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Today I spent an embarrassingly large number of hours trying to automate the install of IE 8 along with some related updates. So I would have as updated of a machine as possible when I do a fresh install. Using VirtualBox of course. I’ve got it done actually. Except for this one update, KB981332. I have it auto-installing during the Windows install process and I just double-clicked the thing and restarted the VM and still Windows Update comes up and says it needs to be installed. Still. It’s very, very frustrating. Only thing I can think of is that is must be one of those two separate updates by the same name thing that MS does sometimes. I guess they have to replace an update with a newer version because there was something wrong with the original.

There is one thing I can do though: there’s an update log recorded and left in I think the Windows directory. It says the updates installed and the actual download location too actually. So I’ll just let it install on the VM and then see what the log says. Then download the update as an actual file and copy it from VM land to my updates folder. Ya, that should work…

Of course, it’s not that big of an update either at 670KBs or whatever. So there’s that.

Well that did allow me to download the update fresh from MS. Then I renamed it and over-wrote it in my directory structure so I could make a fresh ISO and try the whole thing again. Doesn’t that sound exciting? Okay sure I suppose I should be moving on. I still have to fix the IE policy that apparently is making downloads disabled by default and figure where all my beloved .REG files went that did things like disable to stupid accessibility bar and turn off all the sounds for me. Also find and package up all the drivers for the computer I’m going to loaning my land lady.

Oh and perhaps I should mention that I’ve come across a new piece of computer equipment. Ya see I worked for free at this non-profit place for like four months at or near 40 hours a week. Well half of May/June/most of July. So three at best. Anyway there was a major screw up with their OEM vendor supplying monitors and long-story-short I now have an extremely nice 24 inch monitor on my desk next to my existing 24 inch monitor/TV combo thinger I have had.

I had actually been waiting for my even older 19 inch 4:3 monitor to die. But damn all the luck it works as good as the day I bought it three or four years after I bought it. I wanted it to die so I could buy a second 16:9 monitor. But oh look, I’ve come up against a new one on my own. And all I had to do was work for free for three moths. I need a “will work IT for…free….and monitors…” sign I can hold on a freeway on ramp or something.

So I never thought I’d be that guy looking at two 24 inch monitors on his desk like some kind of glutton or some other more appropriate term possibly. And I didn’t plan it that way obviously. I didn’t plan the eight gigs of memory in my computer either. I bought all the parts with six gigs then won two gigs in a raffle.

So at the risk of getting philosophical here does this mean I’ve used up and depleted all my luck/karma or does this mean my luck/karma is merely paying me back for the 14 months of otherwise bad luck?  I mean will this be balanced out by bad luck in the future? Pfff. I can’t think that way. This is all a coincidence. The memory. The monitor. It was going to happen anyway. It doesn’t “mean” anything. Right?

In between the VMs I was also trying to work with Damn Small Linux. I was originally using some even-more-stripped-down version of it in which the mouse and keyboard worked plenty fine in the VM. Then I found this ISO for “current” (actually called current.iso) so I tried that. And the good news is it is way more functional and workable with lots of colors and useful icons for extensibility the bad news is the keyboard and mouse don’t work, period, in the VM. I tried search on this issue and apparently either my google-fu isn’t much today or no one else is having this issue.  Maybe if I left it up a while or something. For the system to detect it. I don’t know if that work. Probably not. I really wanted to get this administrator package installed on it called Webmin to do just what it sounds like. But I couldn’t get that to work either. Kept telling me I didn’t have the right version of perl but also refused to update my version of Perl. No, not annoying. And I haven’t tried yet to install VirtualBox but I’m guessing that wouldn’t do much better.

Well I decided to try out the “IE 8 Admin Kit” and see if it did any good. Couldn’t do any worse right? Well it certainly asked all the right questions and has apparently generated a good install package apparently but I’m going to go to bed and find it out what happens tomorrow.

So I’ve fallen behind on my posting once more but I don’t really care as it turns out because I’ve been using the evenings to try and train myself or at least experiment with how soon after I get home I can actually manage to get into freaking bed.

Eventually, see, my schedule is supposed to shift to a 11am – 3pm time frame. It’s been two weeks at this job and this has not happened. Why? Because I guess the wrong guy went on vacation at the wrong time and he is the only one that can give the signature to allow me network access enough I can use a freaking laptop at work. You know, the main utensil that would make it in fact possible to actually do the job for which I”m being paid. Ya, that thing. Anyway I guess I’ll be going to work 9am to 6pm for yet another week and probably won’t have my laptop even then.

