I don’t know about the rest of you, but waking up to snow on the driveway (and an inch on the ground at the office) when it’s nearly May isn’t my idea of a good time. Anybody else ready for this to be over? I’d love to not have to start a fire every stinking morning.
Category: Jake
It’s My Fault
I want to apologize to all of Central Oregon (but mostly to the folks who live south of Bend) for the weather today and the icy and snowy conditions (especially the bobsled run that is US 97 and South Century Drive down by Sunriver). You see, I took my studded tires off yesterday, in preparation for the deadline to have them removed, and because of that, it snowed, froze, and became a skating rink last night.
This author regrets the error.
Router != Switch (or: Just because the plug fits doesn’t mean it’s right)
So the other day I was trying to troubleshoot a network issue at the office (which is always fun, as it’s usually something stupid that requires far too much time to figure out but only 30 seconds to fix). There were a couple computers in the office that couldn’t get onto the Internet. After checking the obvious (that the cable is plugged in properly), I head into the command line to try to ping our firewall, with no luck. I check to see what the IP address for the machine is (and to see if it even had a proper one) and noticed that it was in the 10.x.x.x subnet.
Since our entire network is on the 192.168.1.x subnet, I had no idea why this machine had a 10.x.x.x IP address. Just to make sure the network card was working OK, I manually changed the IP address back to an IP in the office subnet, manually putting in the OpenDNS IP addresses, and got online fine. But the minute I put the computer back to auto-detecting IP settings, it reverted back to 10.x.x.x, and couldn’t get online. I verified that the DHCP server on the network was running properly (it was), so it was either a) a weird thing is Vista that I’ve never come across or b) It was getting its IP address from somewhere else.
I assumed “b)” and installed Wireshark to look for DHCP handshakes and sure enough, there was another DHCP server running in the building somewhere that was overriding my DHCP server (which is basically a dd-wrt router, since that particular office is trying to phase out their Windows Domain/DHCP server).
So the hunt began for the rogue network device. After a bit of searching around the office, I found an old Zyxel wireless router (with a sticker from the long-defunct Unicom) buried under some wires in the corner of an office underneath a desk. It was plugged in where there used to be a switch (no idea what happened to the little five-port switch). Somebody must have figured that “Hey, this thing has network ports on it, it must work to connect all these random cables together.” And it would have probably worked fine, if somebody would’ve turned off the DHCP server on the thing. And it was only affecting a few of the folks in the office as the rest hadn’t renewed their DHCP request yet, so they still had the 192.168.1.x addresses.
But like I said before, pain to figure out, easy to fix.
So for future reference, just because it looks like a switch, and just because the the network cables fit, does not mean you should just randomly plug it in. Especially if it has a big ol’ antenna sticking out of the top if it.
The NCAA Brackets Have Been Set
You have between now and Thursday morning to fill out your brackets for the pick ’em. Get to it!
Blech
I’ve finally fallen victim to the cold that’s gotten everybody else up to this point except me. My kids have all had it, my office all has it, and I guess I was due for my first (and hopefully last) ugly cold of the season (I had one other one, but it was minor — I was still quite functional).
Just the same, i did want to let everybody know that I added a couple of prizes to the pick ’em (including a digital video/still camera and a toolbox — that one’s for the best local bracket) so make sure you get signed up.
Band Concert This Weekend
See that big banner over there to the right? Go and click on it, and it’ll take you here where you’ll read about some free entertainment this weekend that you’ll be stupid to miss. Or something like that.
Just the same, it’ll be a good show, and I’d encourage any and all to attend this free, family-friendly concert.
Kids Are Funny
I rarely talk about my kids on this blog, because I’m not really into getting into personal stuff too often (maybe personal stuff about me but not necessarily my family). But I had to laugh at this.
Today my youngest daughter had library day at school. She’s come home with some random books before, but usually there’s a reasoning for the books she picks out (she’s in kindergarden, after all, so it’s not like she really knows what she’s doing). But I really had to laugh (and wonder) when she come home with this oddball book.
If I could read the mind of a five-year-old, I’d be a rich (and probably very confused) man.
Busy Weekend
If anybody’s trying to get ahold of me this weekend, I wish you luck. I’m playing with the Central Oregon Symphony this weekend (www.cosymphony.com) and I have rehearsal tonight and then concerts the next three nights. The show is going to be great, even if my parts are boring. If you do make it, make sure to come find me and say “Hi.”
(This was posted from my mobile, so pardon spelling errors and lack of links.)
BendBlogs.com Fixed, Server Almost Back To Normal
What a couple of days it has been.
A couple nights ago, the server that hosts this site and several others (including my employers’) that I manage had a backup hard drive fail. Not the end of the world, the datacenter could swap in a new one, be back up and running in 10 minutes. I did an offsite backup, just in case, and we swapped in the backup hard drive, and things were running smoothly again (once I got the thing partitioned properly so that my backup tools recognized the drive properly).
The problem is that two sites I had been working on when the thing got rebooted had some issues when they came backup (they were having issues before, and this just forced me to look at them a bit harder). First off was the church’s site. The WEC Typo3 install I had been running there had already been going a bit bonkers, so I had to try to get that upgraded and backup and running again, as I didn’t really want to lose their large sermon archive. Typo3 is sometimes a bit of a pain to upgrade/reinstall properly (at least to somebody like me who hasn’t dealt with Typo3 much and am used to much simpler databases applications). I think I’ve got it back up again, but need to do some tweaking before I turn it live.
A constant nagging problem I’ve been having with BendBlogs.com is it’s VERY heavy MySQL usage, and it’s creation of a bunch of large temporary tables. Folks will periodically get this error when loading the site. I’ve been trying to find time to redevelop that site using Movable Type and some plugins developed for Blogs.com that can be used for this type of thing, but I’ve been just totally slammed. In the meanwhile, I knew a temporary fix would be to increase the size of my /tmp partition on the server and setup a script to keep it clean in there, but I didn’t want something that would bugger up cPanel. So following the directions here to edit cPanel’s securetmp script to increase the size, I then removed and recreated the /tmp partition following these directions (as it’s basically a virtual partition that cPanel creates) and that got rid of the error on bendblogs.com. I also increased the memory_limit a touch in my php.ini file to give things a bit more breathing room, so hopefully that’ll hold things at bay until I can find more time to redevelop the site so it doesn’t pound the MySQL database so hard on page loads (as it doesn’t do as well caching things as I’d like).
Testing From Windows Mobile
I’m playing with some apps and settings on my new phone via My Mobiler. I’ve installed PocketSharpMT and if you can read this, I did it right.