And it's going to be one of those weekends... computer shopping, parts buying, computer building, followed by a game of musical hardware and YANTI'ing. Parts supply is most likely going to be a local place, CompuCare, although if I spot anyplace with better prices, I'll be willing to change my mind. <G>

The plan is (roughly) this:

BRIGID is going to have the small (8 GB) hard drive switched with the 20 GB drive that ANYA currently has as its primary slave. The CD-RW drive is also moving, from ANYA to BRIGID. So the storage configuration when we're done will be 50GB of storage on BRIGID - a fair chunk of it, at least 20GB, shared via SAMBA and NFS - and about 20GB on ANYA. Yes, this means the storage on ANYA will be decreased (by 12 GB, to be exact) but on the other hand, ANYA was hosting the entire combined MP3 collection; that'll now move to BRIGID.

BRIGID is going to get a major upgrade, both motherboard and processor. This will allow me to use BRIGID as a workstation, and allow me to make proper use of the ATA66 drives.

I have had the habit for a long time of changing a box's name when the processor/motherboard combo is replaced. It's part animism/personification (replacing the mobo/processor makes the box a different person) and part mnemonic utility; it helps to finalize in my mind that this box has changed, and memorized behaviors and expectations no longer apply. (By the same token, I don't usually change the name of a box unless I'm making drastic hardware changes.) Which means BRIGID will no longer be BRIGID. What will it be? I don't know yet. I usually name my main workstation MINERVA (yes, Heinlein fans can stop chuckling now <G>) but I haven't done that at work; my main workstations there are a Sun Ultra 10 named "OSSDESK03" and a Dell Latitude laptop named "WAL11014128" - catchy, huh? On the other hand, this isn't going to be my workstation for more than a few months. Gripping hand, MINERVA is the name of an extremely powerful and versatile computer - and that's not this one. Well, we'll figure one out - the name, in order to fit the current scheme, must be a God/Goddess from mythology (Roman, Greek, Norse, Buddhist, Animist, Pagan, or Other) or be a character from Heinlein's novels. Yes, I did use Muppets at Siebel, but that was a work naming scheme - totally different. iTOOL used to use dead composers for servers and Owner's Choice for workstations (including one workstation named SAM_ADAMS, if I recall correctly; and yes, it was for the beer.)

After that, we're going to completely YANTI ANYA. It hasn't been done in... um... a long time. I think it may not have been done since before we got the cable modem in Arizona. At any rate, there are wierd errors, memory leaks, programs that have been installed and upgraded three or four times, other programs that haven't been used in months or longer... it's time to clean-sweep the system and start over. I'm going to make Keri do it, though; if she's still speaking to me at the end of the day, then she'll be able to install Windows 2000 on her own (at least on her own or similar hardware) and know what to watch for. I know she can already handle most of her applications on her own, possibly with a few exceptions that are a bit witchy - but those are mostly things that are still on there from when we shared ANYA, and I don't think she needs them for anything.

And when we're all done, maybe - just maybe everything will be mor eor less working. For now. Until the next day. Perhaps. <G>

Thursday, May 10 - Happy Anniversary, Keri

I know, I'm late. What can I say - it wasn't a bad day, I just never had time to sit down and write. Busy, busy, busy, all day at work. No, we didn't do anything tonight; we're going out to dinner tomorrow night, but otherwise not much. What can I say, we're boring people. <G>

So, anyway... Keri, this is for you.

I'll post again in the morning. See you then.

Wednesday, May 9 - The Road Ahead

OK. Last night was a little bit better, and a little more frustrating all at the same time.

I didn't even touch BRIGID, which is the server I'm intending to install e-smith on. Instead, I concentrated on the laptop. Back to SuSE 7.1... well, at least it works now. Sort of. It's very odd... sound hadn't worked in some time, for reasons that were never very clear to me. After the reinstall, I reapplied my kde settings - and the sound worked. Quite well, too. But overnight I downloaded KDE 2.1.1 and the 2.1.2 libraries, and upgraded this morning - and sound quit working.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't upgrades supposed to improve software?

On the other hand, the laptop does seem to be more stable. I did manage to crash it last night, but that was with a known KDE 2.0.1 problem. If I can get the sound back, and if the stability sticks around, I'll be pretty happy.

On the plus side, I woke up this morning with fragments of a plan that has since become a bit clearer.

I have three computer "problems" right now at home:

• I do not have a reliable workstation
• Network file storage/shared printing is not working properly
• ANYA (Keri's workstation) needs an upgrade

I'm thinking I'll get an inexpensive Duron-based motherboard, processor, and RAM. I'll replace BRIGID's with the new system components, keeping the existing hard drive(s), sound, and so on. Whatever system board I choose will have video onboard and be linux-compatable. I may or may not increase the hard drive storage and add a CD-R drive; we'll see what the prices are like. I will then use BRIGID (which will change names according to an old habit of mine, but that's another story) as my workstation, while still using the same machine to provide network storage and shared printing. It won't be a very good workstation, but it'll be better than the laptop and allow me to spend time on other things, rather than nursing the laptop along. THOTH, the laptop, will still be in use - but not as a main workstation, which it's ill-suited for, anyway. I'm thinking more along the lines of "for use in the living room as an email/browsing/remote access" system only - in fact, I'll probably put Windows back on it so Keri can use it, too.

