Linux Migration – Day One

Day one cleared up all the FUD! Kids are happy, wife is happy, I’m happy. I really didn’t doubt the outcome. Am glad for it to have been received so well. It is key to get them to sit down and just use it.

My wife discovered her card games and much more. The kids have yet to discover any of the installed games; they just played on their Webkinz site. I finally sat down as well to look at a few of the bazillion games. I first got a little gitty when I saw Doom and how well it performed. It brought back memories of college days. I knew instantly how much better it is now compared to the 386/486 machines we originally played it on. Looking forward to Heritic the same way. I wonder if Decent is available?

I have a 3D graphics card but have yet to install the closed source driver. I need some pointers… Scott, you know what card I have… give me some tips! Will be sweet when I get Beryl going with this too!

I also took a peek at an emulator. Don’t recall the name, but apparently it only works with a select few games and providing you have the data files/CD. More for some older role playing games. Still interested in using wine or other suggested emulator.

Linux Migration – Day Zero

My family computer is the second Dell we have had with XP Home for the kids gaming entertainment and dual booting Linux mainly for my doing the books. Under XP we have used open source applications for the most part: Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice.org. So off to a great start for migration.

Prior to allowing kids to play on the computer my wife had been using Linux with our first Dell. Then she just stuck with XP instead of having to keep rebooting for the kids. They had acquired many educational and gaming CD’s over the years.

Recently I have inherited two higher end machines yet only one is complete and another just a cpu and motherboard. I have plans to use one for the family and the other for a server. Problem is I don’t care to shell out for a new XP license. I got by with the second Dell we inherited because we simply just plopped in our drive from the first Dell and kept on going. These new machines are not Dells.

Another MS Monday

Okay so today’s troubles weren’t exactly Microsoft related. I was scheduled along with another coworker to attend an online Made2Manage virtual class. I was first to log in and called in soon after for the voice side of the class. Probably about 10 minutes into the class I loose sound in the phone. So I informed the instructor that I was heading up to the coworkers office to attend from there. Then I found she too was not getting sound. All of the office was down! We could call each other inside the office and receive DID calls from the outside, but no incoming to the main number nor could we pick up an outside line to make calls. So I borrowed a cell phone from someone and call our Executone office and they were going to call back on the cell. Needless to say… this techie could not figure out how the dang thing worked to answer it! I kept bringing up the address book. Then when I got it figured out, it wasn’t the call I was waiting for! Oh well, they showed up and fixed it after some time by just resetting the cards. Learning more and more each time he comes out to fix us up. I was telling him if he kept that up they would become obsolete.

Me and the family went to our home town this weekend. Didn’t want to since we had planned to for Easter too. I figured we’d better now before it got any closer. It was supposed to be a non event visit. Turns out they made it a combined birthday party on Sunday for my daughter and nephew who’s birthdays was on the 22nd. We were only there for about 24 hours. Sometimes those short trips are the best but they also kill the weekend. I’d say most of my weekends feel like three days but this kind of trip made it feel like one day. I had a great talk with my grandmother. She is a devout Catholic/Presbyterian. Attends church both Saturday and Sunday to both churches. She also tithes to both! I gave her the “Purpose Driven Life” book for Christmas. I almost thought it was the most meaningful gift I ever gave her. She expressed a satisfying thankfulness for the gift. This trip I see she has read 7 chapters. Doesn’t have a lot of time to read it she says. Not sure if that is the case but rather a hard to swallow conviction maybe. Her beliefs go deeper into tradition than I could expect her to give up. She thinks the death of so many churches is because of the parents. She thinks having a personal relationship with God means feeling his presence as a physical touch. She prays in memorized prayer. She has a problem with the woman’s position God has given them in the world. This was an awesome opportunity to tell her about what my relationship was like. I told her that the death of so many churches are due to their inability to change tradition to accept younger people. Our church is well aware of this and employs ongoing changes to the music worship ever year. Not to mention many other youth inviting places to server. Having a relationship with God could include feeling his touch, but there is a more indescribable feeling when you are close to Him. Having a continual chit-chat with Him throughout the day. Not getting stuck in repetitive meaningless chants. The Lutheran church we attend there sounds so robotic! Every prayer is written in the handouts and there seems to be no prayer from the heart. Everyone prays with their eyes open reading the words instead of listening. Not going to mention the off key tone deaf singing. But then again God does love all forms of worship! My point here is finding the reason why churches are dying today. If God has answered me, he has mentioned that nothing will save these dying churches. Only new born-again churches will rise. Some will occupy the same buildings, but most will not be of the same denomination. Religion is spelled as “D-O”, what I can do to get what I want. Christianity is spelled “D-O-N-E”, what has been done already. Jesus has already made the biggest sacrifice for our eternity and we can’t repay him. To attempt to repay him is an insult. Like paying someone back for giving you a birthday present! I would be insulted for getting the gift back. So I pray that my grandma would think about what I had said and that God would open her mind to a new rebirth.

