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.