Month: April 2004

Well thats the living room wired. 3 cat 5e cables and 2 coax lines. One coax for the satellite and the other for the cable line that they haven’ disconnected yet. When I get another TV I will run an extra line from the living room so I can feed the tivo output to the house, but i don’t need to do that right now. The Tivo is also getting its TV guide data from a serial connection to the file sever upstairs using one of the CAT 5 lines.
So all I have left is front bedroom. Oh and I should probably tidy the house up.

I made a discovery yesterday. I have a loft. At the front of the house it is about 4 feet high at the back it is about a foot. This is good news because tonight I pulled 4 sets of CAT 5e ethernet cable from the basement to the loft area then dropped them back down to the back bed room where all the computers are. Next I am going to run cables to the living room, I might as well make it 4 since I know that if I don’t do it I will end up doing it later anyway. I want to pull 4 cables to the front bed room as well but I am going to leave that till last.
I also found out why the telephone lines were giving me such a shitty dsl connection. The cable runs from the basement to the loft area then splits in two one goes to the front bedroom the other goes to the back bedroom. The cable the goes to the front is two pieces spliced together. All the connections look like someone took the wires twisted them together then wrapped electrical tape round them.
So at the end of this cabling frenzy I can get rid of the cable that runs from the back bedroom to the front one for the wireless base station. I can hook up the TIVO so I don’t have to use a laptop as a serial to wireless ethernet bridge.
Do you think it is to nerdy to run a network port to the kitchen?

Hard Disk Crash

I should have been paying more attention. I was cleaning up some mailing list I subscribe to and all of a sudden I get a bunch of errors. I go log into the file server and there are access errors on the screen. Reboot and the hard disk isn’t even mountable.
Seem the second disk in the mirror got kick out a couple weeks back. At the time I added it back but I guess the reason it got out so sync was the first disk was failing.
So I pulled the ide cable out of the primary hard disk and rebooted and the machine came up cleaning using the secondary hard disk. Other than my pride being hurt I am down 2 weeks worth of email that I had read and copied to my home drive and a few changes I made to my address book. Not a huge loss. I may try and boot the hard disk tomorrow and see if allowing it to cool down will give it a chance to recover. This hard disk is less than a year old so is still covered by the warranty.
I have dropped in a spare 120 Gig drive that I bought for just this situation and it has just finished synchronizing so I have working raid 0 set again.
If I had been looking at my logs I would have seen the errors going back a few weeks. Doh.

I am dialed in at the Microsoft Security security conference in DC after getting up at some silly time to get the MARC train to be in DC to 8:30. I listening to jesper johansson. He is a good speaker and fairly funny. He answer to the question what security patches are available for windows 98, his answer is just one its called windows XP. He Called Windows ME (miserable edition).