Ramblings of a geek with a few hobbies…
Thanks to my anniversary gift from Ana, my new hard drives are on order and waiting to be shipped along with the necessary raid controller. I also ordered a USB2 -> IDE adapter to attach my 20GB tape drive to. I’m not sure what I’ll end up using it for now, but surely something will present itself.
In other news…
As I mentioned before, they’ve done a terrific job on the new stadium. I’ve placed the pictures I took in my photo gallery, feel free to check them out.
When we first arrived at the stadium, and drove past it on our way to park the car, the first impression was how sharp it looked. All of the corners are sharp and crisp, the walkway support beams on the inside peak through the beautiful brick and create a pleasant contrast. Speaking of the brick, it really made it stand out in a landscape of construction and parking lots. You can’t help looking at it, even if it just caught the corner of your eye. The old Busch just didn’t pop like that.
Tonight was our first game at the new Busch Stadium, and a good one it was. I was able to purchase the three tickets about a month ago when the Cardinals said they were further along in construction than planned and released a decent chunk of tickets.
So I was able to hop online on a designated day and make a purchase. The seats were in left field, in what’s called the Casino Queen Party Porch. They weren’t cheap seats, but they also weren’t terribly expensive either. I bought 3, for myself, Ana, and my dad.
We arrived at the new park over an hour before the game so we could walk around and check some of it out beforehand. The place is amazing (I’ll save that for another post) to say the least. Very well done.
When I ordered my new server, I added Backup Exec 10d QuickStart Edition (or something like that). Dell didn’t have much information on their website about what this software was comprised of, and Veritas/Symantec didn’t list that edition as a product, so I was a little concerned about what I was going to be receiving. Granted, my needs aren’t complex; I was even planning on not backing up to tape anymore and just dumping to a RAID array and then across the wlan to Jay’s RAID array.
After installing and some configuration, I’m very pleased with the software. It’s capable of way more than I need, but allows some things I wasn’t planning on and definitely makes my backups a lot cleaner. One of these is the ability to use the remote agents to backup stuff on Ana’s desktop since she doesn’t get data onto the fileserver often. Because of its media append/expirations times, I’m probably going to reattach the tape drive (with a usb2->ide adapter) and use it to continue periodic tape backups.
Now that our network is up, I’ve decided to do a little upgrading. My new server should be delivered tomorrow and will probably end up replacing 4 old, old, old (think Pentium, Pentium II) machines running Linux. To the dismay of some I’m sure, this new server is going to be running Windows Server 2003. There are a variety of reasons, none of which are all that interesting, really 😉
Anyway, the new machine is a horse. And a cheap one at that. It’s a Dell PowerEdge SC430 with a 2.8Ghz Pentium D (mmm dual core) with a gig of RAM. Price after the memory upgrade and before tax was something like $450. Once the machine arrives I’ll also be purchasing a couple of large hard drives and a RAID controller to use for backups instead of my old tape drive. To round out the upgrade will be a pair of gigabit switches to replace some older and failing 10/100 ones.
For those of you bored from this topic, this should be the last in the series Now, where was I..
One fairly recent Saturday we decided to take my antenna off of the chimney and just point it down the road to the other person with a laptop and determine if there was any signal whatsoever coming from it. The current working theory was that the sheet metal on the top of the chimney was causing funky problems with transmission.
After building the antenna mount, it had to be installed. On my chimney above my second storey roof. Now, I’ve been the first floor roof several times (think Christmas decorations, etc) without any problems; but that first trip (and second…and third.. etc.) up to the second storety freaked me out. Since Jay’s such a good pal, he volunteered to attach the antenna mount to the top of the chimney. As it was getting dark outside, I strattled the peak of the roof holding a flashlight in his direction while he attached the mount to the chimney with a whole bunch of lag bolts.
Overall installation was quite simple (photos of both antennas forthcoming). We ran the cable down the chimney and through a new hole into my basement where we hooked it up to the access point, and then stopped for a while to eat some dinner. We were almost done!
After dinner we went to our respective houses and started a ping. It worked. For about 15 seconds. And those were the last echos we’d see for months.
In preparation for installing the antennas, we did a little research to figure out how hard it might be to aim them. Google Earth provided us the information needed to calculate the vertical angles the antennas should be sitting at. Below is a map of the two houses:
This will probably span multiple posts, as it’s a 7+ month long saga… Enjoy!
It all started when Jay and Katherine started looking for a house and we joked about needing to have a network between them. There was so much we could end up doing – backups, shared media, games, voip, etc.. The more we talked about it, the more serious it became, to the point of where it was obviously required. (more…)
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