Jacob’s Insidious Ramblings

It looks like it has been a while yet again since my last post. I am still doing great at Glacial Energy and keep finding more to tinker with. My son is doing well, it is nice to be a Father. When I am not working or trying to spend time with my family I try to sleep a little. I have not had time for any real side projects in a little while. I plan to make some time for some, in other words… less sleep. Nice thing is, I usually can go a while on little sleep before I crash and burn. Up at work I have been playing with DRAC cards on the Dell servers. I have seen them before and know of the Compaq/HP version of it but never got to install and configure one before. Anyway, time to end this post… later.

I had the chipset fan on my motherboard go out a few weeks ago which started to cause rebooting issues every few days on my main desktop. I found a replacement the day before Thanksgiving. It is a huge heatsink without a fan which seems to be doing the job. I think that the job was done to Windows before I got a chance to fix the problem. Before, the reboots were so sudden Windows could not do a BSOD and now Windows seemed to be doing BSOD’s on me. After debugging the dump file it looked like it was the network driver(I hope). So far things seem to be stable after updating all the chipset drivers and network drivers. While I was at it I went ahead and updated my video drivers. I will be hoping that things are stable this coming week. If not then I may have to reinstall Windows. If that does not fix it then I think my MB may be crap and I will have to rip hardware from my secondary workstation. That is something I really do not want to do. Anyway, later…

About a month or so ago I learned how do something on a Cisco Router called ‘IP Unnumbered’. The neat thing about it is that if I have two of them hooked together over a connection with the CSU/DSU WIC card in it I do not need a set of WAN IP addresses. It uses the ‘fastethernet0′ as it’s pseudo address. It took me a short bit to wrap my mind around the routing for it but once it clicked it became easy. I learned it as we hooked up a T1 connection between the main San Antonio location and a location in Webster, TX. I found out about the command when I was hooking up a T1 for an Internet connection and the ISP told me to use that command. When I learn a new command or trick I have to figure out all aspects of it if time presents itself. Luckly it did so now I am versed in that method. You know, if I was rich I think I would buy a bunch of routers and bridges and other devices just to tinker with them. Alas, I am not flush with the green so I just learn as I get chances to.

So far this week has dragged on. Oh well, the weekend is coming up and it will be a long one at that. No work on Monday means good times. This week up at work I got the Cisco 1721 router talking to the new T1. I even got the Cisco PIX 505 almost totally configured. I still have a few items to set up on the PIX and it will be all done. I enjoy how easy most of the Cisco stuff actually is to configure. Of course I never use a GUI or anything like that. Command line all the way as usual. Much easier that way it is…

Most of my growing up years I was not a fan of Apple. It is widely known by friends and family of my thoughts about not just the company but the awkwardness of the OS. That was until OSX came along. I have found it to be mostly clean and not too bad of an Operating System which brings me to the title of this entry. A few months back I had the pleasure of test driving a couple of these units. I found that the Mini is worth the sticker price. In fact, I may one day soon get one of my own. w00t!! Below is the specs of what I want.
• 1.25GHz PowerPC G4
• 512MB DDR333 SDRAM - 1 DIMM
• 40GB Ultra ATA drive
• 4x SuperDrive (DVD±RW/CD-RW)
• Internal Bluetooth + AirPort Extreme Card
• 56K v.92 Modem
• Mac OS X - U.S. English
Those options jump it up to $748.00 but I would still find that worth it…

It is a DVR-A09XL Pioneer drive with a black front. The max writes are below for each format it can handle.
DVD-R 16x
DVD+R 16x
DVD-RW 6x
DVD+RW 4x
DVD+R DL 6x
CD-R 40x
CD-RW 24x
The link to the page showing the specs for this unit is here.
So far it is pretty sweet. I am starting to do backups with it and plan to learn how to compile dvd movies one day. I got some DVD-R and DVD+RW blanks. I would have gone with DVD-RW blanks but I could not find them in more than 10 in a pack unlike the +RW blanks. I would have gotten some Dual Layer blanks but they are a bit costly right now. I even noticed that my burner can go faster than most of the media I was able to find can handle which is kinda neat. Anyway, I plan to waste a few DVD-R disks toying with the DVD movie functions. Gotta go… Later.

No, not the bug spray. RAID means “Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks”. It is a term used in the computing world for a collection of hard drives with fault tolerance so if one drive were to die, you could just replace it without downtime. Up here at work we just got a new server with 2gigs of RAM, two Pentium 4 Xeon 3.06Ghz processors, and two 36gig drives for a RAID 1(mirror). The second RAID device is 7 146gig drives acting as one which happens to be running RAID 5. This is fun stuff at least to me…anyway, gotta go…

If I get time this weekend I plan to throw two 30gig drives in an older computer I have sitting around and use one of the Promise RAID cards for binding them together. I then plan to Install Windows 2000 Professional. It will be a backup server and backup workstation for my Dad to use. I have been meaning to get this done but time has not always been available to me.

I recently got a 3.5″ hard drive enclosure that has both Firewire and USB 2.0 connections on it. I did not want to use the usb side of things for a perm. solution so I went ahead and got a Firewire card. One thing I can say is that it may not be hooked directly to the IDE chain but it works damn well. I am pretty much sold on Firewire. I think all external enclosures that I purchase will have both types from now on. I know, it took me long enough but it is fun in any case. I like this enclosure because if I decide to put a 250gig HD into it the unit will take it. It currently is housing a 80gig drive which is plenty for now. It is acting as my tertiary data drive. I have 4 drives hooked to my computer. I have the main SCSI 9.1gig acting as the system drive. A second 9.1gig acting as an application drive. The third which is housed in a 5.25″ removable drive rack which is a 40gig acting as my games drive. I then have the Firewire drive for graphics and other misc. stuff I want. I plan to redo a bit of it but for now this works fine. Yes, if you have not figured out by now, I ramble a lot. Later…

Earlier this week I took a Cisco class. It taught me how to do subnetting and the like on the first day. After that we dove into Cisco routers and learned the in’s and out’s of them. We also learned a lot about the switches and some about the PIX firewall. I am jazzed a bit from that class and hope to try and get my CCNA(Cisco Certified Network Associate) cert. soon. Anyway, later…

I know I have not updated in a while but life has in fact kept me busy. Tomorrow I will be finishing my move from my old apartment to the one my wife and I live in now. My computer room is still a mess because I have not had the time to clean it up. Today as the title suggests I have been playing with a Cisco product. The Cisco 1721 Router to be exact. I think I am getting rather decent at configuring it. As of this writing I have almost figured out how to upload a different binary IOS version that supports more than just TCP/IP. Anyway, time for me to get back to it for now…later.