Work. Oof. Tired 🙁
Besides that, I am poor as usual, my first months wages are due and my credit card company are on the brink or reminding me that I am banking with them and not the other way around. Really, I have nothing left and nowhere to go. Should be ok when I get paid though.
Top of the list is a new exhaust as I have recently discovered the booming noise coming from my exhaust is getting worse and I will finally have the money to pay for a new one. On close inspection there are 3 holes in it, one is big enough to get a smallish hand in.
Next in line, but most likely to get bought first is the fact that my main workstation has died again. This time the problem looks to be the PSU. It started making a weird hissing sound, then it started hanging, now it doesn’t turn on or off properly and makes a mild electrical burning smell, it powers the board up, but kind of skips if you know what I mean. It better be the PSU and not the board or the CPU. I can’t afford the cost of a new deskstop machine with my first wages. I was going to buy a new case anyway as the one I have is shit and poorly ventilated, which I suspect to be the cause of the apparent overheating and reboots I was suffering before I took the side off and also the cause of the repeatedly dying hard disks.
So, my main machine won’t boot, which leaves me with my work iBook and my own laptop, neither of which I find particularly comfortable for heavy usage. In a bid to save my files, I moved my 160GB /home disk to my project machine to copy the files across to my iBook as I have some uni work to do, but some of the files are unreadable on the project machine and the iBook can’t connect to the project machine’s Samba shares. *Rage*. I’m hoping that this is just a quirk of the machines in question and not a symptom of greater problems with my machine and particularly my new disk that holds all of my files. Anyway, I’m hopeful that a new PSU will solve the problem, my dad is going to loan me the money for a new PSU while I wait for pay day.
In the meantime, to get a workable desktop machine, I used my iBook to get Debian Sarge for Sparc as the iso I have is unreadable on my 160GB disk and did an emergency install on my Sun Ultra 10. It went ok. I’m writing this on it now. Bit sluggish for a desktop and I have a Sun Type 5 US keyboard and mouse which is making typing a whole new learning process, but meh, I have a desktop machine for the interim period.
As far as installing Debian goes, it was a breeze. No problems. Easier than ever, even on an unfamiliar architecture. I had to change the mouse in XF86config-4 as I got it wrong first time round and add in 1024×768 support to make it bearable on a 17″ TFT monitor, but other than that it was cool. I also installed mozilla-firefox and a few other things to make life better. Strange that I didn’t get to add an ftp apt repositry during the install, but I did this easily enough using apt-setup.
Besides all that, What the Hack is in just over a month, V Festival is a month after that and I think I will be going to France for a weekend the week before V. Busy (aka expensive :().
As for work, it seems to be going well. I got dropped in at the deep end last week, I’d been there a week and my boss (aka the other admin) went on holiday. Barely knowing the network I was left to keep things ticking over, with assistance from the other senior director. It went ok, but as the week went on, while I could keep things going which wasn’t much work, just your average admin tasks, the new jobs I was handed took me ages to get anywhere with as for the most part, it was the first time I had ever done them and I didn’t really know the network or the setup I was working with. This included writing my own init scripts, adding new domains to BIND, Sendmail and Exim, getting SNMP working and using MRTG to query it and so on. I also did my first messing with sed and awk. Most of this is stuff that I had mostly either avoided due to it’s messy nature or never had cause to learn. It’s good to get around to these things because otherwise I probably never would. Being a Debian boy I am also learning the Red Hat/Fedora way, which isn’t much different to be honest. You get setup rather than debconf and dpkg-reconfigure and /etc/init.d is symlinked to /etc/rc.d/init.d so it makes no odds. I’ve been doing loads of other stuff too like setting up a new mail server to use maildir instead of mbox, multiple domains, and authenticated SMTP blah blah. It’s been cool but I was glad to see my boss today to take the load off me, zip through some of the things that I’d been struggling with and for me to ask about the stuff I had been unsure about all week. Anyway, I’m sure you’re all fascinated.
Oh before I forget, LUG Radio Live is on Saturday and yours truly is hosting the Lightning Talks stage.