I still have not reinstalled Windows 2000 on my main workstation. I have to do it soon or I will go insane. Windows is getting worse and worse… Well, soon it will happen, and all will rejoice.
Sep 08
Watch out for Pennywise…
Good ol’ Pennywise the clown. Yeah, I got IT on DVD a few days ago. It was under ten bucks so I went for it so to speak. It takes a lot for me to get tired of that movie. I turned on the commentary track with this most recent viewing. It had the director and a few of the actors from the movie in there talking. Well, no time to keep shooting the bull. Later…
Sep 05
Busy, So busy…
I have been a bit busy as of late or I would have posted more this week. I did add a few pictures to http://jacob.smock.com/ but mostly I have been hard at work and fixing computers for people. This weekend I have to bring a computer back to the Church that I do side work for. I need to find time to work on replacing that NIC in my firewall that is running amuck. It is the NIC for the DMZ. If you don’t know what that means, do not let your heart be troubled. It is a network behind the firewall that is isolated from the internal LAN. That is all I feel like explaining. I know, scary it seems that I stopped explaining that subject real quick. Anyway, I gotta go. Tune in next time, same bat time, same bat channel…
Sep 03
Marriage and the like…
Well, the invite list is almost finalized. That is a sigh of relief as it has been a pain to get all of the names/address together for the list. I assume this wedding thing will be an interesting and fun(scary) step in my life. One thing I do know is that many people seem surprised if not outright shocked that I am getting married. Good ol’ anti-social me. But, I digress(often). Time to continue working.
Sep 03
Floyd and FreeBSD
I have a computer I call ‘Floyd’. It is a Pentium 200Mhz MMX with 64Megs of SDRAM. It also has a couple of 8.4Gig hard drives. I installed FreeBSD 5.1-RELEASE #0 on it and then installed Apache. It is behind a firewall on a DMZ by itself so hopefully that is enough to keep it from getting rooted…heh. Anyway, back to work.
Sep 01
USB Keyboards thy name be evil…
One thing I have noticed is that USB keyboards work normally but any problems that might come up regarding a keyboard and you normally need a PS/2 keyboard instead since it tends to be totally hardware and specifically meant for working no matter what. I am working on a computer that is running Windows 98 and since it does not do any detection/installing until it is totally running I have to use a PS/2 keyboard to set up a USB keyboard until it is installed in Windows…I now have to dig up a PS/2 keyboard to take care of this problem. I suppose it happens but sometimes it can be irritating.
Aug 28
Hosting hosting everywhere…
Well, ‘smock.com’ is still hosted with ‘Liquidweb.com’ but it got moved to a newer server and some things upgraded. Instead of 750megs of storage I now get 2gig. Instead of 30gig of bandwidth I now get 50gig. I figure that is more than enough to keep me going. If all goes right and I am able to get all parties prepaired, then I might be moving ‘theuncle.com’ to Liquidweb with the same specs. Hopefully on a different server so in case the server ‘smock.com’ is on goes down then it won’t affect both domains. You know the ‘not all eggs in one basket’ idea. Although having them both hosted with Liquidweb could be construed as the eggs analogy but having redundancy only goes so far on personal domains. On a side note, the server ‘smock.com’ is on has 4 Processors and a Gig of RAM. I logged into my shell account on the server and took a peek.
Aug 25
Tired…but ready to do battle
Man am I tired. Today just dragged on with no sign of ending. I have been playing more with FreeBSD on one of my servers. Not much mind you but enough to get used to it a bit. I may know Linux a lot and that does migrate over rather well but things tend to be in different places and certain programs do not exist on FreeBSD. I am thinking of playing with Postfix or Exim and installing Apache of course. If I can make it do virtual domain and email hosting then it will all be worth it.
Aug 22
Weekend as it were…
I am glad the weekend has creeped up on me because I need it to take care of some stuff and do some quick learning of FreeBSD as I want to get it going on my home network. On another note, that Sobig.F trojan that seems to be going around is irritating me a bit. Up at work I had to set up a filter so it would just filter the messages containing said trojan before even the Virusscanner could hit it. It is still an issue since I keep getting postmaster@ and mdaemon@ type emails saying my message did not go through even though I never sent one. I know I will be blamed for something. Oh well, I know the networks I take care of are clean so I am good to go for the most part. Lates…
Aug 19
Army of Darkness
I have to say when it comes to movies with good one-liners, ‘Army of Darkness’ starring Bruce Campbell, is one of the best there is. I doubt any movie will ever replace my favorite, which is Ghostbusters, but AoD might be up there in the ranks. I paused it a few minutes so I could write this. Well, back to the movie and where is that popcorn?
