Tom's Insights - Week of 8/6/01

Week of August 6th, 2001

Last Updated: August 15, 2001 08:47

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Monday August 6, 2001

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Tuesday August 7, 2001

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Wednesday August 8, 2001

There are no bugs left on the Yellowhead route between Vancouver and Saskatoon (that is, Saskatoon via Edmonton versus Saskatoon via Calgary). How do I know this? Because they are all dead and glued to the front of my car (Note to Self: Find a way to "soak" car in bug remover for 24 hours prior to any attempts at washing. Industrial strength bug remover).

Hi folks. We're home. Er, I think we're home. Let me check my calendar... Yep. If it's Wednesday, this must be Saskatoon.

Needless to say, it's been a bit of a whirlwind the past three weeks. Three thousand miles on the car. Another 10,000 "air" miles. Adventures at every juncture. I sit and let my mind sift through the people, places, and experiences I've encountered since July 19th. Everything blends together and become this huge blob of multi-colored "stuff"; kinda like looking at something through a kaleidoscope. I have no idea where to begin. I'm exhausted -- in a very pleasant "used up" sorta way. Onward, forever onward.

We arrived home yesterday about 5 am and spent the day unpacking, doing laundry, scraping the fine layer of dust off everything, and generally re-acclimatizing (Again. Or is that still?). This morning I'm frantically bailing. Yep. That inevitable fallout everyone experiences after any kind of lengthy departure from normal daily routine: 2500 emails to sort, filter, and synthesize; grass needs cutting; car needs a service; I need to find a place to put the 20 or so new books I collected in my travels. Call Brian and Marcia. Drop an email to Neil. Now where did I put that cable? My To-Do list is growing by the minute. You know, the bazillion little things required to restore rhythm again to one's own personal brand of chandelier swinging.

Glancing around my office I'm immediately reminded of Douglas Adams famous words: Don't Panic. I'm working in FrontPage on Janus. On the desk next to me is Phaedrus (my new notebook -- more on that momentarily). Outlook 2002 is open (it came on the notebook; I'm "kicking the tires". Comments to follow) and I'm jotting down tasks as I think of them. In a second Outlook window is a calendar for August. It was empty at 5 am. It's almost 7:30 and only a few empty squares remain. File manger is humming in the background, copying files to a central "sorting" directory on our LinkSys RAID server (Rats. Note to Self: Check when the RAID server has to go back... ). I have "Ding-Dongs" going off all around me. To my left is Hydras. A backup /export/home is in progress. Behind me is a pile of cables I haven't got around to putting away yet because my cable box is full. Really full. On the ledge in front of me is a pile of CD's. I don't know where to put them because -- you got it -- my binder that had room for twenty or thirty CD's three months ago is full. Bob would be proud of me. My office smacks of confusion and disorganization. I, on the other hand, exude confidence. I'm pretending to have my shit together. Damn. Now where did I put that partridge...

-oOo-

I really did intend to update these pages while I was away. I knew I wouldn't have the time or opportunity to do so every day, but I fully expected to post something at least two or three times a week. Uh-huh. Remember my friend Murphy? Well he wasn't just looking over my shoulder the last three weeks -- he was sitting on it. Laughing and chortling all the time, of course. That Murphy guy really pisses me off some days.

When I left here on the 19th, everything (computer-ish, that is) was humming along like a top. Nothing had been changed or altered on Hydras for 10 days, and what was running, was running as it should. All error logs (OS and, where applicable, apps) were clean. In retrospect, I now know that about the time I was turning the key to lock the front door, the gremlins were waking up, stretching, and looking around to see what kind of chaos they could create. Not just any kind of chaos... No, mundane chaos would never do. It had to be that special kind. The kind that ultimately results in me pounding my head against the wall for long periods of time.