I think I’m going to just give up on the virus updates. There are just too many to keep up on to mention here. I recommend updating your data files every hour!

Last Friday I determined this SCSI tape drive we have here has a bad motor for driving the tape reals. Talked with Certance, who handles Seagate tape hardware now. The tech said I needed to call their warranty dept for a swap and pay ~$165 for a refurbished unit that has a warranty of 90 days. The gal I spoke with wants $250! So I flat out said she must be pulling my leg because I could get one elsewhere for less without sending them my broken one. Without the core they would charge another $500 something! So I have now found a few sites selling refurbished units for less like I said without having checked, plus some do 90 days and others do 1 year!

Was unable to post Thursday. Bresnan had upgraded some hardware causing major outages and thus changing my IP again. I had a bigger skuff about this with our business account and the fact that we pay for a static IP. I wanted a discount because of this as well. Point being that they missed our account for calling before the outage. I want to make sure they understand that we are serious about keeping the same IP we pay extra for. On the flip side I got a new bill from USA Digital. They charged us $150 for not returning the cable modem the corporate office already conceded that we own and said they would let the local office know. In my talking with the corporate office again, they got that straightened… I wasn’t going to bring it up but now that this communication problem keeps rolling around with them, I had to mention that we have not been getting our $5 discount for the past 2 years then. So she was going to check into that and get back with me. Sometimes it doesn’t pay to keep dragging your feet. I was going to just let it go, but since they just want to milk us I couldn’t resist.

Getting Back to Normal

Life is getting back to normal. Had a great weekend. Most ppl might not think it was so great. But knowing how good it had been, my family is getting back to its better days again! I do need to get out of my dead-beat Sundays. The past few weeks I have neglected to shower, shave, or brush my teeth on Sundays. Just hanging around the house in my pj’s or previous days clothing. Total laziness! Of course the kids get that way too, but they do that even on the weekdays.

Worked on a friends PC Saturday most of the day. Didn’t need the bootleg Quickbooks CD after all. Turns out his 2004 CD is a full version. I thought this might be an easy one and just uninstall, clean up the directory and reinstall a fresh copy. He did have a working 2003 version on another PC and I got his backed up data restored into this so he at least has that as his backup. There was some bad data integrity found and fixed. I also attempted to condense the data that stretched back to 1998 or so! That was the kicker that took most of the day. But even with the fixed data 2004 wold not work. So I need to do some online forum chatting to find another solution. I also plan to barrow another XP box to test on. Seems he may have had some Windows updates needing to be done as well. However he being on dial-up left me setting it up and leaving for the day.

The bosses 21″ CRT monitor started making strange flickering a couple times this morning. Turns out we got his PC in December of 2000. I think it just went out of warranty. It had an extended warranty even. So a replacement is looking like $450-500. So I talked him into getting a flat panel and putting his PC upright on the floor. Suggesting a 17″ for about $430-450 he opted for a 19″ at $680! Sometimes I think he just waits for others to suggest getting things fixed or upgraded before he does something for himself. He has this old crappy cheap office chair and the arms were all broken up. He finally went out to get a new one and it turned out something was wrong with it. So he returned it and our purchaser ordered a replacement arm for the chair. I assume it was free as they probably send this stuff out as missing parts all the time. So he still has this crappy chair! Don’t know how he does things at home. I think his wife must handle all that kind of detail. It wouldn’t fly with her! Maybe this is a humbling part I need to learn.

Bresnan came with the new cable modem. So I had to run over and get the server refreshed with this. The guy that set it up said he was able to register it with them. But he seemed to insist that I needed to reboot. After I couldn’t get my Linux server to connect outside I humoured him and restarted the server. Still not connecting. By this time another tech came and had me point the browser to their modem and I went through their registration process and all was well. So I’m guessing that there might be some time-out issue that occurs after registering you need to have a connection process happen. Although I have no idea what he did while I was driving over. So now I have USA Digitals cable modem and called their corp. office up to check for any history on them ever replacing our modem. Turns out this is the third modem they have ever registered for us. Now I just hope they will be honest about identifying one of those other two MAC addresses as not theirs. I don’t think we need one anyway, but I just don’t like being ripped off any more. The lesson learned now is that you either be present at all times of tech services or write down all your serial numbers when you purchase these types of equipment. After a couple calls back and forth with USA Digital, we have come to a conclusion! It seems that modem models ending in “R” are retail models. It just so happens that the one we have does have the “R”. A call back later and they concede it must be ours then. Hey at least they had been pretty honest the whole time and not trying to be evil. They probably now have a task at hand to get a db going on their units vs. customer units.

