Blogging, Installations & Blockbuster I just ripped out a repetitious chunk from my last blog. This has happened to me before where I see several paragraphs from my post repeated. Like a whole section was copied and pasted. It's not a big deal really. I only noticed it because I was reading my last post to see what I had mentioned. I'll be careful this time to make sure that doesn't happen. Maybe it's a finicky problem with this editor ... in fire fox ... on linux ... SuSE 9.3 to be exact. It could be anything.

This past week was eventfully ... but sad to say I was not apparently productive. I mean I got tons done in my head. I feel exhausted, and the new week is almost upon me, but I can't say I have a great deal of tangible results to brag about. In my defense we have had some timing issues connecting with other people, and collecting parts.

I finally got the two new servers on a Friday to install. To my dismay they had only 1 network card (they are both firewalls). It's not a problem ... just let Ray know and they'll get me some more. I can continue with the installation with one network card. Wrong again. It appears that both servers are USB only. No PS/2 ports for the keyboard and mouse. That's alright if you have USB keyboard and mice. I have one USB mouse, and a KVM for two servers which happens to be PS/2. So I phoned Ray Fri eve and toke a drive down to compusmart for some parts. So a single USB to PS/2 adapter is $11.99. I know what you are thinking ... "But they come with every $8 mouse?!?!?!". I need the adapter going in the opposite conversion that the ones that come with a mouse. To top it all off ... they only had 1 in stock. I wasn't about to spend $50 on adapters (I needed 4), and drive all over the city checking other locations for some tiny little adapters that in reality cost about $0.67 to make.

I let Ray know ... he made a call and no dice from Gord either. I decided I was screwed for doing some work last weekend and went to loose my money playing poker. Early last week Ray said he had a USB KVM for me. Well it was a nifty looking toy, too bad it didn't come with any cables! That's all I really needed ... the USB cables. I asked AJ if he had some ... sure we got tons at the office ... "Not the ones that come with mice ... the opposite way". Talked to Andy the tech guy ... no luck. I finally stopped at Computer Rack on the way back downtown. Found double keyboard and mouse into a single USB adapter for 10 bucks each. Sweet! ... I'm in business again. No I can do my installations!

The first Kubuntu installation was finished. Too bad the server wouldn't boot up. :( So I tried on the second server and it worked like a charm. I figured I just messed something up and tried again. Exact same setup and it won't boot. Upon some investigation it is not mounting the /var directory on the RAID device ... which means it can't find any boot information so it just hangs. Lovely! I changed the partitioning to a different order and sizes ... this time the installation hangs in the middle of loading packages. I'm going to try installation on each hard drive separately to see if one of them is a problem. If not ... the it's probably a controller fault, and I'll have to make a service call.

Last weekend I went to rent a new movie from Blockbuster. "The Interpreter" was a guaranteed rental, yet no copies were in so I get a free raincheck. I went back a week later to get my free rental and it's all gone again. The clerk says to me "we never have the new releases in". I though to myself ... maybe you should get some more copies? Looks like I might not be getting a free rental as it expires in a week. Bah ... big corporations! Maybe I can reserve it for some night ... that would take effort though ... which I am not willing to dispense on Blockbuster.  ¶ 1:39:00 AM