Tuesday mutterings....

It is almost Wednesday - just another four minutes or so and it will be.

I lost out on a BMW motorcycle I wanted, but heard from the seller - he thinks the buyer is hinky and wants me to consider the purchase if the winner falls out.  Meanwhile, I bid on a Moto Guzzi that looks pretty nice.

If Murphy is alive and well (and awake) I could end up with two motorcycles (in addition to Big Suzi) instead of just one. Maybe it won't happen - if it does I am certain to lose points with my lovely wofe, who thinks I should be doing this next spring.

I started out looking at sidecar rigs, but didn't see anything (for under about $14,000 for something at least 14 years old) that I really wanted.  Sidecars are odd beasts, and can be really dangerous - but a properly rigged sidecar is a joy to push around, and really scary fun to watch.  If you've never seen sidecar racing, you're in for a real treat, since sidecars are raced by a driver and a passenger - and it is the passenger (he's called a monkey, and if you ever watch a race you'll understand why) who moves around to place his weight where it will keep the sidecar wheel on the ground - and this sometimes means hanging out in the air over the sidecar wheel with his arse around 4 inches off the ground!

I guess I am probably a little long in the tooth for that sort of excitement on any but a voyeuristic basis - but it really is cool to watch.

My lovely wife thinks I need a lighter motorcycle - Big Suzi at over 800 pounds really hurts when she lays down on my leg.  I am happy that it was not suggested that I either add wheels or learn to love my car - a motorcycle a couple hundred pounds lighter would be a bit more nimble - and BMW twins are lighter by at least 200 pounds, and I have always liked them.  The Guzzi I bid on was more a lark than anything else - I like them, and unlike other Italian motorcycles they seem to be devoid of anything resembling temperament. A V-twin sitting crosswise is strange enough but it seems to work really well - and a 90 degree V-twin has perfect balance so it is not inclined to shake at all.  All in all, I think the Guzzi might be a lot of fun - if I can get it without having too many motorcycles.

On another topic, I managed to piss myself off this evening.  I have had a DVR around here that I have been paying for that has not been used.  Well one DVR got flaky so I resolved to replace it with this other one that I have never used.  In the process I discovered that the sound was out on the TeeVee that had been on the unit downstairs, and I thought it was the DVR.  I was wrong - it appears to be in the set itself.  I think what I will do is grab a speaker set off the downstairs PC that isn't being used and see if I can convince the DVR to drive it so I won't have to replace the TeeVee right now.

Work this week has been interesting, and I just got another set of data to produce for a special project that has kinda been back-burnered for a time - but it will be fun, and I should be able to finish it early.

Tomorrow, I have to give my beloved Volvo up for a couple of days - it needs a radiator - not urgently, it's just a drip, but that Murphy bastard seems to have settled in Reisterstown, so I figured that it would be best not to wait for the leak to become a gusher.  By Friday I know I'm gonna be more than a kilobuck lighter, but with vehicles you might just as well do it right the first time - 'cause if you don't the aggregate of do-overs will cost a hell of a lot more!  Don't even ask how I know this....

Soon I have to go to bed - after I seal up the package that has to go into the car to be given to the Post Office or UPS to send back to Verizon some stiff I no longer need to have here - one cranky DVR and two set top boxes for Standard Definition Teevee, which I no longer allow in my house.

So I'm going to sleep.  Tomorrow is gonna be a really good day!

Home Server Doings

Y'all are probably bored with this, but I'm close to done with it. Arnold the Windows Home Server is once again alive - I have learned a few more things that I didn't know (funny how that seems to come up - something gets screwed up, and I learn something that I didn't know before, usually after breaking something I thought I knew all about.)

Now, I have four out of the five big drives that I thought were dead back alive, but the RAID adapter that was supposed to run the new SATA drives and get me the fault-tolerant storage array that I wanted so that when the next drive croaks, nothing gets lost - that's what RAID arrays are all about) apparently is toast, so I have to go and get another one.