We drove straight through to Vancouver. 17 hours, 1200 miles -- Swish. I phoned Brian to double-check flight arrival times. He informed me that Hydras was running like molasses in January. Huh? Everything was ducky just a few hours ago. I borrow my father-in-law's computer and hit several of the sites I was serving to the world. Yep. Slow all right. Consistently slow across the board. So I connect my USB ZIP to the system and install SSH. Try to login. Can't. Login times out. This is not good. SSH is the only way for me to "see" what's going on on Hydras. Without SSH I'm working blind and simply guessing. I put the problem aside; Brian and Marcia arrive and we talk long into the night. Our wives do not allow Brian and I to talk computers or do anything even remotely geekish. We do manage to SSH in once during the weekend using Brian's notebook and a dialup connection (we sent the wives shopping, heh-heh-heh). Server response is ssllooww (type letter, pause and wait for letter to appear on-screen; type letter, pause... ) but I do get in. There's no indication of a problem anywhere. All the error logs are clean, and everything appears to be working as advertised. We focus on friendship and laughter for the balance of the weekend -- I add Hydras to my Round-Tu-It list for the upcoming week.

To make a very long story short... Over the course of the next few days I begged/borrowed a computer and connection whenever I could, but I kept drawing a blank. When I could get logged in, that is. No one I know in Vancouver has high-speed connectivity, so it was dialup or nothing. Dialup sucks big time. More so for me due to the fact I've been blessed with either cable modem or DSL (sometimes both) connections for over five years now. I simply didn't do dialup. When my new laptop arrived (July 25th) I had to stop and think hard about how to configure a dialup connection (Note to Self: Having a 1 GHz processor and 256MB of RAM does absolutely nothing to speed a dialup connection <g>).

The weekend arrived (July 28/29). I had tried everything I could think of -- including a remote reboot of Hydras -- but I was no closer to solving the problem than when I began. I was frustrated. Frustrated by dialup (have I mentioned lately how much I hate dialup?); frustrated by the fact that when I did get logged in (about 1 time in 10), there was nothing to indicate where the problem lay; and frustrated knowing that I was about to embark on a business trip to Indianapolis. I'd have high speed connectivity there, but little opportunity to use it due to a packed and very intense schedule. As it turned out, Hydras was slothful even over a high speed line. Over the course of two weeks, I had tested and exhausted every idea I had come up with. In desperation, I had a friend go to our townhouse and call me back from my office. I then instructed him to power cycle the DSL modem. Nope. That wasn't it. I then had him unplug my LinkSys hub/router, wait 30 seconds, then plug it back in. Voila. Hydras starting responding as it should. I've since spoken to the folks at LinkSys and they are as baffled as I am over why cycling the hub resolved my connectivity issues. As Moshe would say, "Cosmic".

Even with my connectivity issues resolved, I continued to have problems with both email and SCP (Secure Copy via SSH). Both Outlook and Mulberry would time-out when I tried to access mail either through IMAP or POP. A couple times I managed to get authenticated via POP only to have Outlook download two or three messages, then lock up. Feh. Webmail, on the other hand, worked as advertised. Sorta. Usually I'd have to log in a half-dozen times before I got a decent (as in relatively quick for 56K) connection. SCP, on the other hand, was consistent -- using it would lock up my SSH client every time. I was not amused. Getting my email was hit and miss process and I had no way to transfer files to or from Hydras. Nope. Not amused at all.

