Pwned! Yes, Marc, I came up with the idea quite some time ago that I should pull this April Fool’s joke, and I came very close to just posting an entry saying that I was going to do it, instead of actually doing it (Unfinished Post #355). But, I thought, what the hey, maybe I’ll fish around for some gullible people. Well, looks like it worked! Yay!

So, in other real news besides the haircut and my fake engagement (still single ladies), my parents were here for a week between the 21st and the 28th. About the only thing that we did was go to see the CNN Center and go on the tour. International TV studios are cool. :) We walked around Centennial Park. I’ll probably post the one pic I took eventually.

In the world of movies, I’ve seen 300, Wild Hogs, North By Northwest, 21 Grams, Reign Over Me, and last night, Blades of Glory. 300 was good, but not as good as all the hype said. Wild Hogs was much better than expected. North By Northwest was eh. 21 Grams was exactly like Crash and that other movie that I went to see after Children of Men that I liked so much better but can’t remember the name of right now. I guess since I’ve seen more than two of those type of films, that they aren’t really that enjoyable now. I could see why nobody else like that third movie if they’d already seen the other two. To quote Drewby, “I liked it better the first time when it was called Fight Club”. Reign Over Me was good. And Blades of Glory… um, I think it could have been better. Maybe it was because I watched it in a practically empty theater. Maybe more people laughing would have helped it.

On Wednesday (the 28th), I finally received the final packages for my new file server. I got it put together and up and running that night. I had a total of 5 400 GB drives, but one of them was currently in use and completely full, I needed to make a backup before I pulled it out of its current home and put it into its permanent home. I dusted off the ol’ fibre channel and used it. Now I realize how abysmally slow it is (read/writes in the 5 MB/s range while transferring 400GB takes a while). I managed to get my data off, physically transfer the drive, and get the new array up and running. I started to transfer everything back, which took an equally excrutiatingly long time. We were having a lan party at work, so I wanted it to be ready in time enough to show it off. I didn’t get everything transfered that I would have liked, but enough that I packed it up and took it to the lan. I don’t think anybody got any content off it, so that was pretty disappointing. When a couple of guys tried, it kept crashing explorer. I don’t know if it was just Solaris running Samba, or if it was just my Samba config. As I didn’t really tweak much in the Samba config, I would lean towards a misconfiguration issue and incompatibility playing nicely with XP. If I had a copy of XP, I would test for sure. I might try a VM copy, if I can get it to work… After all that was done, I’ve spent the rest of the weekend playing with it more. I’d make some poor choices of naming things, so there were those mistakes to correct. Then I transfered all of my home directory over to it. I had pretty much run out of space there as well. Once that was done, I transfered argento over to ldap/kerberos/autofs and cut argento over. It’s been pretty smooth sailing so far, I must say, working off of nfs. I’m starting to jones for a gig switch and a telco rack. I setup snapshotting as well on it all, which was one of the primary motivating factors of going with a Solaris/ZFS solution. And, I added some new entries to ldap to get some further automount entries besides home. Automounting stuff from LDAP is awesome. While playing with the array, I had been noticing a slightly ominous, yet faint clicking sound emanating from one of the drives. I installed SMART tools, and finally got the syntax right only to see this on one of the drives: HARDWARE IMPENDING FAILURE GENERAL HARD DRIVE FAILURE [asc=5d, ascq=10]. Doh! Looks like I’ll have to RMA one all too quickly. At least I still have the nice box and packaging Seagate sent the last drive in, so it shouldn’t be hard at all to package it up properly.

And finally, I’ve frozen my a/c again. :( With the fibre channel and all of my machines going over those several days, the apartment got pretty hot (cite my away message “i don’t think my apt can adequately cool the current level of heat i am generating… :(“). So, I figured it was just all of the drives spun up, working hard, and generating too much heat. But, Friday night, it was cool enough that I turned off the a/c and opened some windows for a while. That’s when I heard it, the ominous dripping coming from the HVAC closet. I took off the grate with my trusty cordless drill (thanks Clay and KB), and confirmed what was going on. I called the office Saturday morning and put in a work order. Later when I dropped off rent, the lady at the office said that she would have maintenance call me to confirm that it was a trivial condensation leak. They never called. Chalk up one more for “The Runaround”. Maintenance finally knocked on my door at 8:15 this morning. He confirmed that it was frozen, turned it off, and is letting it thaw right now. Hopefully all it needs is a little freon top-off. But it is worrisome that they topped it off not too long ago. Either I’m doing something that I’m not supposed to do, or there’s a leak…

Anyway, so I was up early and started writing to catch everyone up. I made sure to take a shower before the dude got back and tried to finish this post up before work. And now I’m done, and I still have gobs of time before work… bah!