But I got distracted, didn’t I? Yes. My goal was to come home and go to bed as quickly as possible so I could get up at an almost normal time like 9 or 10am and accomplish things before being at work at 3pm. So I’ve been trying to practice this a couple nights this week and it never goes too good because I always turn on the media server which in turn leads to watching some Futurama or whatever episode in bed. So tonight I left the server off but wanted to turn on the desktop anyway to check my bank balance. And possibly check the web-based mail for my employer. Ya, I don’t have email access either. One of the many vital ingredients to doing my job. As long as I’m paid then whatever sure what do I care? It’s not like I’m volunteering or something. Although if I was I would probably be putting the actual skills I want to continue to hone into use as opposed to the highly sought-after skill of plugging in power cables and sliding hard drives into 4U chassis. Wow, thanks for that. Again, I’m getting paid so why am I complaining?

Of course it could very well be for all I know I’ll get my laptop tomorrow, learn the job next week and in two months I won’t remember that lateness of getting the stupid laptop. It will be but a very distant memory. Right? That would easily happen, sure. Or I would get a call from that former boss of mine offering me a position for more money and marginally closer drive-time-wise which I’ll have to take because…what? I’m actually contributing to this job right now? Really? I doubt it.

Okay I guess that was some good venting. I remember I was brainstorming about new hardware and server things. At some point I realized I probably shouldn’t buy a bunch of stuff two weeks before labor day weekend. There’s usually sales over labor day weekend. Right? So I’m glad I waited. Of course waiting for black Friday weekend would probably be even more wiser but I do feel like I need at the very least those new hard drives. It’ll take a long time to do the initial spin-rite-ing on them after all. I’ll probably do one at a time.

Then eventually a new server of some kind. With the VM CPU extension of course. And I’m starting to think I should move away from FreeNAS as the host. I mean if all FreeNAS is going to do is sit there and tell me I have hard drives installed (and possibly their health and temps or whatever) I could do that through Linux. And Linux as an official VirtualBox OE available, unlike BSD/FreeNAS. I’ll use WebMin, which I haven’t tried yet, to admin the box and PHPVirtualBox to admin the VM stuff. As for the distro I wanted to keep it light. Like perhaps customizing DSL if at all possible. I think it is.

I’ve also been dreaming of re-purposing this hard drive “backplane” I was using at one time. It allowed me to just slide drives in and out easily which was really nice but eventually for whatever reason the drives stopped being recognized by the BIOS at all consistently. So I finally just took it out. But maybe I can use that wholly or in pieces along side a “pico ITX” system I once had to tie all the drives together. Or something. The PicoITX system would then make the drives available on the network. And I’d be booting it off of DSL or FreeNAS or whatever and put it in some clever case. This would assume the PicoITX board had four SATA connectors and I could figure out a PSU for all the drives since the Pico one probably couldn’t handle them all. Well it was just an idea.

I don’t think I’m even going to attempt to read that last entry. I can only imagine how chaotic it must be and near incomprehensible.

I didn’t get a lot accomplished today except I’ve been trying to figure a solution to my virtual Windows server idea. I was convinced FreeNAS with VirtualBox OSE was the way to go. A light solution that could boot off of a thumb drive and also tell me about the health of the physical drives through a convenient web interface. But then I started to realize that’s all I really need FreeNAS for: the hard drive monitor basically. I started to think about this after hearing some about PHPVirtualBox, an alternative front end to VirtulBox’s VMs.

So then I realized well hell I can run a more official version of VirtualBox on Linux and I can only hope there’s at least one PHP-based front-end that will sit there and tell me hard drive temperatures and if something is about to fail or whatever. Otherwise I’ll just use the PHPVirtualBox thing to manage the VMs nice-and-easy. Right?

I have also been thinking about the way in which I want to split up the data. Or more specifically how I would like to redundantly mirror the data of this future virtual Windows server. I realized if I bought one more 1TB drive I would four 500 gig drives and four 1TB drives. In that case I could theoretically have the main storage be two 1TB drives and two 500 gig drives mirrored to the name capacity drives. Everything would be mirror in other words.

So I was thinking about this all week. I don’t know enough (yet) about Linux to know how to make the two systems sync with each other auto-magic. I mean I would have two separate physical machines each hosting these four physical hard drives. So if one motherboard dies or a hard drive then I still got the other one. And I wouldn’t want either PC running 24/7. So I was thinking like the primary PC would boot up and look for the back up PC for a few seconds and if it didn’t find it then continue on. And when I wanted to back up I would turn on that computer then turn on the primary which would find the back up and go into “sync mode”. That was my theory. I mean it seems a waste of perfectly good storage drives that I could utilizing. Maybe there’s some way to use one of the two combos as some kind of iSCSI deal on my primary PC that is automatically synced with this virtual server storage. At least I’d have perfectly accessible data, as if it were a local SATA drive or whatever, always redundantly synced. And when my primary PC was off all the data is still available to stream or across Windows re-installs or whatever.

Okay that might be adding a bit of extra complexity to the whole thing here. I’d have to know how to rebuild the iSCSI thing if it was broken some way. If I lost a disk how would the syncs deal that, that sort of thing. It is a good idea though. Just have to work out some of the kinks.