Spent the afternoon creating DNS records for several known big ad trackers such as doubleclick.net and fastclick.net. The zones I have created now point to the machines themselves. By that I mean they point to themselves instead of the real site. Seems to be working. Will have to make sure no error logs are filling up somewhere tho later tomorrow.

The Search For Yesterdays Software

Got a call earlier this week from a fellow Christian friend wanting my assistance with his Quickbook troubles. Seems during an upgrade to 2004 software left him with a malfunctioning application. In attempts to go back to the previous version, he snapped the CD in half trying to get it out of the case. Bummer! Talking with Intuit via India, they offered to restore him for around ~$700. So today I have been scouring the net for a bootleg copy somewhere. He at least has the license to make it somewhat legal.

Installed the replacement PC for Building B this morning. Problem is the optical mouse is a USB mouse and there is no USB connector on the PC. Dates this somewhat eh? But hey this Dell smoked the IBM with less of hardware even. Go figure. So I am working together a shopping list. I need a couple mice and a 5 port switch. Optical mice run nice in the dirty place we have here. Need the switch to replace the base 10 hub that connects our conference room and Building B to the LAN. The wireless to Building B is a max 11 anyway but the conference room needs much faster with Made2Manage classes coming in there. It run like a turtle when we had our M2M consultant come in last week and that was with just an educational company.

I tried upgrading the firmware using Internet Explorer and that seemed to do the trick. A bit disappointed that they Linksys might require such a browser to do such a simple task. Oh well I seem to be buying less and less of their products these days anyway. Had two 5 port switches go bad on me in less than a year.

My brother called me last night from the Big House in OR. Sounds like he has picked up some interest in Linux! So I think I will send him a book on this OS. We seem to have a lot of the same passions. Now if he would only open his mind to what the Lord has to say. I sent him a three book series of John Elderidge’s. Mostly for the Wild at Heart book. Never got a chance to ask him about it tho. He just seemed very interested in a lot of security and such for computers. Well so do I but it’s very hard to grasp even at my status.

Thursday mornings I get together with a few guys from our church for breakfast and do a Bible study. We have been reading a chapter a week out of the Purpose Driven Life by Rick Warren. This is my third time through this book. We often go off on tangents and today’s was on baptism. The oldest in our group seems to be thinking a lot about the purpose for being Born Again as an adult. By this I mean being baptized by water submersion. He, like others in the group was baptized at birth and went through confirmations later in life. Our leader mentioned some one might think this as a scape goat thinking that all I need to do is baptize my kids early and they would be saved automatically. No more worries. Too sad for thinking that way. We all agreed that it’s not required for being saved. I put my thought in saying I did it for two reasons: Worship and as a demonstration of my love for the Lord as a public display. Not as some private back yard hot-tub baptism. I think those who do it that way have a misunderstanding of baptisms purpose. It’s not a form of works! I too was baptized earlier as a child at 8 for the Mormons. I knew at the time I was too immature to understand why I was doing this. So shortly after accepting Christ again back in the Summer of 2001, Kassie and I were baptized again. I denounced the previous baptism based on a disbelief in what I was doing. Besides… my god-parents were split up later in life and were not model godly people. We also spoke about the purpose of god-parents. We don’t do sponsors in our church for dedications or baptism however, but I’m speaking about those churches that do. I often get disgusted when ppl choose ungodly ppl as god-parents for their newborn child. Some even think the purpose is for choosing guardians in the event the parents pass on before the child matures. I find that hardly legal. But today so many ppl choose their cool friends or even their siblings. Not even sure the thought passes their minds as a test. “Do I want these ppl to care for my child after I’m gone?” How does that work anyway if you choose two sisters? Oh the dumb things we humans instill as traditions in our lives!

This afternoon has been fairly productive! Got some petty cash and stopped at the CNC shop to pick up the equipment for USA Digital to cancel the account. Get to their office and find the gal is out to lunch and to return about 2:13PM. That’s just crazy! So I had to pick up a couple switches and a couple mice. Swing through the Arby’s drive thru and get a Jamoca milk shake and back to USA Digital. Had a few minutes to wait yet. Their records state that they own the cable modem! Man oh man! So I get back to the office and try digging up some receipts. No luck. So I figure that with all the troubles we have had with the wireless connections there, they must have switched out our modem with theirs. That could have happened over a year ago. Besides… even if I had the receipt I would need the MAC address to prove. That way they could track down where mine went also. So I called Bresnan to get a leased modem from them before pulling out USA Dig’s. They only charge a $3 lease fee. Besides that Bresnan forgot to not change us the fee anyway. Guess it worked out for him then. So now I have the optical mouse on Building B’s PC and replaced the 10 base hub with the new 100 and bumped the speed for the master port and it’s rocking and rolling!

