That's right, I said it. <G>

Well, the first three-quarters of yesterday were pretty good. The weather was really nice out on the island, cool enough to be comfortable in jeans and a long sleeved shirt (note: you do not repeat do not want to pick up grass hay - or really, any kind of hay - while wearing shorts or a t-shirt. You will be in pain if you ignore this warning.) So we spent the morning picking up 80 hay bales and loading them on a trailer with Sue and Jon.

Well, actually, 120 bales. See, when we got the trailer all loaded, Jon's van got stuck trying to pull out uphill in a soft spot. Ooops. After much head-scratching, we unloaded about half the trailer and pulled it out with Sue's Outback (4-wheel drive on them there Subarus, doncha know.) Re-hitched it to the van, pulled around the front of the field (which was a bit firmer, ground-wise) and loaded the trailer up again.

Now, this was actually more or less fun. It was hard work, but it was the best kind of hard work - done for a purpose, with people you know will have fun with it. (These opinions are the opinions of the author and are not necessarily shared by his back.)

Next, we went over to Keri's maternal grandmother's condo for lunch. Lunch was New York Strip steaks, medium for me (still bleeding for Keri - yuck) with salad, rolls, potatos, sauteed mushrooms ('shrooms!) and fresh strawberries over sherry cake for dessert. After which, of course, we went to put the hay up in the barn. This was not the smartest order of things to choose. <G> Anyway, it's done and Sue's horses have grass hay for the fall and spring. (Winter they get alfalfa, apparently, and that's a different haying situation.)

Went back to Jon and Sue's house and watched the "US vs. UK Challenge" of Junkyard Wars, which was interesting. I liked the two-hour format; they got to spend more time detailing the design processes and false starts made by the teams - and any game with Nosher is generally interesting, given his sense of humor. Too bad for him that "Operation Spank the Yanks" failed, ain't it?

Followed by a fairly nice drive home. Sue and Keri didn't get to relax much, though, as they spent most of the afternoon (and, in Sue's case, no doubt much of the night) calming down horses thanks to idiots with the ability to light a match and an appreciation for things going "bang". (OK, so I fit that category too, but I like bigger bangs. Say SSTO and larger...) Yes, I agree fireworks should be legal. Yes, I agree that you should have the right to celebrate our nation's birthday with fireworks. I also think that the average American citizen doesn't have the sense to poor piss out of a boot before putting it on, much less be trusted with explosives. Worse than Jetskis...

That wasn't the bad part, though. No, the bad part was when we got home. Seems the power went out at some point, and the computers did not come back up happily. (Yes, I know I need a UPS. See dictionary, under "budget" and "lack of".) The mail and web server (THOR, for those keeping score at home) was relatively easy to fix; a few fscks (ok, four, but that's being picky) later, THOR was happy again.

But MINERVA couldn't see him. I could ping the IP, I could SSH to him, no problem at all anywhere in there. sshd and httpd were both running, they were active processes and I could telnet to the ports (from THOR) without a problem - so why couldn't Minerva see them? Let's see... check mail configuration. POP3 mail server, mail.rearviewmirror.org... oh. Maybe PUCK didn't come back up, either?

No, PUCK didn;t come back up. PUCK never really came back up. I eventually got to a login prompt, but with no net access and with lots of complaining about various partitions of the drive. I don't know what happened, but the old 3Com card in the system was dead - now replaced with an Intel EtherExpress Pro100 - and as I later learned, so was the hard drive. PUCK is an oddity, an old Pentium-based system with an integrated SCSI controller, which means I only have one replacement hard drive. Backups? Yes, sort of - all the configuration files for the name server are stored in a couple of different places, including on CD. No complete file-system backups, though.

So. I could replace the hard drive, reinstall some version of Linux, then reinstall the nameserver configuration. Eh. Well, why not? I got to work. The hardware work was simple - one nice thing about this system is that it's easy to work in. Once that was completed, I pulled out SuSE boot disk and set up for a netwrk install. (This system does not have a CD-ROM drive, nor do I see the need to add one for such a simple machine.) I'm not sure why - the error messages were singlularly useless - but for whatever reason, the install failed. Completely. Couldn't even get into YaST before it failed.

