April 2006 Archives

This evening I’m getting some strange power issues and
having UPS on my systems have limited any issues.  Normally with these
types of power fluctuations I would need to reboot and re-sync my systems but
not today.

I went to take a shower on my way out to get a bite to eat
and all of the sudden I was in darkness. Well my UPS have kept all of my
systems up and running during these sporadic power fluctuations this evening
without an issue.

I have had several issues with the wiring of this house
which prompted me to go out to a local surplus store and purchase some heavy
duty UPS. I was also able to come up on some UPS at some government
auctions where they were bidding off surplus equipment.

The UPS I have you normally don’t see in a home
environment even one that has all of the equipment that I have!

I have 2 “APC Smart UPS 2200” and a rack mountable
“Compaq R3000 XR”. I have the “APC 2200’s” on “PC skates”
out on the floor and the “Compaq R3000 XR” in one of my racks with my
Web, Music, Windows and Linux servers and my routers and switches. I use the
“APC 2200’s” for my floor main systems and one switch.

I also have an “HP Powerwise 1000” and an “APC
800 RT” that I’m not using at this point. I intend to use the UPS I’m not
using on my entertainment equipment and will probably move on of my “APC
Smart UPS 2200” into another room to use with some of my audio or video
equipment as well.

For the very small price I paid since they were surplus and
auction pickups for less than 5% - 15% of normal cost they do excellent work.
Even when UPS are not keeping equipment up from a power outage they also filter
the power and knock down surges and spikes so they are well worth the investment
to protect your valuable computer systems presently and in the future when you
are going to purchase new equipment.

Once again I had to clear items out of my garage to be able to access my weights and perform an acceptable work out. The issue was that I had run into some very nice auctions with unbelievable deals for furniture stores going out of business. I made some unbelievable purchases before I was able to move items out of the house.

I’m not talking about those fake going out of business sales where you get 20 % - 40% or even 70% off of list price which means that normally you are getting 40% at the most @ 70 % if you even get that.

These were no reserve auctions for stores actually going out of business since the owners were retiring etc...

Anyway I have figured out what pieces I want to keep and took pictures of the others to place in ads in various places on the web and possibly my shopping cart web site once its ready (almost there). I had to place some of the pieces in storage for a minute since it has kept raining so often preventing decent day of staging things outside.

The furniture is nice Ashley, Schnadig etc... but I had no room to move in the house. I had a garage sale after upgrading some furniture like this in October so I will do something similar when I know we will not have rain for the weekend or just do the newspaper or internet sale thing

Now time to hit that iron!!

I was testing some items on my blogs and found that I was unable to leave comments. I looked through my settings and had comments enabled properly. I looked at the plugins and none of them affected the ability to leave comments.

I then went to Sixapart and found the following in their knowledge base article: http://www.sixapart.com/movabletype/kb/comments/comment_and_tra.html

That article set me straight and after setting my “Preferred Archive Type" to "Individual" my blog will now accept comments again.

I had to make this change individually on each blog

This past Sunday 4/02/2006 one of my memory modules failed today on my "Web Server". I came in from working on my front lawn and then seeding & fertilizing the lawn. I then decided to take a moment to update my "Main Blog" and then of course couldn't make any connection to my "Web Server".

My "Music Server" was still streaming music and I could see a number of people listening to this Music on Winamp. I checked my other systems as well and they were all up so I knew there was not a power hit or anything that affected all the systems

I checked my KVM switch and hooked my web server directly to a monitor and received no response. I then tried to ping my "Web Server" from my "Music Server" and that didn't work so I logged into my backup Linux server and couldn't ping it from there either.

I then slid my "Web Server" out a bit on the rack and began isolating the issue. Once I determined it was the one stick of 512mb RAM I located my receipt called the store I bought it from and found that since I had purchased it as a package I had to return it as a package.

Anyway now I have my 1gb of RAM back and my web Server intact.

I now need to get my backup "Web Server" up to speed again. With all of the changes I have made to my main "Web Server" I have ported none over to my backup system! I should have been ready for this scenario!