February 2006 Archive

Welcome to the Archive for February 2006! What you will find here may be old. It may scare you. It may even scare me! More importantly, you might find links that no longer work, and *gasp* information that is no longer, or possibly never was, accurate in any way. Don't rely on this information to save your life!

February 2006 Archive

Thursday, February 23, 2006

[Comments: 1] 6:17 AM - defective-containers

In the process of assembling a number of our newest servers (AMD Athlon64 X2 3800+ based systems), I've run into issues where it actually appears that we have bad chassis on our hands.

I tried to get a system I built to boot, and it would only power on the fans, and never show any video. I proceeded to replace the power supply, CPU, heat sink, power connectors, hard drive, memory, and even motherboard (that's everything in the system) and it never worked. Then, I removed the equipment from that box, and put it in a new chassis and it booted up as if nothing had ever been wrong.

I know this makes pretty much no sense at all, but when the only thing that fixes a system is to replace its case, that means the case is bad. How can that even be? The scariest part is that it's happened twice. It'll be interesting to try building the last couple systems in those chassis to see if they will boot. I don't know what to do if they don't. Perhaps we have to call up our vendor and give him another good talking to. :)

As you can see, I utterly failed to update my blog regularly at all during either January or February. Let's see what else is new....

My birthday is March 1st. I'll be 24! It's fairly weird to think I'm in my mid-20s now, but such is life. No plans for the day yet, but you can certainly throw me a party if you want.

I meant to watch some of the olympics but I didn't. Seems the US is falling behind a bit on medals this year... I guess we can't always dominate at everything.

I'm trying to work on a new color scheme for the site. My latest effort I generally consider to be a disaster. If you select New (Exp) from the color selector, you can see the direction I was going, but I kind of got lost between the blue and the kind of gold-red-brown mess I left. My colorblindness pretty much prevents me from determining what the hell the color brown is anyway, so I don't even know if there's really any there. My aim there was to produce something a bit like dusk, but I think I missed the mark...

I really should work on a lighter scheme, but I always end up working on the colors when it's late and white is starting to bother my eyes. Perhaps I should focus on coloring things in the daytime. ;)

With any luck, I'll actually blog again before the end of the month, assuming I survive my currently active battle against spammers on our network. Bleh....

Saturday, February 4, 2006

[Comments: 0] 4:06 AM - finally-stopped-moving

Our datacenter move is almost completely done! We finally got the rest of the servers transferred to the datacenter this past morning. After something like two weeks of keeping hours of approximately 11 PM to 11 AM at the datacenter, we've succeeded in clearing all customer equipment out of our two cages and have it all up and running in our new larger space. Little did we realize when we initially signed our lease that we would already have filled almost all of what we were allocated. It looks like we'll be upping to the extra thousand square feet well ahead of schedule, probably within a couple months.

The only items remaining in Equinix are now some core equipment that has to be migrated carefully so as not to disrupt our network connectivity too badly. We are keeping a half-cabinet full of equipment that will let us take Internet connections from Equinix down to our new facilities.

The excitement of completing the move along with the odd hours and little sleep have put me a bit on the loopy side already. That coupled with the party we had well preplanned for Friday has left my head spinning a little more than usual I think.

Originally we expected the move to be finished before today, but as we didn't finish up till early Friday morning. Cleaning, napping and other chores in preparation for the party were very rushed, however the party was great and served as a much needed break from the madness.

Tomorrow I aim to relax as much as possible and then try to slip back into a standard routine by Monday. For now, I'm off to bed, in hopes that I can sleep off what I drank and the past two weeks of continuous activity.