News updates

Hmm, where to start ...

• The universe has a way of making you spend money whether you want to or not.  cymrullewes' car badly needed new front brakes, and now has them; I replaced the pads, rotors and wear sensors today.  I also replaced my trolley jack (which seized up unexpectedly), and bought several new sockets.  I have a theory that auto manufacturers and toolkit manufacturers conspire to make certain that doing mechanical work on any car on the market will always require at least one wrench or socket size never included in off-the-shelf wrench/socket kits.  Specifically, this time, the caliper retaining bolts on a 1998 Mercedes C230 require an 18mm socket.  When was the last time you saw a socket set on sale that included an 18mm socket?  Much less a half-inch-drive one, to take the required 100 lb.ft or so of torque?

  Replacing the trolley jack ate up about $125 of what we were expecting to save in labor costs, but I don't see that as a cost of the job.  It had already seized up, and was going to need repair or replacement anyway.  Repair wasn't in the cards because it's a Chinese-made jack with no visible brand name that I bought from Post Tool 18 years ago, and it doesn't appear to be designed to ever be disassembled once assembled.  But I can't complain too loudly about it lasting 18 years, and anyway, the new jack is better — more lift height (21"), more lift capacity (3 tons instead of 2.5), and it's more controllable than the old jack.

• I don't have access to any of my normally used email accounts right now, not least because babylon5, my personal workstation and at this point still our mailserver at caerllewys.net, is down with a hardware failure.  (Capacitors on the motherboard leaked.  They were keeping the machine up, but once I had to reboot to reallocate some disk space, the machine wouldn't boot again.  I ordered replacement capacitors from DigiKey yesterday, and hope to have them in my hands tomorrow and babylon5 back up tomorrow evening if all goes well.  It could at least have waited until I got the new primary mailserver on babylon4 set up.)  However, I realized this evening I still have access to mail at co.ordinate.org, so for the time being I am redirecting all LiveJournal mail there.

• Speaking of babylon4, it's our new storage box, and it's been up and running for a week or two at this point.  So far it has taken over the duties of minbar and nijo, though they haven't been shut down yet.

  Minbar is a Sun Ultra30 with a single 250MHz UltraSparc-II, 768MB of RAM, 54GB of internal disk, and 360GB of striped external disk in two 711 multipacks, running Solaris 9; it's been providing NAS to all our machines via NFS and Samba, and backup nameservice.  Nijo is a Sun Ultra5, running a stripped-down Solaris 9 and doing nothing but primary nameservice.

  Babylon4, their replacement, is a rackmount box with dual 3.2GHz P4 Xeons, three redundant power supplies (I believe it requires any two to be operating), mirrored 80GB SATA boot disks, 4GB of RAM at present, and a 3.25TB SATA disk array, running Solaris 10 and ZFS.  So far it's taken over NFS and Samba duties from minbar, and primary nameservice (now running in its own zone) from nijo.  I'm working (or was working, before babylon5 went down) on migrating Postfix and Apache2 over from babylon5, and have still to migrate mysqld, mrtg, dspam, Mailman, and Bacula.  Once those are done I plan to do a complete OS reinstall on babylon5.

One hundred days, three hundred photos

I have but one word here: "Self-absorbed."

(Oh yes ... this is a crossposting test.)