So right now, Arnold is alive with old drives, and I am learning how to make him useful (which may take the rest of my life) and get the music database repopulated and reloaded, and get the media streaming stuff working throughout the house again. I will use one of the old drives to liven up the robot to get the music collection reestablished, and when I get a new SAT RAID adapter and get the RAID array working, I'll make it part of the storage pool, and gradually retire / relocate the old drives into less critical locations - or at least put them to uses that aren't likely to have a bad effect on the overall network.

One of the reasons I write this stuff is to help me be sure I know whatthehell I'm about to do. Sometimes I find I do, sometimes I don't - but the writing always helps.

On another topic, I was off today - I ended up working Saturday here at home, and Sunday night got called in until the wee hours of this morning, getting home again around 4:30 AM. It isn't as easy as it was when I was younger, but it is a part of what I do, to be prepared to take the off-time to correct. I spent some time today looking in and rechecking what I had done, but it was all good.

I think now it is time I went to bed - the morning comes so early, and I have to get one grandson to school before I can take myself to work. I thought that by the time I hit 60 life would be calm and boring, but I reckoned without the help of my children, who have conspired to keep life ...interesting... for Phyllis and myself. Both sets of parents are gone, so we find ourselves in the position of venerated elder authority and foolish parents whom you can't take out without being embarrassed - sometimes both at the same time. It'll keep us young and/or nuts.

I'm going to bed. Next rants will probably be less about hardware, and more about Things of the Heart. Be well, y'all.

ARNOLD Lives!!!

It's 4:45 in the morning. I must get up in 5 hours. I did not go to bed when I thought I might, instead I mauled Arnold a bit more, and he is alive.

The RAID array is not even being seen, but the server is alive and working, and even letting me introduce it to my laptop! Will wonders never cease?

Now all I gotta do is get the data off the old server's drives, then get the RAID array working, then make it available, then take out the old server drives and reserve them, and then, well, probably go to work, dammit!

Weekends should be longer.

Happy Sunday, y'all - it looks like the motherboard is good, and will hold the load.

Home server rant continues

Alfred is dead. I killed him. I enjoyed it - the SOB just would not behave. Old motherboards sometimes make life hard, and this one just wouldn't continue beyond ten minutes after bootup.

I reused the case, so Arnold looks like Alfred, but isn't - there's an AMD dual processor motherboard in there, and Home Server is rebuilding as I write. After that, it looks like I scrambled the SATA connectors to my RAID cage, so I can look forward to around 30 hours of RAID array formatting during which time nothing will get done. After that it should be clear sailing and I can start rebuilding my music and video databases for the home network.

If, on the other hand it is still unstable I shall call RAID a bad job and go to conventional storage. I don't want to do that because it is so hard to recover a loss in a terabyte or so of music and such. Some days you eat the bear, other days you're his lunch.

So now it is waiting time. I guess I'll know more in the morning before I head for church.

But I did take a break this afternoon and call an old friend on the phone - one I've not seen since around 1972, but whom I have known since the late 50's. He's a bit older than I am at 75, but our lives have touched several times over the years, both here in the US and during the time I was in Germany, as he was a teacher in a military dependant's school while I was serving in the Air Force and we spent many pleasant weekends wandering around Germany, sampling wines, and generally being single and carefree. I don't recall if we returned at the same time, but he went home to Minnesota and I ended up here in Maryland. We got together in 1972 when I drew a trip of a couple of months to Minneapolis for schooling, but after a few weeks I decided I should bring my wife out, so visiting got somewhat curtailed.

But we've stayed in touch all these years, sharing memories and other friends, and it is a little hard to think of him as being 75 yet I know that he is every bit of that age, just as I am every bit of almost 67 - but those numbers seem unreal to me. I promised myself never to grow up or to get stodgy and set in my ways and I think I've been moderately successful at that - but my knees hurt, my shoulders creak like an old maple tree, and I can sleep wherever I happen to be. But I still love to motorcycle (although I no longer love it enough to go out when it is below about 50 degrees - and I used to ride all year round regardless of temperature) and to go and see things I haven't seen yet.