I’ve only just started looking at Ubuntu Server Edition and it looks like it has about everything I want: a small install I can boot off a thumb drive with enough capabilities I can add VirtualBox/PHPVirtualBox and whatever else later.

I will say for FreeNAS though: it apparently has experimental ZFS support. I don’t really know what the “experimental” part is actually supposed to mean. Will it kill a drive? randomly corrupt data? Is it just a CYA? I have no idea.

I’ve also pretty well convinced myself I actually need three 1TB drives: 1 as a storage for my primary PC since my two 500 gigs will be utilized else where, 1 to complete the four-of-each thing I had in mind above, and one as a “hot spare” if/when one of the drives dies I can just slap in a new 1TB to replace it. So I’ll probably order them all online and then I’ll inevitably end up running spinrite on all three before using any of them. I’ll be lucky to have to project started inside of three weeks.

I was also contemplating a new motherboard/CPU which would of course mean another $80 in memory. I say this because my current “server” is so inconsistent in finding all four SATA drives. It’s driving me crazy. And apparently the CPUs, drivers and BIOS updates for this particular motherboard are no longer available. Unless I’m thinking of something else. I was going to upgrade one of my other desktops but I was trying to save that for one more other purposes. And it needs a CPU upgrade anyway. I should do that anyway since I’m sure those CPUs will soon no longer be available.

Okay I think this is the blog equielent of rambling and my spelling skills are some how getting worse so I think it’s time for bed.

Today was actually my second day of the new job. Just no time to post anything last night.

I signed a lot of non-disclosure agreements to get this job and even though I’m effectively anonymous on this blog I’m not going to actually mention the name of the company, the city or anything else that could possibly definitively identify who I am working for. I will in broad terms describe what I am doing.

Yesterday I showed up at 10am as instructed but my contact or what I later found out to be my “team lead” hadn’t arrived yet so a co-worker came out to show me in. The first hour or so was him trying to track down a hardware issue with a particular PC.

But lets back up a minute. Firstly I got there a little early, 9:50 I think, and went to the security desk and told them who I was and that I was starting. The security guard took my picture, printed it and gave me a badge in like minutes. I was very impressed. Then he had me go up to an iris scanner and look into it to identify me by my iris.

Okay I’ve never worked some place where I could get in and out of places simply by staring into a special mirror. A little recorded voice even says something like identification complete and the door unlocks. I know that novelty will eventually wear off but I think it’s really, really cool.

Any way I tried as best I could to offer ideas to this co-worker who was trying to troubleshoot this one particular computer.

Basically there’s thousands of computers in racks all containing between I think 10 and 24 hard drives each. Two mirror the OS, two are for parity and the rest is for mirrored data. Apparently the machines are booting off the RAID controller.

So this particular PC’s RAID controller was not being detected at POST and the co-worker was trying to get it to work by trying various things.

Oh and this is a huge data center full of computers that are maintained by other companies, each section of computers are completely enclosed by basically a chain link fence. All sides and even over head. I don’t know if the over head thing for security so no one climbs over or if it’s a Faraday cage thing. Or both. I don’t know.

So eventually my actual contact shows up and he’s actually the team lead of for this particular area I’ll be working. He makes the call it’s a hardware issue and we just replace the PC, being very careful to put the drives into the new unit in the exact order they were in in the old unit. So that was fun.

As you can imagine with thousands of computers running it’s a bit noisy. It’s hard to hear anything over that sound like people talking for instance. So I made it through all of yesterday some how. It actually seems quite similar to a past job I had but this ones on a much much larger scale.

Also, apparently, this job will be giving me a work laptop and a work-related blackberry. Seems I just can’t escape the blackberry. Although I don’t know in what instance I will be called for it. I can see how it would be good to emails on it but I’m a by-the-hour contractor. I think I’m going to be charging them if they go and ask me work-related stuff in my off-hours. Seriously.

Today was more or less similar to yesterday except I got to meet another co-worker who was not there yesterday. He showed me a bunch of stuff I hadn’t yet learned and seemed remarkably full of energy for somebody doing a relatively low-energy job.

I learned a lot about the square wholes in server racks that separate out the “U”s. As in a “3U server chassis”.

Oh and this particular center is almost entirely Linux-based. All CLI stuff, too. Then the RAID cards have there own CLI. I think I’m going to be very CLI-full for the next 6 to 12 months.

I think I went over some of this but over the weekend I did get back into that whole automate XP install thing.  I keep getting wrapped up in it and thinking of different ways to do it. My latest thoughts involve creating that simple config file of 7zip=1 type lines, one per line, then in the main batch file during install time it there would be a IF statement at each line to test if that particular program’s variable was a 1 or 0. That would decide if that program was even written to the RunOnceEx registry in other words, thus deciding which programs would be installed and which weren’t.

