Insanity: Continued
I haven’t really slept in weeks. OK. Almost a month. I’ve tried sleep aids. I still wake up a couple hours later to wander downstairs and re-start working on computer builds and software issues.
I think that time is coming to an end.
First, my mother has finally gone home after her fall. She cracked a vertebra (C2) and opened a bleeder in her skull which required emergency surgery at the region trauma hospital, Legacy Emanuel. ICU to Trauma Unit to 24 nursing care to assisted living, all in about 24 days. She’s tough. She drove herself home on Friday. For some strange reason
Second, the hardware installs and software upgrades are almost finished at the office. I installed Win7 on both of the employee workstations over the weekend followed by Office 2007 and Paint.Net. The installs went fairly well. Win7 was a breeze. Office had a problem with my key so I had to uninstall, get a new key from MSDN and reinstall both copies. One system is having a problem with the anti-virus plug-in. I started a reinstall of that software package and ran out of time. I need to follow up on that one.
At home, I’ve installed Windows Home Server on an one PC that was sitting around unused. I had a lot of problems with overheating. I bought a drive chassis so I could cramp 5 drives into the space of 3. Then I filled it with one new 1.5 terabyte Seagate drive and 4 250 Gb WD drives. The goal was to migrate off the old 250s as quickly as possible. Well… The 250s kept overheating and failing. So after letting everything cool off, I restarted the system and began the process of migrating all of the data on to a single 1.0 terabyte WD drive. That took days… Everything appears to be working at the moment. I’ve got another WD coming back from warranty replacement any day now. Once it shows up, I’ll add it to the system. Then I’ll have 2 1.0 terabyte drives and one 1.5 terabyte drive. All of the machines at home are being backed up on a nightly basis.
I also finished building up my new Win7 system. I migrated all of my data on to the new system, but I haven’t really gotten everything installed yet. Office 2007 and Visual Studio is all that I really have to have to be functional. And that’s all I’ve got installed on that machine at the moment.
After I finished the Win7 build, I stripped down my old machine and rebuilt it into a Home Server as well. That effort took hours and hours. First problem was with the drive array. By default I run the RAID setup on the motherboard. Home Server kept crashing after all of the setup files were copied across and the system tried its first restart. Resetting the SATA controllers to Enhanced IDE resolved that problem. Second problem, memory. I had to pull out half of the RAM from the machine. I don’t really know why. I just know that it works now and it didn’t work when I’d had the full 4 Gb of RAM. Even adding it back in after the build was completed would mess things up. So only 2 Gb of RAM in the new/old Home Server.
On Sunday, I took the more powerful Home Server to the office and dropped it into the network. I cleaned up the server closet, rerouted all of the cabling, cleaned and rearranged the rack shelves, etc. It actually looks tidy now. Once I had the network back up, I backup all of the workstations and started the Win7 upgrades.
I need to upgrade the significant other’s workstation to Win7, finish configuring the Win2008 Small Business Server, and install a VPN, then all of the infrastructure upgrades will be finished.
The end is nigh.
Saturday, Scott and I burned full for 5 hours. We rode up to Trout Lake for fuel and a late lunch, then north to SR90 near Mt St Helens via 88, back to Carson and home.