I arrived home only to discover IMAP worked flawlessly on all my systems. Not terribly surprising -- I have over 400 MB of mail stored in 50-odd folders. Trying to pull just the headers over a dialup connection is bound to result in frequent and/or consistent time-outs. What really puzzled me however, was that POP still didn't work (timed out or locked up) over a 100 MB LAN. Mmm. Last night I uninstalled then re-installed CommuniGate Pro. Nope. No fixee-fixee. So I stopped the service while I pondered my next move. Leah called me away to help with something, and I forgot all about restarting the daemon. I got up this morning and couldn't figure out why Mulberry claimed it couldn't connect to Hydras. Well Doh, Tom. Try starting CommuniGate. I did, and Mulberry connected via IMAP without further protest. Two minutes later I heard my notebook chime. Huh? The notebook was configured for POP3, not IMAP. Sure enough, I could now POP mail off Hydras without error or protest. Another cosmic chain of events. Perhaps CommuniGate just needed a rest? Dunno. For the moment, the fact that everything is working as advertised is Good Enough. I don't have the time to troubleshoot through the problem, nor do I have any hankering to try and recreate the error. Mail is flowing again. Do not touch. Please keep your hands and feet inside the vehicle until the aircraft has come to a complete stop at the terminal gate and the captain has turned off the fasten seatbelts sign.

SCP, again, is being remarkably consistent. It doesn't work. Period. Full stop. I've had problems with OpenSSH in the past, so I decided last night to download and compile SSH 3.0.1. No joy. The linker falls down half way through the make process complaining loudly about something to do with the lncurses library. I'm sure the problem is easily solved; I just don't have the time to do so just now.

Speaking of time... gotta run. My plate is piled high and I'm not getting anything accomplished babbling away here. Hope your day is a good one, and thanks for all the patience everyone has afforded me. Tomorrow I'll tell you all about my new notebook, Phaedrus. Where'd I get the name? From "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance", one of my all-time favorite reads. I lost track of the number of times I've journeyed across America listening to Pirsig and Phaedrus deliver a Chautauqua. What's a Phaedrus? A Roman fabulist. What's a fabulist? A person who invents or relates fables. Suiting, don't you think? What's a Chautauqua? You'll have to read the book for that one.

Cheers...

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Thursday August 9, 2001

I bought two 256MB 133MHz DIMMS at Costco yesterday. $60 a piece. Canadian. Which is about $40 US. Yeah, it's just commodity RAM, but good grief... First time in ages I've bought something I didn't really need, but simply couldn't refuse for the price. Just to give you some perspective, when I built Janus two years ago, I outfitted my system with 256MB of quality RAM, and at the time I got a good deal -- the RAM was $410 for two 128MB DIMMS. If you're running Windows 2000, you cannot afford not to have 512MB of RAM in your machine at current prices.

-oOo-

My new Inspirion notebook received a Cold Dead Fingers award just hours after I unpacked it. My only complaint so far is the keyboard -- I prefer a little more of a "clickey" touch (like my MS Pro Keyboard), but my criticisms are minor relatively speaking. I've worked on a lot worst. For the record, Phaedrus is an Inspirion 8000 with:

15" UXGA LCD
1 GHz Intel P4
256MB RAM, 1 chip (which leaves me one slot open)
24X CD-ROM
8X CDRW/DVD
20 GB HDD
32MB nVidia Video chipset
Built-in V.56/10-100 modem/NIC (Intel based)
Extra battery
Leather case (very nice)
and an MS USB mouse (prefer to use a mouse when I have the room)

It's heavy, but the system is designed as a desktop replacement, and I just may end up using it as such. It's certainly capable, and the screen is stunning. Better than my 19" Viewsonic.

The OBE was marvelous (Out of Box Experience). I unpacked it, plugged it in, and turned it on. Everything was preloaded on the HD; everything worked as advertised. Nice touch. How unique to take a new computer out of the box, plug it in, and immediately go to work. While I still have a lots of fun configuring and building systems, it's nice to let someone else do all the grunt work and swearing for a change.

I've got some wireless stuff from LinkSys coming next week. Should be fun. One unit is the base station, which also functions as a hub/router/firewall (much like my BEFSR81 except with rabbit ears and only 4 ports), then there's a PCMCIA wireless LAN card (10MB/sec), and finally they're sending some kinda gizmo that plugs into my USB port and connects with the base station. Dunno. Wireless is all new to me.