I just looked at the bottom of my screen and it is now February. It just kinda sneaked up on me. I hate it when that happens! But after February comes March, and by mid-March the weather is getting good for riding once again, and I can count on more and more motorcycle days.

Tomorrow I have to get going on our taxes - it is my least favorite yearly task, and when I can retire I get to do less. Near as I can tell, retirement will come sometime around the age of 74 for me - but maybe not then. I have the rare good fortune to like what I do, and as long as someone will pay me to do it, I might just as well. We still have one of our kids with us, and a grandchild, so the responsibilities will not decrease until she marries and leaves, or maybe just leaves.

Somehow life did not go the way I thought it would when I was young and still knew everything. The path is still changing, and it is anyone's guess where I will end up (although some of the more fundy-oriented folks I know are sure that they know) or when.

It's funny where life goes. I was born here in Baltimore, then moved to Hatboro. From Hatboro I went into the service and went to Texas, Syracuse, Texas and Germany. I stayed an extra year in Germany; I don't recall just why although I have been told a German girl might have had some influence, and when I returned my family was back in Baltimore, so I came here and despite grand ideas of taking a company move or something like that I have been at this address for 36 years. I do a number of things that were too far-out for even science fiction when I was in high school, trying to imagine what I would be when I grew up.

So, what have all these years given to me as revelations?

1. Hatboro was a pretty good place.
2. Going to college to please someone else is a waste of time.
3. Military service, properly managed can be educational and even fun.
4. No matter how hard I tried, Germany made beer faster than I could drink it.
5. Speed limits are a revenue-producing tool, not a safety enhancement.
6. Getting married is easy; staying married is hard.
7. Riding a motorcycle will teach you lots about paying attention and being gentle.
8. An hour at the pistol range will clear your head better than a week at the ocean.
9. My children will do what they deem fit. They do not have to make my failures good.
   
10. When your state is altered, your competence to determine your competence Goes Away.
11. Music is wonderful, and cannot be explained - you get it, or you don't.
12. Living in a foreign land, learning the language, is more valuable than books
13. Foreign languages are different - and you must never translate an idiom.
14. I think I'm rambling. Again.

Now I have to go downstairs and look in on Arnold, then get some sleep. Tomorrow is already here, and I must be musical in just a few hours.

Home Server Part 2

Well, I have become less cheerful - Alfred is fighting me every step of the way. I finally figured out that I had to just let the RAID card do its format and leave it alone - for something like 38 hours! Large disks take a while to stripe, I guess. Hope I never have to replace 1 - it'll take 15 hours just to rebuild, during which time probably nothing else will do anything.

I finally got the RAID right, and started the maintenance tool to add the disk capacity - and Alfred went nuts and refused to talk to me. I have a bad feeling that I am about to get to scrap his motherboard, and demote his function to a single-processor machine that I have laying around doing nothing,which will tick me off as I have a couple more multiprocessor motherboards, but just don't feel like doing one of those agonizing swaps today, although I may change my mind. I really need to get this pup working and stable, so I can get the rest of the house's computers to cooperate and play nice - and start rebuilding my music library.

If anyone wonders, RAID is not what we use to kill software bugs - it is an acronym for Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks - which means that it takes a bunch of cheap disks and rearranges the way data is stored so that the failure of one disk in the array will not result in complete loss of data. Really clever idea - the net is less space that is useful, but less likelihood of all of it getting to be useless at once. Unfortunately, I had been watching RAID arrays built with relatively tiny disks, and it didn't seem that it took that long to recover when a disk failed. I am using disks 50 times as big as what I used to watch, and forgot that things would take 50 times as long to recover and rebuild. We live and we learn.

So for now I have a server that works, albeit not well, and is useless by virtue of its refusal to talk to anything but itself. Time for a restart, I think. Time to put that old monster out to pasture. Time to put Alfred down.

Time to start building Arnold. I'll keep y'all apprised....