I will confess to being lazy today… more or less in anticipation to what’s to come the next couple of days. Not that I don’t like and appreciate Christmastime. I certainly do. It’s just that for all that it is, there is also some stress involved with the partying and where one has to be, when, and so on.
Our preparations around Casa De Bit are nearly complete. All that remains now was the final food preparations, and then actually showing up to where the family is gathering a share, which happens to be a share of my sisters place. Thank the good lord that she and her husband had both the dollars in the presence of mind to buy a fairly sizable place. My brother did two, and he’s expanded on that place rather substantially over the years. As it stands right now, those are the only two places that have enough room for the family.
When we first bought this house, we actually had everybody over for Christmas, and it was a grand time. Trouble, was it was a little on the tight side space wise. Now that both my brother’s kids and my sisters kids are married and have families of their own, space is becoming more and more of a premium. It’s gonna the point where we’re gonna have to seriously consider renting the place out. I say that, in jest, of course, because it’ll never happen. Still it would solve a number of problems.
I have to admit, though, that it’d be nice to have the clan all here. I don’t know. I’ll consider it as time goes on this coming year but I have to tell you space will be an issue.
For the meantime, however, I’m looking forward to tomorrow, and the next day. Truth to tell, the last few years, our family isn’t as close as it used to be, as nieces and nephews and grandnieces and grandnephews, now make their way in the world, they have their own lives, and they often are not with us. Dad’s gone now, a few years past. So are all my grandparents. But, to my understanding, a number of the family will be at my sister’s day after tomorrow. We’ll have a grand time, together.
Note the inclusion of that last word… “together”. I’ll just leave that word hanging there. It pretty much says what it needs to say, all of its own.
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It’s windy up here tonight. We’ve got about 40°, and 45 mile an hour winds, with higher gusts occasionally. Gonna be a bear try keep the Christmas decorations where they are to be.
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Because I say I was lazy, does not necessarily mean I was totally unmovable. I actually got quite a bit done today. I managed to touch up the website a little bit. Some of you will of noticed by now the little decorative magazine style drop cap thing going on at the head end of every post. That’s something I always wanted to add to the other site that never got around to doing. I also smoothed out some of the rough spots in the RSS and ATOM feeds.
I get some pre- writing out of the way too. I will often jot down half formed ideas that I will use in later posts, once those ideas flesh themselves out in my head. I managed to salt away a few of these, today.
I also managed to restart my old server. “Elephant” is an IBM Netfinity 7000. For those of you who don’t know about such things it is a quad processor PII/200MHz. that’s right, I said 200 MHZ. It’s actually a little faster than the slowest machine that I have which I called “Gopher”. Go for gets used for things like watching the firewall, doing FTP work, and slow file transfers. Elephant, meanwhile, is a huge lumbering beast. At the moment he’s running a full Gig of RAM, and 70 gigs of RAID-5 across 14 disks. (A defrag on this thing sounds like I’m grinding coffee!)
He also has two DLT tape drives, and capacity for a number of SCSI devices. In past years, he’s been responsible for keeping the CD library up and running. the CD library is a cabinet with six SCSI CD drives. this configuration plus the seventh one that’s already in the unit, allows me to share seven CDs simultaneously. This can get used for a number of things, but what I used it for mostly was setting seven music CDs in them, and telling my MP three converter to go to town just before I went to bed. Usually, it was finished by morning. I plan to use that setup again; it’ll be nice to have it back.
Now, Elephant has been sitting around for the last year and a half not doing much of anything after I lost the RAID contoller on him. This week, I managed to find another one, and I was worried he might not spin all those drives… but when plugged it in, he old boy came up and barked like a champ.
Now, slow as he is, I can’t run anything more recent than WIN 2000, and frankly I wouldn’t want to run anything newer than NT on him. So, NT it is. But, whatever. He handles file rights correctly, is reasonably responsive on the network, any handles all my SCSI devices. In other words, he does the job. And he was free… plus, he’s an old friend… I inherited him when they retired him at a job site I was working at, at the time.
Setting him up was like old home week; having gotten used to setting up newer servers, I found myself having to actually THINK about what I was doing, and remember what I USED to do with NT.
I have a lot of machines like that around the house. I have a few newer ones, like Panther, here… my main desktop machine, but most of the systems on my LAN (I have 12 at the moment 3 of them servers…) are <1GHz. They're free, they do the job, and I get practical networking experience... keeps me sharp. And of course, it's not just my job, but it's my hobby, too. Nice to have a hobby your family gets a practical benefit out of. -=- I must say, I'm a little surprised by the number of notes that I've gotten from readers, these last few days, about these Nightly Rambles. When I started this, I wasn't at all sure it was going to click. Apparently, however, it has. And thank you for telling me. -=- Oh, well, I have presents to wrap, and then to bed.