Month: March 2004

So, the show tonight is canceled due to the weather … It’s really not even that bad … But, here I sit, working on another Out On the Town (well, in between my other stuff) and thinking about all the things I have half done, or three quarters done, or just started … or the things I say that I can do but never remember to do, or forget to do … This was part of the reason for a “project manager” application … Where I could keep track of all this stuff …

I told my father a year ago (or was it two years ago) that I could write something for him in 2 weeks … See? Isn’t that bad … I mean, I know that I could have had somethig working for him in two weeks, but the more I looked into it, the more involved it got, and where I know I could make it work much better as a web application, I was just overwhelmed with other projects … the little things I had to do to make other people happy … To make money to sustain whatever I have in the way of bills, etc … But, people are suffering … I’m sure my dad is suffering …

Now that I have the 6 night a week job, my work ethic is totally screwed up … By the time I get rolling in that programming mode, it’s time to either go to work, or pack up to go home from work (if I set up the laptop there and got involved). Now I have business coming in that I certainly don’t want to say no to, but I have said yes, and now projects sit not getting done …

This has to change, something needs to be done … I’m not really sure what right now, but I know I need to fix this …

Today, the big thing was the Steam update … I did both CS Servers and finally th client updated … At least now I know the game that I hardly ever play anymore is all up to date … The server usage has dropped off a lot too, since about last Sep/Oct … You can see the decline of the outbound traffic on the T1 connection statistical graphs here.

The other has been the flood of virus filled emails trafficing through the servers … The FreeBSD server is catching most, but the trick of the spammers is to password protect zip files, and this way the virus scanners can’t open them and identify them as virus emails … the latest one I have heard of is that they say something about ‘your email server having to do maintenance’ or something, or ‘due to the volume of virus filled emails’ you need to unzip this file with password ‘blahblah’ and apply the contained patch to continue to receive your email … It’s really disappointing what people will do just to cause other people grief … I don’t understand the motivation, because you’re not really even seeing the results of this …

A guy who resells through me asked to have a Ticket System set up that is Open Source … He was into the features, and I suspect the price wasn’t bad either … He wanted to utilize a FreeBSD server to accomplish this … The distributed version of this package comes in a SuSE RPM good to go … There’s also a RedHat one that they say isn’t tested (?) and there is a tarballed source that you would use for other systems (such as BSD) … I got the one working for him on a FreeBSD machine, but I thought it was pretty slow … So, I have SuSE 8.0 and 8.1 here in boxes (bought from store) and I installed an 8.1 box and brought this up myself … It runs much faster on the SuSE box (same hardware) … Why? I dont know … After trying countless ways to upgrade the 8.1 box to 9.0, I finally started a 9.0 install via FTP on another box … The reason I have another box is as follows …

Brought up another rack of computers … So, I hooked up another KVM and another switch … Got the crossover cable going over there and the boxes are responding nicely … <1ms ping time ... but weird, if I ping the switch directly I get varied results ... Switch has been sitting for a while as I didn't need it, but expanding into other operating systems, etc, I figured I could use some more hot machines ... Maybe Mandrake will find its way back? I always wanted to check out Debian too ... As I recall, the Mandrake version of proftpd supported quotas itself, so it didn't have to be compiled into the kernel ... Anyway, so that's what I've been up to ... Updating Counter-Strike, bringing up Ticketing systems utilizing FreeBSD and SuSE, and installing the power, network and KVM stuff for the new rack of machines ... They've just been sitting there a while too ... Not much time to get to everything all at once, but someday I will, no?