Seems a lot of my posts lately have been about stuff I’ve been doing at work. This one is going to follow in that tradition, even if it is Christmas. Maybe I’ll write something about Christmas later too…

At any rate, my assistant (not a secretary) left last week for greener (maybe bluer is proper here) pastures at Miles Community College. We’ll miss him dearly (I already do, it gets lonely on the IT Island). As such, we’re hiring. If you’re looking for a job working with computers, maybe this will be a Christmas present for you. If you’re interested, go to http://dawson.edu/faculty_staff/Employment.asp and send in the required application materials.

Indeed, moving hardly seems appropriate. Flying may perhaps be a better term in this case. A lot has changed in the last couple months. As I mentioned before, I started a new job. It has been a lot of fun, and a lot of work (as you can probably tell by the previous posts). The two guys that used to work here left things in a bit of a mess. Fortunately, I’m a bit of a neat freak (I know, my wife wouldn’t agree), and so things are shaping up nicely. Having a real budget is also a nice change (sorry Joe). I also get to work with one of my good friends, Matt Hull, which is pretty awesome. We also have a Fantasy Football league up at the college, and I’m beating everyone handily. It’s kind of nuts. So far, I’ve only been favored to win 2 games. I lost one of those. All the other games, I’ve won. I’m favored to win next week, so I’m nervous.

We also just bought a house, and moved in subsequently (I think I used that properly, grammar nazis… go take a hike). It’s great. It’s not large, but it’s perfect for us, and will last us for a while (until we have eight kids…). It’s got a great yard, and Scooter is just loving it. The sellers had done some remodeling, but hadn’t quite finished things up, so we got a great deal on it too. We took some pictures, but they’re stuck on the camera right now. I’ll hopefully get them posted this week sometime.

We’ve had some snow already, which is great. It melted quickly, which made Amanda happy. I would have been more excited about it, except it knocked our electricity out for most of a day (about 15-17 hours), and we had no heat in our house. We bundled up, and made it through just fine.

Amanda just got a job, and her first day (today) went quite well. So well, in fact, that her supervisor is having her work tomorrow all by her lonesome. She’s also going to be directing the Spring play for the high school in Savage which is about a half hour north of here.

Recently (and related to my last post), I was in the market for a free iSCSI implementation. Having read the wikipedia entry on NAS and then the article on SAN, I decided to try out FreeNAS.

FreeNAS is based on FreeBSD, and borrows heavily from Monowall. It’s a super small download, and the full installation stays that way. I was really impressed by the ability to run it right off the CD. Of course, if you want your changes to be permanent, you have to adjust the configuration slightly. FreeNAS allows you to either run from the CD forever, and store the configuration on a USB stick/Floppy disk or you can install it on a hard drive and run it from that. All configuration can be done from a web interface, and it even let’s you do Software RAID. Having done Software RAID from the command line before, this is a pretty huge deal, and they make it really simple. I had determined that what I really needed was SAN, not NAS, so I wanted to use FreeNAS to provide an iSCSI ‘target’ to my Windows server. It took a couple tries, but I finally figured out that one needed to have fully configured an iSCSI target on FreeNAS before you could enable it and save your changes. I installed the iSCSI initiator software on Windows Server 2003, and then logged onto the iSCSI target. Things were looking pretty good. Upon trying to format the iSCSI drive, I got an error. I went back to the instructions from the FreeNAS knowledgebase and determined that I needed to follow the instructions to make the iSCSI target 1 MB smaller than the partition size. It worked, and I was able to format it just fine. Things got a little bit trickier when I decided to try using 2 drives as part of 1 target. I’m not sure how this is supposed to work, but it didn’t at all. Instead, I used the software RAID to build a RAID0 device, and then used that device as my iSCSI target. Everything should have been working now. Unfortunately, there appears to be some issue with the iSCSI support in FreeNAS, because I could write data just fine, but as soon as I tried to look at the data, it locked up my server. Not cool.

I left work Friday feeling pretty frustrated. Monday morning, I said a quick prayer while I was getting ready for work. God answered quickly. I started searching for issues between the iSCSI initiator and iSCSI on FreeNAS. I stumbled across an article comparing file-sharing performance between FreeNAS and Openfiler. It basically said Openfiler was the superior option if you wanted a NAS sharing files via SMB (the Windows sharing protocol). That was pretty much irrelevant to me at this point, but I now had another option to try in my quest for iSCSI.

Openfiler is based on rPath, which is based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (if my memory serves me correctly). Linux is a bit more familiar territory for me, but it didn’t really make a difference, as all configuration is again done on a web interface. It also includes ‘Linux Enterprise iSCSI’ which sounded promising. You can’t run it from the CD, although they do have a VMware image if you want to try it out before installing it on real hardware. The interface was quite slick, and since I had already mastered the iSCSI stuff on FreeNAS, doing it on Openfiler didn’t take long. I was able to quickly create a RAID0, and exported the entire drive as an iSCSI target. Initiated it on the Windows server, formatted it, and I was in business. Reading and writing worked great, and shortly thereafter, I had a backup of our email system dumping files to my new iSCSI device. I intend to get an actual server with hardware RAID for production use, but this will certainly get me by until that time.

The win goes to Openfiler for making it all ‘just work’. Now, if only I can get things straightened out with our Quantum Autoloader, we’ll really be cruising (with dual rocket-boosters even).