So I’d go in and just set to 1′s and 0′s myself manually ahead of time. During install a batch file would run a for-loop against the config file basically concatenating “SET ” (set with a space) with the variable part (7zip=1) thus setting up all the variables.  Then in the RunOnceEx.cmd file is all the registry entries for the set up commands of the applications. Each line with a IF statement to see if each program is set to install like if 7zip=1 then install, else skip to next statement. Break. Whatever. Well I have to read up on IFs I guess.

So I got that on one end and on the other is just an interface to creating the directory structure for new OS installs, or “projects” as I call them. I really need to change something because I’m already running out of space on my 500 gig drive.

I was also thinking about ways to modularize the install process. Like have IE with all the associated updates (or updates slipstreamed where possible), .NET 1.1 and 3.5 also with updates. In other words these packages and there updates would would be one single unit associated with each other and not necessarily installed at one point in particular. Like with updates as a first thing or last if so desired. And I have to do the same thing for the VC++ 2005 and 2008 runtimes. Why some form of this isn’t included with Windows 7 I have no idea. I thought we left the runtime requirements behind when the popularity of VB started to (apparently?) fade.

And I’m still noodling the whole replacement for my WHS as well. This new job and it’s redundant disk arrays with VMs has me thinking about it again. It would be so nice to have WHS virtualized so I at least didn’t have to worry about the hardware changing. I can upgrade or I guess downgrade the PC it’s on and the VM would just keep on chugging. I could also relatively easily backup the virtual hard drives for both the data and the OS to other locations. And there’s all my data. I’m going to use virtualbox in this case because of VirtualPC’s seemingly irrational and arbitrary limitations (only three disks? 160 gig limits? really?). And actually you can mount VDIs as drives as per this forum link. Although that won’t work for dynamically expanding type disks which I was thinking about using actually.

Well maybe I’ll just make lots of 250 gig virtual drives and spread them across a bunch of drives maybe even over multiple physical machines. Gotta keep them redundant after all. Of course if those VDIs were backed up then there’d probably be no need to tell the virtual WHS to duplicate data as well. And I can only hope this would eliminate my WHS’s current habit of telling me there are conflicts. Of course I probably would have trouble mounting a 250 gigabyte VDI file over the network. Even if it is a 1Gbps network. Unless there’s some way to mount it on the host and use it as a share or something. Now that would be something.

So another question is what would I use as the host OS?  My almost instant answer to this jumps to FreeNAS actually. Mostly because of it’s presumably smallish memory footprint thus freeing up that much more for the VM. Of course for this to really work I would need to most likely upgrade both the CPU and the memory of the host computer anyway. I would be using the 64 bit FreeNAS so I’d most likely go past 4 gigs “just because”.

Even though I can almost see myself buying a new motherboard as long as I’m buying new memory and possibly a new CPU anyway I think I’m going to avoid doing that this time. This motherboard seems fine to me and I think I can stretch a little bit of life out of it still. I don’t think a couple of gigs of memory and a slightly faster CPU preferably with the VM extension will cost all that much. Even if I did buy a new motherboard I would have to buy a new CPU and several gigs of memory anyway. So I may as well just limit it to the CPU and memory.

I’ll probably end up buying more 1TB hard drives before all is said and done as well.  And as I probably said splitting up the virtual disks across all the physical ones. A 1TB drive is actually 931 GBs so I could divide that by four for roughly 232 GBs. And probably leave some extra room available so the OS doesn’t freak out or whatever so maybe…. a whole bunch of 220 GB virtual disks per physical disk. Obviously fewer on whatever 500 gig drives I decide to use and closer to four if not four on the 1TB drives.  And perhaps have them mirror either with a roughly written script and sync utility or something a little more auto-magic that’s built in to BSD or FreeNAS or whatever. Over the network that is. So I imagine if I had four 1TB drives in the main PC with four VDIs per disk that would be 16 VDIs total, at least. Okay so lets drop that. I have to limited to the number of redundant copies. If I had four 1TB disks I would have four 500 gig drives. So that’s 8 VDIs I could back up at any one point and possibly two of those would be for the OS. So really 6 VDIs for the data storage. So 220 x 6 is 1320 GBs, which is roughly 1.29 TBs of data. If I did my calculations correctly which I may not have considering I am getting more and more tired and later I stay up. Of course the OS VDI doesn’t have to be the whole 220Gigs. I could it smaller like 80 or 120 or something.

So the six VDIs would be for storage, 1 for the OS of much smaller size. Okay that makes more sense so it screws up the calculations from above but I don’t feel like doing it over again. And all them are mirrored, by which I mean copied/synced as VDI files, over the network to the 500 gig drives. Now if I could figure out some kind of auto-switch over thing so if a 1TB drive failed or wasn’t detected or whatever then two 500 gig drives would just flip into place as a replacement…well that would be pretty cool but perhaps not very likely.

