slow to wake up and this caused a synch error.

2)The drives I'm using are just too slow and aren't capable of keeping up with the demands placed on them.

So, I wiped it...again... and reloaded FreeNAS - I set up the drives to be 'always on' I'll see how it works. If it doesn't work I'll have to make a decision...

Do I just add the individual 185GB drives and keep them as two seperate volumes in FreeNAS? This kind of defeats the purpose of being long term storage, without raid I'm prone to data loss. I don't want to cludge over any kind of disk mirroring, FreeNAS should be capable of that anyway, right?

I'm also thinking about picking up a cheap PCI IDE Raid controller of some sort, build the raid at the hardware level and just feed it to FreeNas as a single volume. This is the first software raid I've tried to configure in FreeNAS and it's a pain in my ass. Hardware raids have all worked flawlessly.

Anyway, I gotta get a fresh can of compressed air and find something that will soften up those rollers on the 6500 printer so we can get it back into service... I'm really getting tired of disposable printers. Of course having spent about 6 hours tearing down a HP 8500 laserjet at work on Friday to find a damaged sprocket on the developer feeder doesnt' make me too fond of HP at the moment either...

I also got called over to my in-laws house. A couple weeks back I helped Dave, my father-in-law, order a new DVD Burner and a bigger IDE HDD and they came in this week. I was pretty impressed, he had managed to get both drives installed and had windows formatting the new hard disk by the time I got there. He had a few questions about junk mail rules and address books in Thunderbird and some text size settings for Firefox. Quick and easy housecall.