Aug 18
The Beast has a name and it is NT4
Well, up at work a PDC server is starting to go so I am creating a BDC that will hopefully take over until a permanent solution makes itself known. It is scary that I remember how to do just about everything in NT4 in almost all regards. One nice thing is that Windowsupdate seems to work just fine if you get IE6 installed on NT4. It is updated and seems to be handling things ok. This solution is of course temporary as the computer that is being the BDC is a Compaq desktop and most people know how reliable they are. 😛 Anyway, it is getting closer to the time that I must take my leave for the day so, later.
Aug 15
Computer habit I curse thee!
Seems that every time I look around I see another computer part or electronic gadget that I want. Too bad the money situation is not healthy or I would be gathering them all to my fold. I am getting restless so I might end up reinstalling Linux on Floyd(my Linux box) and Windows 2000 Server on Kramer(my Win2k Server box) to clean them up. After this time though I don’t want to be reinstalling on those two again until a HDD crashes. I am getting to a point to where learning does not happen often with those two so being functional is more important than learning. Well, enough of my chatter…Off to bed.
Aug 13
Of shows and seasons
I cannot say I watch a lot of TV shows but the few I do watch are hopefully going to be showing new episodes again soon. As I do not have anything more than regular TV stations I am not graced with the expense of cable or satellite programming. That is not necessarily a bad thing. I have never been able to pay for TV AND the commercials that most of those stations have. Just watching commercials is payment enough in my opinion. Having to watch them and know I am paying for them upfront is hard to swallow. Well, enough of my ranting as I have said my piece and am ready to move on to a different topic.
Aug 12
W32.Blaster.Worm patch
This is of course a major irritation to have to make sure all the workstations that I lord over are patched. They all seem to be and this I guess was patched when I started doing all the updates. Below is a link from Symantec.
Blaster.Worm fix/removal
Aug 12
Snowcones
Ahh, the simple joys of having a snowcone. Been a long time since I have had one. I got a large cup that contains the necessary ingredients pertaining to a snowcone. My favorite flavour(notice the English spelling) is ‘bubblegum’.
Aug 11
Burning burning everywhere
Well, at the moment I am making copies of data CDs. I have to make 2 copies of each CD and I have over 100 to make copies of. It will take a while but it has to be done. All this and on only 3 or so hours of sleep. I was off visiting family and got home at around 3a or so this morning.
Aug 09
Travis’ Graduation
Well, it was interesting to go and watch him walk across the stage. Not used to being on the watching side of this ritual. I do know that the Texas Representative that did the commencement speech was boring to listen to. Afterward we all went to a Church that he goes to over in Huntsville, TX. It was a little party gathering for him graduating. I am glad that he finally got the Bachelors degree in Computer Science. It has been a while since I have seen his family and some mutual friends. Well, I am off to find something to eat for tonight.
Aug 07
Boredom I call it computers
Right now I am finding computers in general to be boring…or at least getting to be as such. I think it is because of the lack of a challenge. The only major challenge that I have left to learn is programming and time does not often permit the learning curve involved. I have some knowledge on it but I want to be able to program on my own instead of searching for it all the time. I have started trying to learn PHP, which is a scripting language used for the web. Once I learn a bit of that I will learn how to get it to interact with MySQL and possibly MSSQL. Yeah, I know the latter is a Microsoft server but I figure it is good to know for increased job opportunities. I would also like to maybe make a program that I could port between Win32 and *nix systems but for right now the web scripting will cause me enough headaches.
Aug 06
Gambit of updates
You know, I have been updating the computers up at where I work now for the past two weeks as I have to work around the schedule of others. I do not mind that because that often is part of the job that IT Admins have to face. It is just that the updates are all the same. Good ol Windows. The joy’s of installing a service pack. I normally don’t have an issue with Windows service packs but I really do not like that Microsoft seems to think that it knows better and re-enables all the services it wants to. It never asks. I have a few services always disabled on all the work systems and even mine at home. “Automatic updates” is one as I do not need my computer deciding to connect and check for updates on it’s own. I also disable “Remote Registry” since there is no need for it on this set up or any others that I work with. “Windows Time” and “Windows Messaging” are also not needing so I disable them. Enough of my rambling on this subject though…
Aug 05
Apophis yet again…
That same day that Apophis gave me problems I was able to use the Recovery Console to restore the Windows 2000 MBR. That did calm me down a bit from how irritated I was. I still am going to get Linux on there. I might give Mandrake one more try as when it is installed everything seems to work without too many problems or tweaking. Once I get the MBR thing worked out and able to slap down Mandrake when it pulls an act worthy of Microsoft; the computer will be exactly the way I want it. The Windows side works great again since that MBR restore. I would have tried yesterday but as soon as I got home I crashed hard and slept until 2a or so. I Then noticed the time and went back to sleep. Well, back to work…