Once upon a time, there was a tortoise who was on a journey. Where? Doesn’t matter, because it’s not a real tortoise, it’s a literary device. This tortoise plodded along just fine. Of course it wasn’t getting anywhere fast, because it was a tortoise. But it went even slower because it only had a leg and a half. That’s right, only 1.5 legs. So it didn’t so much plod, as scoot along the ground. It never worried about the half-leg being but a stub, so long as it had the other good leg. It kept going, day after day. Then, one day, it’s leg fell off. Of course we all wondered how. Perhaps it just got worn out from being the only real leg the tortoise had. Perhaps… Really, it doesn’t matter, because it’s a literary device, remember?

The tortoise was stuck, it needed to get that other leg going, but it was only half a leg. Fortunately, the tortoise was resourceful, and built a rocket-ship out of spare parts he kept in his knapsack. The moral of the story? Never put all your eggs in one basket when going on a journey, much less when backing up your data. And if you lose your basket, build another one really quick, and start collecting more eggs.

Tomorrow, I embark on a new journey. I’ve been working at an office supply shop doing computer and network service for the last few months. It’s been fun, but there’s just been something missing. My coworkers are great (they’ll probably never read this). I’ll miss Tom, Jeremy, and even April too. Denny…not so much. Actually, I go to church with him, so it would be tough to miss him when I still see him.

My new job will be as Technology Coordinator at DCC, our local community college. I’d give you a link to their website, but I don’t want anyone to see it yet; at least not until after I’ve had a chance to clean it up a bit. I’m pretty excited, as there will be a lot more of what I like to do there, but most importantly, its where I believe God wants me to be right now. I can’t ask for anything more than that (and I won’t).

So, farewell, old job. Hello, new job!

Well, it’s been a couple weeks since I started my new job, and even longer since I wrote my last real blog post. The new job has been fun, with a few new challenges, and lots of new software to learn about. We had rented a small house originally that turned out to be a bust. The landlords don’t keep the place up real well, and aren’t too picky about who they let in, so it had a lovely cigarette smoke smell, and several other quirks here and there. At any rate, they were gracious enough to let us out of the lease, since our eyes were burning, and my wife wasn’t even able to spend the night there due to associated sinus problems.
Since then, things have been looking up. Amanda got a job at a flower shop last week, and today was her first day. We also received an offer on our house, which puts us in the same boat as my cousin, oddly enough. It was kind of funny to read her post, and say, hey, me too! At any rate, it’s very encouraging to have received an offer on the house, and there has been a lot more interest in it than we really expected, which is very nice.

February 29 will be my last day at Trinity Bible College. We’re finally moving out of Ellendale, and going to my hometown, Glendive, MT. I’ve accepted a position at BOSS Office Products as a Computer/Network Technician where I’ll essentially be a computer tech and consultant for small businesses and schools and such. I’m a bit sad to be leaving my job here, but I’m a lot excited for this new opportunity and can’t wait until March.

I’ve been here, there, and everywhere. Back in August we went to western Montana, and camped out a couple days for our honeymoon. It was absolutely gorgeous there, and I think I have some photos around here somewhere. I’ll have to post those later. On the way back, we got a call from a hospital in Sidney. They offered me a job, but I declined it. I might be crazy, but I just didn’t feel right about the job.
School’s back in full swing, and work has been nuts. Lots of new people to explain the same old stuff to. “Here’s your password for the eightieth time, and no, you can’t change it.” Otherwise, there’s been lots of fun. We’ve got a new feature to be added to the college website soon, and I’ll give you a sneak preview. It’s a lot of fun, and you’ll get an extra laugh if you’ve actually been to Trinity.
In other awesome news, Apple just released the iPod Touch, which is fantastic. I really want one. Really. I’ve never been big on mp3 players, as I had one once, and only ever used it on long road trips. It also didn’t help that it went through 4 AA batteries in 2 hours. Ouch. But this one does more than music. Of course, it does video, but it also has built-in wireless, so you can surf the net, browse Youtube, or even shop the iTunes store and buy music right to your iPod. It also has a few useful tools like a Calendar and Contacts.

Some days, I look back and go, “did I get anything done today?” So here’s me recording for the world what I did today. You can stop reading now, because it’s going to be really boring. I promise. Really.

1. Read from I Chronicles
2. Installed Ubuntu ‘Feisty Fawn’ on a server (yikes)
3. Updated three other Ubuntu servers (web, mail, and DNS/DHCP)
4. Took Amanda to work
5. Pulled a VGA cable and some Audio cables in the new preaching lab
6. Gave a friend some references on HTML and CSS
7. Started installing Gnome on my Gentoo VM
8. Created a PDF from a Word document for Justin
9. Made copies for Amanda
10. Helped with the EHS play tryouts
11. Found out the NORCO DS-1220 just needs proper drivers for linux
12. Used too many acronyms
13. Debated Vista with Mike Hume (he’s going to try Ubuntu first)
14. Picked up Amanda and took her home
15. Made burritos for dinner…yum
16. ‘Fixed’ a login problem with empower
17. Unblocked a website for Steve
18. Found more errors in the ‘proxy’ blacklist from urlblacklist.com
19. Traced the snack shop phone line to the pedestal (it stops there)
20. Re-punched-down said phone line
21. Gave up on said phone line until more snow melts
22. Applied DST patch to four Windows 2000 servers
23. Re-installed the NORCO DS-1220 on blackhole
24. Upgraded a couple packages on my work computer
25. Fed fish (three times)
26. Gave guineas more food and hay
27. Finished this list

This is a reminder to myself, and dissemination of ‘general knowledge’. If you run linux, and you want to change the resolution that your computer displays the console on, this is for you. Read more