That way, the network will be stable and I can concentrate on replacing ANYA. The plan is to get Keri a fairly high-end workstation - with all of her graphics work, I think she needs a dual-processor Pentium III system and a fair chunk of RAM - 512 MB minimum. That's not too hard to do. She'll keep her existing video card (a Voodoo 3) or, if we decide to replace it, she'll get something better and I'll keep the Voodoo 3 for myself. I want to leave ANYA more or less intact, though, since I have plans for that, as well. Keri's about to become a two-computer geek. <G> I'm intending to strip ANYA down to the basics - her current CPU and motherboard, of course, a low-end video card, and the smallest of her current hard drives (8 GB). ANYA will then be Keri's "communications" workstation - used for email, IM, and maybe web browsing. Her real workstation will be the new one. That has two effects - one, it allows her to keep Outlook open without affecting Photoshop and her "serious" programs, and two, if a virus trashes her email; well, it's not good, but it doesn't affect her work, either. Someday we might even get her using Linux on ANYA - if we ever get to the point where she wants to try it, ANYA is capable of doing the job, at least.

So, now it's time to find new components for BRIGID. For various reasons I'm not going to go into right now, that means local shopping - but Seattle is a great place for that. Time to go ad-hunting. See you later...

Later...

All set. A local place is offering an ASUS A7PRO motherboard with 800MHz Duron, 128MB RAM, and an off-market video card for less than $300. That's exactly what I need. I feel better already...

Tuesday, May 8 - And the Hits Just Keep On Coming...

I'd intended to post last night concerning my experiments with e-smith and their linux-based server solution. I didn't get a chance to, however, as I had another problem.

First, e-smith didn't work. I could install fine, the entire routine would work, but when it rebooted to configure the newly installed server - nada. LILO wouldn't even finish. I experimented with it a couple of times, and I never got it to reboot. However, I suspect the problem is that e-smith does not like having two hard drives in there, and it's not partitioning well. I'll fix that tonight (or make the attempt to fix it, at least) by pulling one drive and leaving only one device for e-smith to play with.

As I finished playing with that, I decided to write it up for the site and post it. But my laptop crashed. Again. For the fourth time in less than an hour.

This displeased me.

Finally, I decided I'd had enough. I've got cd's of Mandrake 8, and I really liked it on my test system at work... it's worth a shot. I tarball'ed my home directory and scp'd it up to the server; time for a clean sweep. I made a Mandrake 8 boot floppy (the biggest problem with the external PCMCIA DVD drive is that you can't boot from it) and we were off to the races. Yes, it booted OK, no problem. Get into the setup routine, and... the mouse doesn't work. At all. Well, that sucks. OK, let's plug in the serial mouse for the install, I can fix it once I get into the system.

I never got that far. One of the last steps in the install is a "summary" where the timezone, printer, and so on are configured. On the same page, there's a button for the mouse. Because I'd told it I had a PS/2 standard mouse (which has always worked fine for the eraser-head stick mouse in the past, including in Mandrake 7.2) it decided it would stop listening to the serial mouse. I had no way to continue. I tried twice more before giving up in disgust. Back to SuSE 7.1 - at least on *their* installer, the bloody mouse works. But it was late, so I just went to bed. This morning, it took two tries to make a SuSE boot floppy on Keri's machine (my included boot floppy never did work for some reason - no big deal, though) but the install did start OK. I left it installing a more-or-less kitchen sink install, and we'll see if there are any problems this time around. Right now, though, I hate computers. <G>

Pictures of the San Juan Islands trip are up on Keri's site.

Monday, May 7 - Ouch

Well, that was fun. I spent Sunday with Keri, her aunt Sue and uncle Jon, and grandmother Elaine moving furniture and such into Elaine's new condo in Friday Harbor. Beautiful day; just cool enough to be comfortable, blue skies, and any day you're on the water heading through the San Juan Islands is a good one, right? Right.

Of course, I didn't get any computer work done. But I did spend some time with Jon wandering through the marina, looking at boats and getting reaquainted with sailing. It's been a long time - not as long as it has been for riding, but still far too long - since I've been able to get out on the water. The canoe needs a new portage yoke (or the old one needs to be sanded and varnished, take your pick) and I need to relocate the paddles and lifejackets - but it's about that time.

Of course, there isn't much we could do with a canoe in the San Juans. We could take the canoe to Friday Harbor (which, incidently, is on San Juan Island itself) the same way we took the furniture there - by ferry - but, well, canoes aren't really made for blue-water sailing, you know? The waters were very calm yesterday - only a light breeze, not much swell - but anyone in a canoe would still have to be very willing to get wet. Sea kayaking, yes - but please note that the kayak's occupants are wearing wetsuits and the deck of the kayak is waterproof. The deck of a canoe is the bottom of the canoe.