Monday, November 14, 2005

Feeling Crappy

This past weekend I came down sick with a cold. It has been taking pretty much everything out of me. Taking a day off work to rest. Be sides being sick, Friday in Fort Collins was an absolute awesome night. I was able to catch up with some old high school friends. Very fun time. Well, off to resting.

Friday, November 11, 2005

Up and Running

I have successfully setup the two 4400 on our network and running Windows 2003 Server and Debian. I am currently working on some software that makes it easy for our developers to setup test sites and other neat things from an administrative panel on the server. I am leaving for Fort Collins in about an hour. I will have my cell available for those of you who need to get in touch with me.

Thursday, November 10, 2005

Automatic Playlist of Music You Like!

I often find myself visiting digg for all my news stories. I still check out /. from time to time, but mostly digg. Today I came across something really good. Go check out Pandora, if you haven't already. Basically what you do is type in your favorite artist and based on the kind of music they play, it will create a playlist of stuff you might also like. Contrary to what you might expect, it actually works. I found several artist, even ones I have heard before and didn't like, but it found songs I would like from them. It worked really well. A definite digg and something to check out. Besides that not too much going on tonight. As I mentioned earlier, I am heading to Fort Collins tomorrow. Looks like tomorrow my time will be spent working a little more on the new servers and need to catch up with some final belly stuff.

Problem-Free Linux Day, Not Possible

In the process of getting our new Dell servers up and running, I have ran into a few problems. Firstly, I could not get the kernel to see my RAID. Well, that turns out to be a really simple fix: Configure the RAID first. Everything went fine and dandy from that point on. The Windows 2003 Server went smoothly without one problem. No I am not giving credit to Microsoft ;) Due to my limitation in power cords, I shut down the first Linux server and got the 4400 Linux server going, but am right now running into a few problems. When Debian installs the kernel files it works fine over the network. But breaks with the base package downloads. Then I find another power cord and boot up the first Linux server I took offline. Now it won't boot. Geez. By the way, as you can tell I have no naming conventions for these servers yet, but you just wait. That is coming soon. Tonight I am going to be helping a friend install Windows XP Pro x64 Edition for his new 64-bit server he built. Should be cool. Alrighty, I am out. I'll post an update later on.

Wednesday, November 09, 2005

Untitled

I really do like the idea of naming posts, but at times they can just get in the way. Therefore, I have titled this post, "Untitled". Perhaps I could have named it something dealing with post titles, but this is more unoriginal. Not much went on today other than moving servers around. It looks like installing an operating system on these new Dell servers will be quite a pain. I am looking forward to learning more about SCSI and other various hardware in these systems, but it will bring nightmares of compiling Linux kernels and device drivers. Oh my! This weekend is looking to be a good one. I am heading up to Fort Collins to visit my friends attending CSU. Always a great time and this one shouldn't prove otherwise.

Tuesday, November 08, 2005

Something out of Ordinary

I pretty much start most days off by asking myself: "I wonder if anything will happen out of normal routine today?" Most days are the same normal routinal days. Well, for today, it wasn't anything normal for the most part. I wake up early and get on computer to check my e-mail. I get an e-mail from my boss asking me to look into some servers he had found on craigslist. I look at little and leave the rest for work. After I do the research I find that if we were to buy these servers it would normally cost about $2,000. It also appeared they are in the ballpark of $6,000 to $8,000, 2-3 years ago. My boss then talks to the guy and comes down and says he is willing to sell all four servers for $500. Yes, you see the numbers correctly. $500. My mouth hit the floor. An appointment was setup for me to check them out. I go and look at them and realize that these servers are not machines, they are beasts. In total 600 pounds of pure computing power. To quickly summerize it all, my company purchased a Dell PowerEdge 2300 and 2400, and two Dell PowerEdge 4400's for a grand total of $500. Its like we stole them ;) In other news, there is no other news. I just have tons of new sys admin work to do.

Back to Blogging

I am not sure if I am missed or if I miss blogging. I know that one of the two is true. I still want to do something with brosner.com, but I am not sure. I think I will stick to posting here on this website as it requires zero effort on my behalf, other than actually writing the post. Life has been a bit of ride and not sure when it will pan out. Work has been quite hectic lately as we approached the launch date on the belly project. We should be launching tomorrow, or better yet, later today ;) I am living back at home now. Not real exciting, but need to get certain aspects of my life under control. My plan is to be able to get a place of my own in downtown Denver. I will be looking around for something soon. I am glad to be back and posting content somewhere. I find that looking back and reading these posts is some what insipiring to see how I become more mature in life. I just need to find some way of consolidating it all and keeping the data for a long time to come. I'll figure out something ;)