Ya now that I think of it this seems a little unsafe. I mean what if a 1TB drive went bad? If I’m limited by the 500 gig drives anyway would it make more sense to use the four 500 gigs as the primary VDI storage and when one of them fails slip in the back up 1TB? Then at least I could keep working until a new 500 gig could be put into place.

Okay I’m too tired to keep writing and I should have been in bed a long, long time ago. So night.

See I knew this would happen. I knew if I let myself start skipping days of entries in the blog one day here and there was going to turn into two and three days which would eventually be several days at a time. I knew it. And that’s what’s happened, hasn’t it? I’m now going days at a time without making any entry. I mean the goal was every day for the whole year and I did go a good consistent six or seven months which is nothing to be ashamed of but I really would liked to have kept it going more consistently even than that.  So all I can do is try and make sure I do my entry daily so I don’t fall behind again.

So since the last time I wrote I had to drive about two hours down to a little town called Tracy. It was supposed to be half way  between where I live and where the staffing service lady works but I think I really got the short end of stick since she only had to drive a fraction of the time I did. Not that I’m bitter.

Actually I don’t care that much. Just more paper work I kind of which I could have done at home and scanned/emailed like all the other paper work I had to send to her that way. If nothing else so far I have learned the software that came with my printer/scanner quite well. Scanning several documents into the one PDF for instance. Never bothered to notice that before this last batch of sending paper work to the staffing company.

Oh and I finally received a start date for the new job. So there’s that. I mean given my track record I won’t consider it really a new job until I’ve been there a while. A couple of weeks perhaps. And the commute will be pretty far. At least 45 minutes with no traffic. Probably longer actually. And way longer with traffic. After the initial training period, I’m told, my shift will most likely be from 3pm to 11:30pm. So I’m not really expecting any traffic at either of those times. And if I can manage it I am going to go to bed as soon after I arrive home as I possibly can so I can get up at 9am or whatever. Maybe I can go jogging or study or continue volunteering a couple of hours or whatever I want really. That’s my theory right now. I don’t know if sleep patterns will really work out like that.

I mean the main reason I don’t go to bed at say 7pm, after getting home around 6:20, is because it seems some how odd to go to bed so early.  And the sun is shinning in through all the Windows and there’s lots of activity outside and everything else that’s wrong with that. But if it’s 12:30am when I get home, or whatever, everybody’s asleep anyway so theoretically it shouldn’t be that hard to talk myself into sleeping soon after getting home.

So my only complain about this new staffing service so far is that it took four or however many weeks for them to get me to this point of a starting date. And yet Friday, the very day I before I would be starting, I was informed one of my employers couldn’t be verified. So what you didn’t try to verify until the Friday before I’m set to start? Really? And you couldn’t put in the same of the staffing service into Google, go to their home page, click “contact” and call the 800 number? Is that what you’re telling me? IS THAT WHAT YOU”RE TELLING ME???

It took literally minutes to find and call this 800 number to verify my employment. LITERALLY MINUTES. I cannot believe employment verification people who sound like by the name they do this sort of thing FOR A LIVING couldn’t USE THE GOOGLE to find this 800 number. I mean even if they were having trouble why wait to the last minute to ask me?  IT MAKES NO SENSE.

Okay I don’t know why this sort of thing just grates on me especially bad.  Maybe it shouldn’t.

In other news my planned robocopy of stuff to the two hard drives via USB adapter is still going to pretty well. I volunteered to re-install my land lady’s PC with XP because  it seemed to old and antique-dated that I didn’t even bother to try and install SP3 on it. And when I heard about that shortcuts glitch that was already being exploited to install nasty software I had to insist to her that I re-do it for her. So she let me finally. Her computer is a Dell with a Celeron. Yes, JUST  A CELERON. With 256 megs of memory. Will it even run IE 7 or 8?? I don’t even know. I do know the patch for the shortcuts shell glitch is only officially available for SP3 and that’s enough reason I need to get her PC up to date as much as I can. And I’ll try and make it as easy as possible to use Firefox or Chrome or some other browser that isn’t IE 6.

Once I get the updates under control and figure out her drivers, including her printer I should probably make a note of that, I don’t think it will be that difficult. Just can’t get carried away.

So my idea, for now at least, for choosing which apps are installed and where aren’t is to have basically a config file: just a text file with the short name or nick name of each application followed by either a 1 or a 0. Like logmein=0 and 7zip=1 and other similar. Then during windows install a batch file with a for-loop will going through this config file and conjunction those statements with the the words SET. So it would be SET logmein=0.  Once all those environment variables were set it would just be a matter of adding some logic that would run the install if it was set to 1 and skip the ones set to zero.

The obvious step of course is to have an actual program that will generate this config file list of programs with a fancy GUI for setting which programs I want and which I don’t. Well I’m getting more and more tired and the wee hour of 8:45 and obviously I haven’t worked out all the details yet. But anyway that is what I am going to work on tomorrow.