-oOo-

I've been playing with Outlook 2002 for almost three weeks now. WPA aside, I like some of the refinements. In particular, I like the ability to color code calendar entries. And while I never had a problem configuring Outlook for multiple accounts, it was not the most intuitive process with OLK2K; OLK2002 has reduced all setup and configuration chores to one dialog. You can also group which accounts send/rec, when, and how, which is a nice touch. The product seemed a tad unstable when I first started to use it, but since then I've downloaded an update for both Outlook and Word from the Office Update site. Both installed with error or incident, and so far, they appear to have addressed some of the long delays (which appeared in the form of long lockups) when dialing out on a POTs line. We'll see. I really don't have an opinion yet. I'm using Outlook because I'm on a mission for Studio B -- I'm combining 10 personal address books into one master file, cleaning up duplicates and errors, and generally making a useable, categorized contacts list that can be shared among the staff.

If you use Outlook (in whatever form), you owe it to yourself to purchase a copy of OutBack Plus. I just DL'd the latest version (which is Outlook 2002 compatible; V3.0.2 I think). It installed without incident, and backed up all my files in less than five minutes.

Time to hit the pillow -- I'm toast. Be Good.

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Friday August 10, 2001

See Saturday.

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Saturday August 11, 2001

I know. A sorry excuse for a Daynoter. First I take three weeks holiday (Mmm), then I fail to post two days after my return. Bad Tom.

Truth be know, I've been heads-down-driving-hard since I returned home. A small part of my mind (somewhere in the upper right quadrant, I think) kept telling me that if I worked harder, I'd somehow recover all the time lost, and magically end up being caught up, balanced, and happy to be alive. Uh-Huh. Obviously that region of my brain is lacking correct serotonin levels. Since we arrived home my days have started at 05:30 and ended around 23:00. Last night I lay down on the couch for a quick nap -- a nap that lasted 8+ hours. Pushing it? Who me?

Today, I'm striving for a wee bit of balance in my life. I slept late, spent some time with the kids, and this afternoon I'm tending to some backup and logistics issues. And email. Always that ever-present email. I'm actually enjoying my email duties today. Several people who I've never corresponded with before have dropped me a line to say "welcome back". Hah. More lurkers <grin>.

It's been relatively hot here in the Saskatchewan the past month (nothing at all like Indianapolis, but that's a story unto itself). Yesterday, I finally broke down and bought a "proper" fan to put in the door of my office. It's 20" across and the housing and blades are made of stainless steel. Everything is heavy duty and designed such that if a part fails, it can be replaced with ease. It certain does move air -- in fact, it moves air so well that it's blown some of Danielle's drawing off the wall. It also sounds a lot like one of those swamp boats people use to cruise around the Florida Everglades.

I think I now know why my network has been so atrociously unresponsive the past few weeks. One, unbeknownst to me my LinkSys router had a bug in the firmware that demanded a reset now and then to "clear the cobwebs". Two, according to my Apache logs, I was getting slammed by the CodeRed worm. It couldn't get in or do any damage, but it did affect response times to my web site. Can't do much about CodeRed pummeling my pipe, but I did stumble upon what I think is a fix to the LinkSys problem. I found the following on the BugTraq mailing list:

Tim Higgins of www.practicallynetworked.com just
informed me that Linksys has released an upgrade
of their firmware for their 1,4 and USB port
routers to version 1.39.3BETA. This should fix
the password retrieval vulnerability.

Note: I haven't been able to test this upgrade
myself yet.

Firmware upgrade: http://www.practicallynetworked.com/support/linksys_router_help_pg2.htm#Firmware

I installed the above firmware update and immediately noticed faster response times on both outbound and inbound traffic. Could be coincidence, but I don't think so. I'll be contacting my rep at LinkSys next week. Perhaps she has some insights to share with me...

Now I'm off to revamp my office. I've got to "review" my cable box, and I'd like to shuffle some systems around. I think I'm going to try using my laptop as a replacement for my workstation for a few days. I'll let you know.

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Sunday August 12, 2001

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