I had the opportunity to zip up to the Smokey Mountains this past weekend to spend time relaxing with friends. I grew up in Knoxville - south Knoxville to be exact. From my house there, it was only about a 45 minute run till you were in Pigeon Forge and a few more minutes to Gatlinburg. From there you were another few minutes to the Sugarland Visitors Center - the first spot most folks go when arriving at the park. Back in the day, my friends and I would take my Trans-Am and go all over the place. Nothing like having the t-tops out and driving around those curvy mountain roads to make for a fun time.

I did make it over to Cades Cove to drive around the loop. Nothing has changed from what I could tell. My last time in the park was at least 20 years ago. I did get to see some wildlife this go around. First was a small black bear. Of course all I had on my camera was my wide-angle lens so that did me no good. All you see in the image is a dark spot in the grass. I did have better luck with some deer though…

Posted by THE J-Mo | 4 Comments »

What a pleasant surprise! Our agency won some awards for work we did for the City of Decatur. One was even “Best of Show”. This is one of those things we’ll be placing on our website, but one of the steps was to get a photo of the awards themselves. The problem is that they are made from a clear material with some faceted accents which can make photos a little challenging. I had an idea of how I was going to light it and nailed it on the first try. Checkit yo.

Posted by THE J-Mo | 1 Comment »

Last week, I had a break through getting the server going but had the last hurdle of getting the backup program I use to recognize the old catalog files. This is important because if I have to re-create the catalog files, it would be EXTREMELY time consuming. I’m talking a few days to rebuild the catalog. Once re-created, I could restore the data from tapes, again somewhat time consuming although not as much. I posted my problem in the support forum for Retrospect (the backup program) one evening and got the reply I needed the nextg morning from another user. That did the trick! I just needed to change the file type and creator then everything worked. I’ve been restoring files since Thursday and hope to have all the data back online by late Monday or Tuesday.

While I’m glad everything is working again and even did it cheaply, it was a HUGE pain in the rear to get to this point. In the past, when working with PC’s, spare parts were abundant. Everybody had a PC or an old one or two. Heck, I have probably 6 or 7 complete PC’s around. Apple stuff? Not so much. Even so, Apple’s aren’t built to be user servicable so it’s still not easy. That is one thing I can say about Apple’s - they are AWESOME when they are working as they should. If a hardware problem crops up, it’s rarely a quick or cheap fix.

UPDATE 10/14: After running flawlessly for several days, the server is once again acting up. GAH! I plan to order a new server tomorrow. Can’t keep screwin’ around with this one. I’ve got other work to be doing besides this.

Posted by THE J-Mo | No Comments »

With many of my friends changing over to iPhones, getting together for lunch, dinner or whatever else invariably turns into an iPhone orgy with each of us flaunting new apps, new tips on using them, taking caller id photos of each other, you name it. But it’s FUN. Speaking of fun, several folks from church are Twittering now so our connected little community is starting to grow. Pretty soon I’m sure we’ll be Twittering about going out to dinner somewhere or to a movie and have some other folks nearby come and join that are looking for something to do. How cool is that?

Now then, the practical application of geekiness. I’ve been working on a problem with my Apple XServe at the office. One of the data drives failed 2 weeks ago and it’s been a long arduous process getting things going again. Truth be told, I’ve been meaning to do some upgrades to the system and how it was configured - now with a service window at hand, it was time to get things back to tip top shape. First, I wanted to change how my drives were set up. In my old configuration, I had 3 - 250gb drives. I drive was my boot drive that I put the operating system and server applications on. The other two I striped together as a RAID 0 volume that was 500gb in size. That wasn’t such a good idea but you live and learn. A problem with either of the two would cause a loss of data on both. Now, I *DO* back the data drives up to tape every Monday, Wednesday and Friday evening so I’ve got that part covered. The caveat is restoring data - it takes awhile to move 400gb+ from tape to hard drives. At first, I thought I wanted to go with having a boot drive and then the two remaining drives as a RAID 1 set. This way, data is mirrored on the two drive and losing one or the other wouldn’t impact things. Another identical complete set of files would be avaialble on the non-failing drive. Problem here is now my data drive will only be 250gb instead of 500gb. I could get bigger drives but there’s an issue with the max drive size supported by the firmware on the server that I didn’t want to fool with.