So I made up a new little hierarchy of folders for my VirtualBox VMs and all the related stuff and started some new VMs. I think I have to go through and download all the latest SP3 updates out since April of 2009. The ones that can be slipstreamed will be slipped everything else will be installed via batch file on-the-fly. Just have to figure out a new method of picking and choosing which applications will and will not be installed.

So a funny thing happened last Thursday: when I booted the computer I got a message about some inconsistencies being and found the Windows was doing something to fix them. Well the last time I saw that message I ended up running spin rite on the drive for like 800 hours (yes, eight-hundred).

So this time I thought I’d “learn from my mistake” and went straight to trying to clone this 500 gig drive over to a different 500 gig so I could spin rite the one that had some kind of “inconsistency” with it.

So I get into my little PE environment that contains Ghost32.exe and spend several minutes checking and re-checking to make sure I have the right drive set to source and destination. They’re both exactly the same capacity and possibly the same brand, ya see so it was a little confusing. And the Ghost GUI didn’t seem to indicate which one was the USB drive. That would have been kind of convenient. Right? In retrospect just now I think if I had copied Ghost32.exe to the drive I wanted to clone Ghost32.exe would not have let me over-write the very exe I was using thereby inadvertently protecting me. But I didn’t think of that. Anyway despite what I thought was several checks and re-checks to be sure I was going the right direction i ghosted a blank drive over the top of the drive I had intended on keeping.

It’s not really the end of the world the though. I mean all my documents were on drop box. That’s the most important stuff, really. Almost all my games had steam-based backups, although I didn’t realize that until later. So there were a few things would like to have NOT lost but nothing super-critical to whatever I don’t think.

When I rebooted after realizing I now had two blank drives rather than two partially filed 500 gig drives I found out Windows 7 wouldn’t boot up any more. So perhaps it was the C: drive that had the inconsistency. Perhaps the entire premise of my cloning over the 500 gig data drive was completely pointless. Maybe.

Since I didn’t want to deal with it any longer I just found a different IDE drive to use as a C: drive and rotated out the old one. I did actually figure out how to boot Windows 7 on the drive again though: I used my PE environment to bring up the CMD shell and then used the DISKPART utility to mark that partition as active. How the 100 meg “system reserved” partition disappeared I have no idea.  I wasn’t even working with that drive.

So I made a fresh Windows 7 install. And since I had two probably perfectly good 500 gig drives laying around I set them up as a mirrored volume under Windows 7.  So at least I’ll probably be partially protected if one of them dies. Although I have yet to actually test that theory.

I have also set up a series of robocopy batch files to back up some of the more important folders to separate SATA drives via USB adapter. Folders like my steam game backup folders, my install of Guild Wars and WoW and my Firefox Portable folder. Eventually I will add that XAMPP folder as well. I just power on the USB adapter and start running the shortcuts to the batch files. And it does work pretty well actually. Not convenient perhaps with the swapping drives back and forth and powering on the USB adapter. So I might try installing Windows server 2k8 on a spare box and put those two drives in it so I can just back up the folders over the network. Maybe I could make the batch files “log off” type scripts. Or I’ll just map a drive letter and mark it as “make available offline”. I’m pretty sure that will keep those certain folders synchronized. I would also have a convenient excuse to set up a domain server and try out some of that PXE stuff. One thing at a time though.

So now I am back up and running perfectly well. I have my steam games at least conveniently around so I don’t have to spend hours on end re-downloading them. I have a lot of things I no longer have to worry about re-doing. I mean it would be better if they were backed up some where off site but I guess there’s only so much I can do.

I mean sure I could set up a spare PC at my Mom’s house, my sister’s house, my Dad’s house and possibly my Aunt/Uncle’s house. There could be that. I don’t think I could talk them all into it actually. I don’t know if I could talk even one of them into it. So basically it would be kind of a mesh thing. Everybody’s data would be synchronized at all the other locations. But encrypted so any one person could only see THEIR data. Ya, that would be difficult both to convince anybody to do so as well as actually putting together. I would probably put two 500 gig drives or just a 1TB drive at each location connected to some lower energy use/silent PC.

Okay back up a minutes. I think I would sync all the drives at my house first with the data. So I would go to each location and sync all the user data to the initial 1TB drive. Then back at home I would sync that drive to the other 1TB drives. So depending on how well that went the data would only be between hours and days out of date at that point. Then I would have to figure out how to securely and preferably slowly over time synchronize the data sets between all the locations. Perhaps using some creative use of torrents or that MS Mesh thing, whatever it’s called. So they would just sit there in the background, a silent/lower power consuming machine and 1TB hard drive just syncing as required when required.

I guess it would be the user’s data would synchronize to the local 1TB drive over the local network and then that drive would sync to the rest of them in the little network over the “WAN”. I suppose I would need some kind of  administrative interface to monitor it all as well.  And I don’t know what I would do if that 1TB drive started to run out of space. I don’t think that’s really very likely. Not for a while anyway.

