It’s been a long week
It sure feels like a long week. The Solaris 10 Advanced Admin course went fairly well—as before I found it fairly straightforward, with no major new information. I strongly believe that for this level of course it would be easier to sit down in front of a machine yourself and try out the stuff in the books. The instructor is obviously a useful asset when things go wrong, or you’re having difficulty getting your head around a certain concept, but the rest of the time I find it far better to work things out for myself. One of the main benefits is that you are forced (sort of) to sit down for a week in a classroom to do stuff. If I had a week off, I might spend more time sitting about slacking off.
On Wednesday evening I caught the train from Blackwater to London where I had a meal with Xiao, Tina and Tina’s housemate. The food wasn’t great, but it was good to see Xiao before she went. We went to see My Super Ex-Girlfriend at the cinema after that, which was pretty funny, although at times a bit sketchy. I stayed over at Tina’s house and caught the train first thing in the morning from Clapham Junction, thanks to the fact that Tina lives all of about five minutes away. This greatly reduced my return trip time.
I’m glad to say that Xiao arrived in China without any hitches and was even lucky enough to have a whole row on the plane to herself, which meant she slept all the way :)
Yesterday I sat down to watch my new DVD (The Hidden Blade by Yoji Yamada) on the Freevo box only to discover that the sound output had completely broken. I spent a bit of time trying to troubleshoot it before James, Kim, Liam and Charlotte came back and decided they were going to sit down and watch Die Hard. Not wanting to watch it I decided to get an early night. So much for my film :(
The course finished at lunchtime today and Chris gave me a lift home (but not before I beat him in three straight games of air hockey!), which meant I spent a bit of time working from home. Most of the time I was connected to SWAN (the Sun Wide Area Network) via the VPN software. This is pretty awesome as it means I have full access to all of the internal Sun info, docs, software, as well as all the machines in the lab. The downside is that all communication MUST go through the VPN… this meant I couldn’t keep an eye on the Freevo box and its torrenting activities. In future I’ll probably just switch my laptop on and use that cool software that allows you to control the keyboard/mouse remotely (you just move your cursor off the edge of one screen and it appears on the other computer!).
I’ve been messing around with CompSoc stuff a bit today… I’m working on troubleshooting the Sun StorEdge T3 we have; in theory one of the disks is broken, but I’ve not managed to come across any problems so far. The RAID 5 volume verify (about 360GB) is currently at 43%, so it should be done by the time I go to bed.
I pulled the Freevo box apart, wired up the front audio and put it back under the TV. The sound still didn’t work so I tried a live CD I had kicking about. Somehow this initialised the soundcard properly and it now works from the Ubuntu install that runs Freevo. I can’t say I’ve come across a problem like that for about ten years. I honestly thought it was down to a hardware failure.
Thanks to working in the lab so much it now feels incredibly wrong to be handling PC internals without an ESD wrist strap. I feel as though I’m being naughty.
Tags: Life