Busy Work, Sleep Schedules & Christmas I know it's been forever since I wrote something. I've started about 3 different times in the last month or so, and have never gotten around to finishing it. There's too much to list off, and I've forgotten some of the things that have happened I'm sure.

Work has been very very busy. With the new things I am doing for Fortress it's been allot. Not too much, just really busy. With Aaron out of the country half of the time I think they really appreciate linux gurus. For about 2 weeks straight one of my phones woke me up. I usually had an average of 4 messages on each phone throughout the day as well. It was just too much. I was working on 2 major projects were both came to a deployment on the same weekend. I really didn't sleep for about 3 days, and I am just now recovering from the "work lag" so to speak 2 weeks later.

I am very happy to say the both went fairly well. Of course there have been several little things after the fact, and some little fixes. It's not we took down an entire wireless ISP network when reconfiguring IP address this time. (I can't actually take the credit for that, I was logged into another machine at the time ... was writing shell scripts and the router went insane). Needles to say the connection is no longer on that bridge. The mail and web hosting deployment was more of a custom setup, and learning all of the little tricks from the old system has been interesting. They seem to be very very happy with the new servers though. The other installation was a simple mail server replacement. My work was done fairly quickly, the bulk of the migration time was spent on the client computers.

I've learned, and experienced some things along the way with these projects. I found a solution to my earlier installation problem. Certain RAID setups are not done properly. I needed to edit mdadm.conf and set auto=yes on the device. Turns out the init scripts run in the background have not waited for the device to be brought up, and then they use things on the partition that is not mounted on a device not active yet. Got it? ;-). Kolab is very very cool (www.kolab.org) I set up my first master slave kolab system. I was simple after I overcame a problem in the slave bootstrap. I even submitted a patch, and a version of some sorts was applied. It is my hope that eventually I can become more involved directly with the project. As for right now ... I'm just a happy user. I spent hours installing Horde for use with Kolab. It's not the simplest thing in the world to do. If you do something wrong ... lookout. I finally got it working. Mind you this was a simple Horde installation without kronolith for calendars and the other group ware modules. They just wanted email. Outlook sucks. Thank God Gregg has a good memory and mentioned Aaron's blog complaining about how Lookout sucks, and specifically in respect to changing the ports to use SSL. They're broken little interface was really no help. Nothing but problems. KDE 3.5 is out as of yesterday, hopefully the project will gain some more momentum.

I missed Thanksgiving diner (Canadian), so Mary Ann had a diner for way word souls a few weeks ago. I was uber sick. I drank 4 neo-citrons that night. The gang (Mack, Dayle, Steph and Mary Ann) drank 8 bottle of Red Wine. I guess it was a fair trade. It was a really really fun night though. We have plans to do it again. American Thanksgiving was this past week. Which brings me to my complaint about television. If thanksgiving has not even occurred. Why was "The Grinch Who Stole Christmas" on TBS 3 weeks ago? That's just wrong. It's not December, nor past Thanksgiving ... why is there Christmas television? That bugs me. This weekend is the L&Y Christmas party in Canmore. I'm looking forward to it. I need a weekend off.  ¶ 7:48:00 AM 0 comments