So there’s still the question of how it would be set up. Maybe I could synchronize across the internet to various FreeNAS machines. At least the admin interface would already be there.  And sync via bit torrents I guess. Set the maximum bandwidth used to 5kpbs or something ridiculous like that. And of course the data is already encrypted before it even leaves.

I just thinking of the cost of this. It would be expensive no matter how I did it. Even at $50, five 1 TB drives would be a lot of money. As would even $200 PCs. Multiply it by five and that’s a bit of money. But at least if I went with netbooks they’d definitely be low power and include wifi. So I could put them machines in an attic, basement, drawer that some how has access to a power plug or what-have-you out of the way of prying eyes and curious toddlers.

Of course if I want it to be cheap and out of site I guess there’s plenty of already embedded devices that have custom Linux distros that would do this for me. My Asus O!Play for instance or the much superior other devices for another instance. In fact if it were for having to have to the drive out in the open it would probably be cheaper to buy all of use some fancy open firmware routers with USB ports that would simply host and share out the data that way. Assuming those devices could also cope with some form of encryption of course. These embedded solutions of which I speak are only between $80 and $100 so at least that would cut the total cost down a bit.

Well this was a fun brainstorming session.  In some other minor bit of news that job I interviewed for several weeks ago has finally gotten back to me about it: I have a “tentative” start date. I would mention it but I don’t want to jinks it. As I’ve said a hundred times before I don’t really have it until I’ve been there one or two weeks at least. Even then, don’t assuming anything.

The staffing service lady sent me a bunch more paper work and made some plans with me to meet half way between where she works and where I live. Only out a two hour drive for me. So not that convenient but whatever. Right? After 15 or whatever months it’s been I think I could put up with an awful lot of abuse if I really had to.

So perhaps this time next week I will actually be actively employed. Perhaps I’ll order Star Craft II as a celebratory gesture for myself. Although I have no idea if or when I will actually get around to playing it. I think I should get some kind of symbol of congrats for making it through all this time of not being employed. I mean really.

Wow what a…compelling title?  Actually it’s about PXE network booting, you’re supposed to (reportedly) pronounce it like “pixie”. I have tried several times over the past several years to figure out how to set that up, always unsuccessfully. Well that friend of mine that got me the volunteer job was on vacation so I had a chance to geek-it-up with the network admin while he was gone. One of the things we did was convert my “VistaPE” so called custom PE to a network bootable image. And lookie there it actually worked. And he made it look so easy!

Actually the Windows-based PXE thing requires it to be a domain controller. Which is why I have resisted going that route. I just don’t need the headache or extra complication. I was sure there was a DOS/windows or-if-I-have-to Linux solution that I could manage to set up. Alas, it has always escaped me. I’m probably going to have to set up a practice domain anyway so I could probably do set this up now. There’s probably some special hardware requirement with the NIC for it to really work but I’ll worry about that when the time comes.

It was really cool and actually a lot faster to boot that little PE over the network. I normally boot it from a USB thumb drive and as fast as USB 2 is it’s not gigabit Ethernet-fast.

We also set up a PXE for the Windows 7 install image. Which worked out incredibly smoothly and quickly. I’m so unaccustomed to having things work exactly the way they’re supposed to on the first try. That hardly ever happens for me.

I’m trying to cook up some ideas to make imaging so much easier at work. Right now we’re using a “CloneZilla” CD to boot the PC than imaging several gigs worth of a CloneZilla image for a 1TB USB drive.  A single USB drive. So guess what happens if we lose that drive or it’s otherwise unavailable… Or if you can’t find the stupid CloneZilla CD. Pfff. Minor details. Wouldn’t it be nice if I could just PXE boot a PE environment, run a script, select a WIM source to restore and have it just come up? Wouldn’t that be WONDERFUL?? Like..you know…we’re living in a modern, post-2002 era?

So that’s what I’ve decided to work on. I don’t know if I’ll get the whole domain controller PXE thing working but I hope I get at least a small portion of that done. Over the next four days. Ya, that’s right, I’m “working at home” for my non-paying “job”. Should be a lot of fun though. So there’s that.

Okay I think I’m done writing for tonight.

Last night I had the misfortune of seeing the movie 2012. I was expecting it would be a moving in the vein of say The Mummy, and it actually it was in that vein. But as wherein The Mummy some how worked for what it was I don’t think 2012 really does (a comparison to The Core would be appropriate too). There’s just too many of those leaps in logic. Like driving from L.A. to Yellowstone…uh in a limo in apparently a couple of hours. It would take like two days to drive that far period. I don’t know that a limo would even work on those mountain roads that I can only imagine lead up to Yellowstone. And yet some how not only does the main character drive to yellowstone and back over the course of a couple days he does so in a limo. Are you kidding me?

Also, at the end, after the earth has pretty much come to an end and is in the process of being covered in water some how the main character, who is inside a mouttain mind you, successfully makes a cell phone call. Wait, what? WHAT?