Tomorrow I need to put my ups in line and test out an old 8mm tape drive out. Just realized it is a 24GB drive! My current one is a 20GB Traven.

MAC Mystery

Yes the possessed IBM PC is back. I’m working on it’s replacement as I type. It continues to freeze up on boot up. Never fails that after fixing this some other problem occurs. This time it was a network issue. The MAC address security between the two access points seemed to be missing this IBM’s MAC address. Which was fine by me I guess because it wasn’t supposed to work in the first place! I first thought that this NIC had some how changed it’s address. I have seen this happen before but only by one character… this was the complete address. Anyway adding the MAC to the second AP did the trick. I need to check for updates on their firmware I guess. That goes for my other wireless network as well. I had trouble with enabling the encryption on that. It still runs open!

On the M2M front… my coworker and I have been waiting for the right time to ask the boss about the upcoming conference in Las Vegas this June. Interestingly enough today the boss forwarded the email about the conference to both of us. I think this might be some type of praise! Yesterday ADS called the boss trying to win us back I suppose. Not sure what he said, but the boss transferred him to me. The impression I got was that he and my boss have “made arrangements” to talk with each other at a later date. So I’m not too sure why he needed to talk with me. I didn’t offer any information as to our dropping them. Seems they only pay attention to us when there’s money to be had anyway. I sure hope that dance is over!

It seems one of our Mormon coworkers is now leaving this week. I am happy for them but sad they (he and his family) are leaving. I had taped some informative Mormon beliefs videos for him some time ago. They are rather new to their faith and passionate about God. I have concluded they have no idea what they are getting into and had to step forward. They didn’t have much to loose if they were to step away from them. No family ties or works involvement yet. So when he broke the news to me yesterday, I pleaded with him to watch the videos. I had lent him my flight stick and a couple old PC games. I told him he could have them under the condition they would watch the videos. That reminds me… I was thinking in bed last night that I should pick up the book “Purpose Driven Life” for them before the week is over. Another condition for them to read it after watching the videos. You never know who God may put in your path, but I’m getting the hint that you’ve got to work fast these days before the opportunity passes. We had two Jehovah Witness gals come to work here and I don’t think I said enough if not at all about His Word. I did a little with one, but her interests didn’t bring out any questions. She was the stronger of the two if that means anything.

Went out for dinner with the family and some friends. They bought dinner. Didn’t want them to. They have financial struggles as we do. Was nice of them to do so. Got lots of cards and the wife and kids got me a nice T-shirt. My folks send my money and my mom’s old coat she didn’t like any more. I needed one. It smells nice like my mom! It’ll take a while to get used to the color. I don’t think I own anything yellow. Waited up watching TV just in case the folks called. I guess I slipped by them for a change. Then again I hope it wasn’t pay back time. It seems that I have forgotten a time or two birthdays. I really need to get an automated reminder scheduler going. I think my uncle got his going because two of his sons emailed me. Today my cousin Brad from the Navy wished me a happy birthday. That was nice. Wish I could have gotten to know him better as a kid. He was born about 10 years late for the group. Of course they moved often and made it hard to keep up. He’s a good kid. I wish him the best out there on the boat.

Well it seems I can’t get the dang firmware upgraded on the AP’s. The screen spins into infinity and refreshing the front screen shows the old version still. Been working on Symantecs AMS service. I had taken a stab at this some time ago to no avail. Seems it may be once again. Did make some progress however. So now to deliver the PC to Building B tomorrow.

Birthdays Galore

Surprise surprise surprise! First thing this morning at work I get an email from a long lost cousin. Not lost actually but just doesn’t respond to email very well. As I was sending a Birthday email wish to a mentor of mine, IN comes the surprise! Was great to hear from him. I immediately sent off a belated Happy Birthday to him as well. His was yesterday. He is one day shy of being a year younger than I. My mother-in-law’s Birthday was yesterday too. Kassie meant to call her along with my kids and we forgot to do so until bed time. Was watching ‘You’ve Got Mail’ ’till 10:30. What a great love story. Been meaning to see that for quite some time. Anyway I talked her into calling and it turned out well. Her mother was not upset and they ended up talking for record times. It seems that it’s been a goal for several years now to escape a Birthday with out hearing anyone wishing me a happy birthday. For the most part I have never been able to but came very close. Got off to work without the wife and kids saying anything, but they soon called later. Only one coworker vaguely said anything. He mentioned that I was looking older. The receptionist asked if I got my hair cut. It was cut Friday, so only three work days late. I like to be a giver not a taker, so not to draw attention to myself is what I want to achieve.