OK, let's try Mandrake. Not enough RAM in the machine. (32 MB isn't enough for a basic text-based install. Damn, Linux is starting to bloat just like Windows... isn't that a scary thought...)

Debian? I know it'll load... but it's already midnight. I have to work in the morning. Time for plan B. Check THOR - yep, the most recent versions of BIND9 and named are installed, but not running. Reset the startup scripts to start it on boot, copy over the configuration files, start it up.

Unnknown start user "named". WTF? Oh, right - SuSE gives each daemon a separate user to run under, whereas I prefer one "nobody" account for each class - public network daemons being one class. So I'd deleted all those extra user accounts. OK, fire up emacs and hunt through the startup script... change this line:

startproc /usr/sbin/named -u named -g named || return=$rc_failed

to this:

startproc /usr/sbin/named -u nobody -g nobody || return=$rc_failed

and try it again - success. Test the zones... yep, they all work. OK. Now to change the router config... um. Ooops. What's that password again?

Yeah, yeah, I know. I keep all my passwords in an encrypted store on my Visor, which works well considering how poor my memory is for random number and letter strings (which is what I use for all my "important" passwords.) The problem there is that I lost the data from my Visor a few weeks ago - and the backup that I had didn't include the most recent changes, including the router password. Uh-oh. Well, I know I have it written down in my lab notebook... which is, for reasons best left unexplored (in other words, I have no clue) at the office.

So until tomorrow morning, my primary nameserver is going to be unavailable. My apologies. Please note that I did not pull a Microsoft, my secondary nameserver is alive and well on a separate network. Right, Brian? Brian? Uh-oh...

Ah well. To bed with me. 'Morning all... (since it is.. 1:04 AM PDT right now...)

Wednesday, July 4 - Happy Independence Day

NOTE AT 21:45 PDT - My apologies... power went out earlier today sometime, and the servers didn't come back up. Mail and web are funtional again, but the name server may be down for the count. I'm pedalling as fast as I can, back up sometime tonight most likely.

We're off for a day of barbecue, sunshine, cooler-than-expected temperatures (thank God; six months away from Arizona, and I wilt in temperatures over 85) and other such fun and frivolity. After a morning bucking hay for Aunt Sue's horse farm, of course. Ah, well. Just means I can eat more, right? Right. <G> Have fun with your family today, too.

Tuesday, July 3 - Last Day of the Work Week

Well, sort of. I have tomorrow off, but I have to go back Thursday and Friday. Still, I think that's another work week, isn't it?

Spent some time last night fiddling with Fido and watching TV. Fido is progressing OK, in fits and starts as I have time. Right now, it installs OK with the installation script, but actually running still has a few "issues". <G> Still, it installs OK, right? I suppose I could just use Microsoft's development model, release 1.0, and fix the other problems in a service pack...

The rest of my time was spent relaxing and watching TV with Keri. Junkyard Wars, of course, with one I hadn't seen before - coffee grinding. I have to say it was the first time I wasn't impressed by either design. I can usually find something wrong with the designs being used (although that's easy to do from a living room; working in a scrapyard would undoubtedly force a few design compromises) but in general, there's one design or the other that I like. Last night, they were both leaving me cold - and the judge didn't seem to think much of them, either.

Let's see, what else... nothing Earth-shaking happening here, unless you mean all the earthquakes under Ranier. Let's see, small, deep tremors, taking place under and around an active volcano - connection? Nah, couldn't be...

Monday, June 2 - Work or Fun?

Sunny day. Light winds. Mild temperatures. Birds singing.

Yup. Time to go to work.

Ah, well. I get a day off in the middle of the week at least, which, while it will likely play holy hell with my schedule, is welcome anyway. How's your week starting?

As most of you no doubt already know, John Dominik's site host decided on a particularly nasty form of revenue generation last week - they wrapped frames around the bottom and right side of the page, load the page itself in the remaining space, and load constantly changing banners in the frames. This, too put it mildly, is annoying. Keri stopped me from mail-bombing their registered address, I checked to make sure I had plenty of room on the web server, and Keri called the Dominiks to offer hosting space on our server. So if you're looking for Jon, the url is jdominik.rearviewmirror.org, and if you're looking for Ann, it's adominik.rearviewmirror.org. I promise, I won't force any advertising of any kind - and certainly no frames.