And these are just the minor gripes. There’s just too many leaps in logic. Seriously. If the leaps distract me at all than really they’re just too much. They’re not fun any more, they’re just too much. It was kind of biblical ending. Which you should just see coming really, it’s not like they’re subtle or something.

I also saw The Book of Eli. That one I’m not that sure about. The twist ending is kind of lame I thought. I guess I won’t spoil it. Still lame. Also, the producers of that movie failed geography. Or they forgot to that whole sequence of them crossing the Sierra Nevada mountain range over the course of several weeks. Okay, whatever.

You know that strange interview I mentioned a few posts back? The one that baffled me about how well it may or may not have went? Well I guess it went pretty well because they want to “move forward” with me. In other words I passed the interview and I am in the mountain-of-paper-work phase of the process. In fact I’m staring at a pile of right now and writing this instead.

So I guess I did pretty well. Or the other candidates dropped out. Either way I’m glad to have a better-than-before chance of being employed sometime in the next three weeks. I can almost not regret getting that new fancy phone now…

It was an incredibly unproductive weekend full of doing incredible amounts of nothingness. I did finish the first book of The Wheel of Time however. And as soon as I was done I did two things: purchased the second book on the kindle and wrote a review of the first for Amazon. I was probably a bit too generous with the rating. What can say, I enjoyed it. Even if it was kind of poorly written on some level. I still enjoyed it and obviously wanted to see what happened next.

Other than talking to the staffing service lady and getting a link to some assessment test along with all this paper work noting of note actually happened. Okay perhaps that assessment test is worth…assessing? There were some incredibly strange or perhaps merely vague questions on that assessment. Like have you done anything wrong in the past 24 months.  For a question like that there were multiple choices. It was either varied from strongly agree to neutral to strongly disagree or it was some number of instances like 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 or more.  You’re supposed to know that? Or it just looks at how you answer and it doesn’t otherwise matter? I don’t know.

I don’t know how I end up being so utterly exhausted before 9pm like this but it’s really annoying. I have a feeling it has something to do with my uncomfortable position of my sleep which has a lot to do with my poor posture. Maybe if I learned to sleep on my back I would some how feel better. Speaking of which I should probably stop here.

This was pretty much an all day volunteer day again. We went to a location I hadn’t been before and installed some new PCs, replacing the old ones and transferring some data over. The most important parts I’ve found are all that is necessary: desktop, favorites and the outlook folder containing the OST files. So it’s a pretty easy transfer. That and what ever custom software might have been installed. Luckily that wasn’t really an issue this time around.

So it was rather uneventful, just a normal for an IT guy. Could have been improved by a pay check. Pff.

I did start thinking for some reason about what I might start writing for the novel-in-a-month thing I sometimes do and sometimes merely start but never finish. Namely I would start a fictional blog set around the 2012 election and lasting for the entire four years to the 2016 elections.

The more I thought about it the more I liked the idea.  There would be some entries from mid 2012, some entries around the party conventions, the debates, actual election day, the inauguration on the 20th of January 2013, and the whole series of events over the four years.

I kept getting distracted of course by the presumable red-fonted warnings I would have to put up all over saying this is not a real blog over and over. Because conceivably it could get SEO’d and start actually showing up when the real election starts and some gullible people might actually mistake it for a real chronicle of events. So I’d have to stick warnings on it stating it is fictional, imaginary, not based on actual events, so on and so forth.

Maybe I could even make fake pages that the blog links off to. Also covered in “this is not real” notes.

Maybe I should just set it in some far-flung future with imaginary candidates, issues about giving AI life forms the right to vote or have access to whatever, the rights of the moon colonists to govern themselves and stuff like that. There’s still something about a blog set in the near future that’s just imaginary enough it could almost be real. That’s just sounds like it could really be fun and interesting for some reason…

Maybe I should just start it anyway in the novel-in-a-month month of November or not. I probably need more excuses for creative expression. I mean sure there’s this blog but this isn’t really that creative.

One more thing I’ll talk about: I perhaps unwisely purchased a bluetooth headset for my new phone. It was only $42 and seemed to of a little higher quality of other headsets in the same price range.  And actually it’s the PS3 bluetooth headset.

I’ve only talked on it a couple of times but the reviews from the people on the other end seem positive as far as how well they can understand me. The one complaint I have is that my ear hurts a lot after about 30 to 45 minutes. It’s pretty bad. When I got home I removed the rubber bumper that is wrapped around the speaker ear piece and tried it and it actually seemed a little more comfortable but there was still a level of irritation. I’m going to have to either dissect an old body glove 2.5mm jack phone headset and see if I can Frankenstein it to conform or just return it and find something else.

The documentation, which is probably more extensive if I went to look on the web site for it, didn’t really mention a lot about how to use it with a phone besides a few lines about how to pair it with a phone. I could probably find some better information if I looked.