Tuesday, April 29 2008, 11:14 PM

So, I'm sitting here in my newly reconfigured den/office/computer room/whatever (more on that later) waiting for CD images to download. Multiple CD images. I'm trying to upgrade the firmware for a SATA RAID card I eBay'd a few weeks back to handle the new 2TB RAID array I was building. It seemed to work fine, but after some use, it showed a nasty habit. The firmware seems to be buggy somehow, as I receive messages in my server's dmesg output about the adapter kernel panicking. I found it strange that a RAID card could kernel panic, but it makes sense when you consider the fact that firmware is just software for a hardware device. The card seems to recover itself about 80% of the time, but that other 20% involves hardware hangups, and hard reboots. No fun... especially when this box is providing storage for multiple other machines.

Back to the firmware. I'm trying to download the latest firmware for this card, but HP isn't making at all easy. Instead of putting a link to a specific file, or set of files, they just have links to their "Firmware Maintenance" CDs, which contain updated firmware for damn near everything they've unleashed upon the world in the past X years worth of product releases. Thing is, there's no documentation anywhere I can find about what each CD covers, what firmware versions are present, or anything like that.

Case in point - I downloaded the newest CD listed on the support page for the RAID card, and it didn't have any firmware for the card listed whatsoever. 650MB downloaded and a CD wasted, all for nothing. I try the oldest CD they have listed, and sure enough, it has firmware on it for my card. I was left wondering if there was a newer firmware somewhere on one of those intermediate CDs though. So here I am, downloading more CD images, and wasting more CDs. Grand! What's really great is that if I want to actually install one of these firmware updates, I need to find three working floppy disks that I can use to actually perform the upgrade because the embedded boot process won't install things automatically. Why? Even though the server is a HP-branded server, it's not of the proper vintage, so the boot loader/installer thing won't work. What a pile of crap.

Now that I'm done venting about stupidity (while downloading yet another CD)...

I've been feeling pretty run down over the past month or so. I attribute it mostly to what I would consider poor sleep. I typically sleep for a good 7-8 hours, but I haven't woke up feeling rested in quite a while. I have one working theory as to why, and it involves the server I'm working on right now, strangely enough. The simple fact is that the thing is loud. It's buried in my walk in closet with my other server gear, but it still had no issue polluting my bedroom (which is attached to said closet) with gratuitous amounts of noise. It seems like my poor sleep roughly coincides with the introduction of that machine into my closet, so I decided to shift things around a bit to see if it would help. I switched the roles of my two bedrooms - the larger bedroom became my office/computer room/underground lair, and the smaller room became the bedroom. It remains to be seen whether it will help much, but I liked this arrangement better when I used to have it. It also allows me to move the second cat litter box out of the bathroom, which is reason enough to move everything around in my opinion. They've never really been very good at keeping litter off the tile, which sucks. I'm not really a fan of walking on cat litter, especially when I'm fresh out of the shower and my feet are wet.

cats frustrations hp raid

Friday, September 07 2007, 3:22 PM

This one's nothing but pictures. Enjoy!

More flowers...

A solitary flower...

A pile of zebra mussel shells. Watch those feet, they're sharp!

A chipmunk hanging out in the wood shed... I needed the flash for this one, unfortunately.

Mesa, during an apparent drinking binge...

Mesa, totally hung over...

cats photography upnorth vacation

Friday, January 05 2007, 4:35 AM

I just weighed both of my cats, out of curiosity. Marshall weighs 13.5 pounds. Mesa weighs 15 pounds. I have big kitties.

cats

Monday, December 04 2006, 11:26 PM

Wow. It's been like three weeks since I posted last. I think I've had more than five people ask me if I'm going to post again, or whether I'm gong to close the website down. I'm not closing the website down. I've actually been somewhat busy, and things have been somewhat eventful. Combine those with a general lack of motivation for posting, and you get three weeks of inactivity.

Right now I feel like crap. I had some sort of illness late last week, and its remnants have firmly implanted themselves in my lungs, giving me one of my death coughs from hell. I had a splitting headache for most of the weekend because of it. Today my head doesn't hurt as bad since I'm not coughing as frequently. I am, however, coughing more violently, and it seems to be making my throat swell up. Every time I swallow, it feels like I'm trying to swallow a golf ball or something else similar in size. Ugh.

In another sucky occurence, one of my cats, Marshall, broke my good laptop. It's been broken before in a similar fashion, but this time it's really hosed. I had the laptop next to my bed on my makeshift nightstand, and he was sitting on the far side of it. He apparently felt the need to visit, and he tried climbing over the laptop. He planted a paw on the top of the screen and tried pushing on it, and it opened far more than my makeshift repairs would allow it to go, and the plastic around the hinges pretty much disintegrated. The laptop still works, but it's pretty much useless as a laptop though. This has allowed me to convert it into a more powerful and much more compact mythtv frontend than the full-sized machine I had before. I have it set up in a diskless network-boot conifguration, so it can sit right next to my center channel speaker and not be adversely affected. I've still got my old beast of a thinkpad that I acquired from Jon, but I'd sure like to get a new laptop. Perhaps I'll look around after Christmas.

I've got a few more things to talk about, but I feel like laying down for a bit right now. I'll try to touch upon them soon.

cats illness laptop mythtv

Saturday, November 11 2006, 2:02 AM

It seems that I don't ever take the time to post anymore. I'm sitting here on the floor in this hallway of a hotel in Indianapolis typing this because I'm bored out of my mind, and Bob is asleep already in the hotel room. Since I'm not tired, I'm out here.

I'm down here for my buddy Andre's wedding. It rained like crazy coming down here, and there were some wind gusts that probably could have blown me off the road if I wasn't paying attention. Good thing I got the new wipers on my car the other day...

Now onto news... First off, I came up with names for my cats. I liked my dad's suggestion of Marshall for the black cat, since he's always sleeping up on my Marshall 4x12 speaker cabinet. Running with the cool guitar equipment names, I called the gray cat Mesa, in honor of Mesa amplification. Now I have to get used to calling the cats by those names.

I also had a follow-up appointment with Dr. Doshi on Wednesday. He said everything was looking good, and my vision tests showed I was seeing a "fuzzy 20/20" with my righteye, which is pretty damned good. I guess that equates to being able to see the 20/20 line with significant effort, as opposed to seeing it at a quick glance. I don't ever remember seeing 20/20 with my right eye even before the problems started occuring, so that's something to be happy about. In a related note, I was able to get a pretty good sampling of night-time driving this evening with the associated headlight glare. It still gives me problems, but it doesn't seem to be as bad as it was.

cats friends indianapolis righteye roadtrips

Monday, November 06 2006, 12:51 PM

Yep, I've defintely been rather lax on the posting front. First (and fastest to type) is some eye news. It is definitely somewhat better, but keying on how much better is difficult. I'm not seeing as much glare as before, and I'm starting to see more of the general debris that floats around in there as a result of the Coats' Disease. I take that is a good sign that the fog is thinning, but it kinda sucks that all of the crap is still floating around in there.

Second up is something more fun, cuddly, and lovable. As of a week ago, I'm now the proud owner of two cats. The were given to me by a coworker, Jay, and they're some of the coolest cats I've ever been around. Most cats are tempremental, grumpy, or just downright mean, but these two are outgoing, friendly, and affectionate. I've yet to give them names, but I figure I should do it soon.

Edit: I forgot to post the links to the cat gallery. Here it is.

cats righteye

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