The weekend at last!

What a huge week! I even did some patch panel work this week. One of our customers (in their wisdom) glued their patch panel to the wall because they could't find any screws. Which is fine, but it's crooked! There is NO chance of getting it off the wall now without taking out chunks of wall. Anyway, my job for the day was to take their blue spagetti soup and turn it into a working LAN, which I did. The annoying part was the patch panel, it wasn't all that spectacular and I ended up having to strip and twist (to make them thicker) the wires to get them to contact the V blades in the punch down. I got it all sorted eventually. The other weird thing was it as a 568B wired panel, which is odd. I've not seen one before. Most of the outlets needed to be re-crimped too. I ended up offsetting the rack-mounted gear on one side by one rack hole so that they were level!

IDE Tape drives. The bane of my existance. We have tried about 8 IDE cards now and they just do not want to play the game. The one that is working is chewing up one whole core when doing a backup, that's crap. Reason is because we can't see the IDE ports on the IDE controller card because it's RAID. The IDE ports aren't shown in the device manager. So, we can't force the drive to use DMA mode. It's annoying because it's going to probably mean a board swap and more down-time for the customer. It's a damn shame too because everything else in the server is perfect, they've done everything right. RAID 5 with a hot-spare, lots of RAM and regular backups. It's a really frustrating problem!

Yesterday and today were coding days. I added a few new features and fixed the interface mainly on our Sugar project. I am really loving the YUI library. It's great. I've used it to do small popup dialogs that grey out the site into the background, you fill out the form then it goes away. This is the *good* kind of popup though, it does stuff for you. It schedules a followup call for our projects when you hit the button. It also updates some other status' that allow us to monitor the progress through a project.

Computers are dropping like flies at home. The HTPC died, and tonight has mysteriously started working again. Which was good because I needed to nick one of it's SCSI drives for the server, which lost a drive in it's RAID 5 array. I booted the HTPC and copied all the data off it. The lone SCSI drive in the HTPC is an U160 drive only 16GB I use for recording to. I've thrown that in the server, replacing the dead one and it's rebuilding while I type now. It's unfortunate because the replacement drive, although quicker, is much, much louder. It's all I've got though. I've gone from a Seagate ST318275LW (18.2 gig 7200RPM Ultra-2 SCSI) to a Seagate Atlas 10KII (18.2G 10000 RPM Ultra-160 SCSI). The other down-side is that drive will far out-pace the other drives in the array, it's kind of a waste throwing a nice U160 drive in with Ultra-2 gear. What I really want is to get another 2 or 4 disk array of 320GB SATAII drives. That would be nice =) The other thing that annoys me about this failure is that it's the other RAID 5 array that has the hot spare! This array doesn't!!! Grrrrrrr.

Hopefully the data is all-good and it's happy when it's done and I reboot.