I get off on the cheesiest things. I discovered how to modify Mozilla do color code replied and forwarded email. Also how to change the font in the URL bar to an easier font for such things like copy-n-paste. Sometimes it’s hard to get the drag through just to the right spot. Now what I’d like to do is create a packaged install of my preferred settings. I even have my favorite Orbit theme I started installing. If you’re savvy enough you could find a screen shot somewhere in my Gallery.

Had a great discussion with a friend about Christianity last night. He is somewhat of a Gnostic person. Today in modern times Gnostic ppl of the world tend to create their own system based on their knowledge. I was one… I know. I didn’t believe in organized religion. Based all my beliefs just in what I knew. I reached a point in my life tho where I no longer wanted to seek the answer to unknown questions. I found having faith and a belief system was a huge relief off my back. Don’t get me wrong… this is not blind faith. I am still a sinner and so I still have questions all the time. Sometimes I’d fear final growth but just when you think you have it all under control, a new arena comes forth. New growth to be had.

Tieing Up Loose Ends

Some breakthrough with the QC department PC. In my venture to find upgraded software to run this Hummel T500 unit, I found that I needed a dongola for the software. I should have known! A quote for $1,400 software to run this includes the dongola. After finding this the old DOS version we have now works! Too bad the newer DOS version we have still won’t work. So now I wait for a new quote without the dongola. Still want to upgrade if not just to be able to choose a different printer besides the LPT1.

Working on a coworkers aunt’s PC today. Somewhat of a favor. However I’m doing this for her for free since she is a fellow Christian. I do just about anything to help out another member of the Body of Christ. This is the third PC I have brought back into our shop to use their compressed air. So nice not to have to waste the canned stuff. Plus it doesn’t freeze in your hand and it’s more powerful. Still trying to get a little reserve tank for myself.

My Birthday is tomorrow. I’m getting to be a bah humbug about celebrating them. Kassie wants to have friends over but I’m just not feeling up to it. Probably because of this little depression I am going through. I have been here before but for far longer and I don’t want to be this type of person much longer. It seems most of my childhood I was an introvert. When I started college for CAD schooling, I suddenly was this fun extroverted guy! Now over the past year I have slipped back into the hiding place to wallow in my own pity party.

Man I need to get back to helping out in the Gallery forum! Take a few days off and end up getting way behind. Seems I’m about the only one offering any help in the nuke forums. Was just me in the random blocks but I am happy to see Joerg is back! He took about a year off. I guess I should see what damage I can do there today. Looks like I need to upgrade to RC2. Probably should do that but will wait to see what the questions are in regard to first.

Quick update

I’m not going to do too much filling in from the past posts in the archives. I’ll just try elaborating when detail is lacking.

Today I wrestle once again with our M2M sistem upgrade from 5.02 SP5 to 5.5. I keep getting into trouble with the SQL2SQL conversion. Talking with M2M again today didn’t make me much happier. But they did spark a thought about the data I restored from previous restores. I had restored data prior to removing ADS’s IFE package which is what we are trying to get away from. So after that I had to once again go back to square one. Amazing how only 2 ppl can hold up the show between testing this thing out!

Other topics I have been working on are to flesh out the denied logs of ads in the squid-cache server. Tired of scrolling through those denies. So I think I need to make a firewall table for that. Also been researching some viruses that have been hitting pretty heavy. They must be new enough that they are not searchable yet on Google. Also was helping Scott out with his MailScanner to try getting rid of some pesky spam that doesn’t get detected on his system. Both my servers are detecting them but it’s not high enough to trash them. I need to get a tighter hold on trashing the same daily ones I get.

We had Gaven dedicate to the Lord this weekend! Prayed lots that he wouldn’t cry or do is normal tantrum up on the stage. He slept through the whole thing! I need to make a mp3 tract of all the kids’ dedications to email or post on the website. Cristina was gracious to watch Adea and Garidy while Kassie and I could go out to dinner for a date night. We took Gaven of course. He was not a happy little guy. I ran to Shop-Ko to get a pacifier and that didn’t work. Kassie fed him and changed him… that didn’t work. So by the time the food came we had them box it up and we left. :/ Don’t remember the last time we went out for a date. We will have to try again some time after Gaven is a bit older. We need to rekindle our marriage!