Ultimately, I am going with a RAID 5 setup using all 3 drives. This way, I can lose any 1 of the 3 drives and all the data will be there but performance will be degraded. I simply replace the failed drive and the server automatically starts rebuilding the data. Also, I have more room! I set up a 20gb logical drive to put the OS and server applications on and then another logical drive around 450gb in size for data. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

The original hard drives were Hitachi DeskStars (or DeathStars). Since those guys have been spinning 24/7 since 2004, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to go ahead and replace them with drives being so cheap nowdays. Got some Seagate Barracuda ES drives. Long story made VERY short. The server and those drives didn’t play well together. In the interim, I discovered that the servers built-in CD-ROM drive wouldn’t read CD’s… I needed that so I could boot from CD to set up my RAID card and install server software from. GAH!!! I called around to some Apple repair shops for a replacement CD-ROM drive and got prices from $120 to $150 and up for the part. GAH!!! There’s no 24X CD-ROM worth THAT in this day and age. I slid the server out of the rack and looked at the drive. I got the part number and manufacturer off it then did some Googling. I bought TWO of the CD-ROM drives I needed BRAND NEW for… $3.99 each. They arrived today. I put one in and voila! It workee workee.

Back to my Seagates now. The server would only intermittently recognize them. NOT GOOD. I went back over to my buddy’s shop (he ordered the Seagates for me) and told him my latest predicament. He let me have three Maxtor drives to try. I swapped out the drives. BINGO! They are working like a champ.

Finally, I was able to configure the RAID controller and get the drives all set up. I’ve got OSX loaded as well as all the zillions of updates from Apple installed. I’ve got the latest version of Retrospect installed too - that’s my backup program.

Things were going too smoothly now. So… as if on queue, my next issue is that the catalog files for my backups (they have a list of what’s on the backup tapes) aren’t being recognized as catalog files by Retrospect now. I copied the catalog files from the old server to my Mac Book and also to my Dell laptop. For some reason, the server thinks the catalogs are UNIX executable files. Grrrr…. I’ve got to figure out how to heal what looks to be some sort of file association horkage.

I haven’t had to have my I.T. hat on so tightly since my Intergraph days.

Posted by THE J-Mo | 3 Comments »

After being a Crackberry user and T-Mobile subscriber since the Powertel days, I’ve made the leap to an iPhone 3G and AT&T. Honestly, I’ve been interested in the iPhone since it’s introduction but I was still in the middle of my contract with T-Mobile and making the change just wasn’t worth the money it would take to cancel early and make the switch to a new phone and another carrier. There was a glimmer of hope of staying with T-Mobile when they introduced the Google phone or “G1″ as they are calling it, about a week or so ago. The big problem though was that there was probably not going to be 3G coverage in my area on their network for awhile still.

Kevin calls me last week and lets me know he and Stacey picked up iPhones. I decided to at least call T-Mobile to find out how long I had on my contract (which renewed when I got my Blackberry 8700g). It turns out that as of just a couple of months ago, my contract was up and I was eligible to upgrade my phone. When the T-Mobile rep asked me if I wanted to upgrade, I said “Nope! Goodbye!”.  My next stop was Apple’s site where I was able to start the process on getting an iPhone - fill out my info, number transfer, select my plan then schedule an appointment to pick up my phone at the Apple store. Everything was ready for me once I got to the store. All I had to do was pick a model and color and a case to put it in. I went with a white 16GB model. The 8GB versions were all black but with the 16GB you could get black OR white. A lot of my friends had black ones already so I thought white would be a nice change.  A few minutes later, I walked out with my old number transferred to my new phone with everything all set to go. I remember in the past activating a phone let alone transferring a number from another carrier took some time. This was all done in a matter of minutes and with no fuss. What a pleasant surprise.

Church was funny today when I discovered just how many had “drank the kool-aid” as well. At lunch, Kevin, Stacey and I were nerding out with our phones. So much so that Jason got the thirst also and had his iPhone within the hour!

Posted by THE J-Mo | 7 Comments »