10:30 AM Greetings...

The new laptop works like a charm. SCOOTER is an IBM Thinkpad T20, with a Pentium III 700 Mhz Coppermine processor, 256 MB of RAM, and a 12 GB hard drive. It's now running Windows 2000 Professional, Service Pack 1, and doing quite well at it, too.

I didn't have any MAJOR problems installing things on this machine; There was a problem with the hard drive, where Win2k install wouldn't format a partition. About the fourth time around, I noticed that the partition it was trying to format was D:, not C:, and there were apparently 7 MB of "unformatted" space that couldn't be accessed at the front of the drive. So, it seemed to me that there must be a problem with the partition table that Win2k's installation program couldn't figure out. This looked like a job for... fdisk!

Only I didn't have it. A coworker had run off with my book of CDs, which included my emergency boot floppies. (Severe beatings ensued, but not until yesterday morning, when he returned.) Hmm. A flip through the emergency stash of CDs turned up a Win2k cd, but no boot floppies.

Well, there were the IBM-provided "restoration" cds. Those were worth a look. Pop one into the machine... ah, a proprietary DOS-based menu system, select what you want to install, and it does it for you. How quaint. But the important bit is that it loads Windows 98 to do it. This is workable...

So, reboot with the restoration cd, and hit F8 on the "Starting Windows 98" line. Sure enough, there's the familiar menu. Start Command Line Only... fails. Loads the IBM menu app. Hmm. Reboot, try that again. Command Line Safe Mode... perfect. Now, is fdisk loaded... yes, indeed it is. And yes, there's a partition there, a 7 MB Primary Dos Partition with no volume label and 99% used, according to fdisk. Blow that away, the extended partition Windows tried to create as well, and just for good measure, blow away the mbr with "fdisk /mbr". Reboot, this time with the Windows 2000 cd... success. No problems at all on the install.

Now, I can already hear some of you asking... why SCOOTER? Simple enough. The naming scheme here at Siebel for workstations is first initial, last name, number if you have more than one machine. For servers, it's a three-letter code for the office, a two-letter domain code, and another code for the function of the server, plus a number. Reasonable. Rational. And impossible to remember.

I don't know about you, but I have trouble remembering whether the file I want is on PHXHQSRV01 or PHXHQSRV02. I can, however, easily remember the difference between BERT and ERNIE. So here, we've got a double-naming system; one that no one knows or remembers, but goes in the reports and is reported to the WINS server, and another that we really use in everyone's LMHOSTS file. Perhaps some day, an outbreak of common sense will strike, and the two will be reconciled... but don't hold your breath.

In any event, the names that we use for the machines are selected from the Muppets. Old ones only, please, no Elmo's allowed - in fact, no muppets created since Jim Henson's death. As I mentioned, we have BERT and ERNIE, there's also a KERMIT and a MISSPIGGY. ANIMAL is in the corner, DRHONEYDEW and BEAKER are in the other room, and SAM is the internal interface on the firewall. When I was trying to figure out a fitting name for this laptop, a friend suggested SCOOTER - and, well, it just seems to fit.

I'm not running Linux on this laptop at all; it's certified for use with Linux, and a friend has both Linux and FreeBSD running on his, but I don't want to spend the disk space on it. Instead, we have another spare laptop - another 570E like my old one - That I am installing Mandrake 7.1 on. I can actually carry two laptops in the new laptop bag and still have it weigh less than the old laptop and bag did. This is somewhat frightening.

In fact, I already have Mandrake up and running, ready to rock. I'm going to install a few applications on it, and put it away for the day; I don't even have everything I need here on SCOOTER yet.

Later all...

Late It's been a long day...

I spent most of my day discovering problems with the construction plans. Have I mentioned we're already under construction? This is not a good time to find problems. But the contractors and I spent two hours going through the electrical plans, the mechanical drawings, and swearing a lot. It would seem that either there was a complete breakdown in communication between Siebel and the electrical engineer (possible) or said engineer was not clear on the funtion of the server room. To list just a few major problems, the power for all six fully-populated server racks was a single 20 amp circuit. The outlets for that circuit - all six of them - are on the wall behind where the racks will go. BAD spot for them. They should be in the ceiling over the racks.

Those are only two of the problems. I THINK we have everything reworked into something useable on paper, by the middle of next week I hope to be able to give the contractors the updated plans. If we can manage that, then there will be no delay in construction. Or not much.

Then once that's done, I have about six weeks to get everything whipped into shape and move across the continent. Well, at least it's the short way, this time. <G>

And now, it's officially Friday and I have work yet to finish. Sigh. OK, back to it...