Stonham

Posted by Rob at October 24th, 2007

Just got this email I get an extra day off this year. It can’t have anything to do with the cost of heating the buildings for 1 day, can it?

As Christmas Eve falls on a Monday this year, the Senior Management Team
has agreed, exceptionally, to designate it as an additional Christmas
closure day. The University will therefore close at 17:15 hours on
Friday 21st December 2007, reopening in the New Year on Wednesday 2nd
January 2008.

Please note that Friday 21st December will be a normal working day and
there will be no early closure on that date.

Posted by Rob at September 2nd, 2006

For those people that don’t get the joke email me and I’ll enlighten you.

If you just want a clue find out what sudo means in linux.

Posted by Rob at August 31st, 2006

Have you ever had your printer jam? Do you feel like you want to destroy your printer? This US Army solider did.
He didn’t like the support that he got from Hewlett Packard. The model in question was a HP5510.

Some how i don’t that shooting your printer full of holes is an approved method of clearing a paper jam. But it is a satifying way i guess.

Posted by Rob at August 24th, 2006

I think that the HDD (a Maxtor 6L200M0) in my work machine is dying
When I came into work today I started having problems with VMware. So being lazy I decided to just reboot the entire machine to see if that fixed it. But to my horror when it rebooted it failed to mount the root filesystem.
So my next step was to boot from a CentOS install CD into “rescue” mode. First time it exited “abnormally” and rebooted. Second time it had some trouble extracting the IDE/SATA driver from the cpio file. Finally on the third attempt I got it into rescue mode.
So great I’ve got into rescue mode. Now I can start to fix the filesystem and get down to some work. But no, first I fsck /dev/sda1, then I move onto /dev/sda3. That starts off OK, then it starts moaning about Duplicate blocks and stuff. So I let it get on with it’s work. Five minutes later “kernel panic”! Reboot into rescue mode again. Try fscking from the last partition this time. So I go and do fsck -c /dev/sda8 and guess what, it has another “kernel panic”
I’ve now downloaded and booted PowerMax 4.23 from Maxtor. So at the moment I’m having to run a full diagnostic on the HDD to see if there are any bad sectors and see if I can get a replacement HDD.

Posted by Rob at August 22nd, 2006

The Blog Of Ryan Vennell » Linux? Windows? Huh?

I really like this guys take on the Windows vs Linux battle.

Posted by Rob at August 19th, 2006

The Sysadmin Song - Streaming Google Version

Description:
A funny song that sings the praises of System Administrators. Written by Wes Borg of Three Dead Trolls in a Baggie.
Visit our site at http://www.deadtroll.com for a free downloadable version of this video.

Posted by Rob at August 19th, 2006

1. Strange…
2. I’ve never heard about that.
3. It did work yesterday.
4. Well, the program needs some fixing.
5. How is this possible?
6. The machine seems to be broken.
7. Has the operating system been updated?
8. The user has made an error again.
9. There is something wrong in your test data.
10. I have not touched that module!
11. Yes yes, it will be ready in time.
12. You must have the wrong executable.
13. Oh, it’s just a feature.
14. I’m almost ready.
15. Of course, I just have to do these small fixes.
16. It will be done in no time at all.
17. It’s just some unlucky coincidense.
18. I can’t test everything!
19. THIS can’t do THAT.
20. Didn’t I fix it already?
21. It’s already there, but it has not been tested.
22. It works, but it’s not been tested.
23. Somebody must have changed my code.
24. There must be a virus in the application software.
25. Even though it does not work, how does it feel?

Posted by Rob at March 2nd, 2006

I can’t believe how boring it can be doing nothing. I’m going to have to think about taking some automation out of my job so that I’ve got something to actually do.

Posted by Rob at February 1st, 2006

I’m soon to be starting a new website where you can have a winge and moan about the idiots that you have to work with. It will also to somewhere to tell the world how bad people are at their jobs and tell funny stories.
Keep an eye out at www.iworkwithandidiot.com

Posted by Rob at November 21st, 2005

thegeneva.com » Verifying DMI Pool Data…

I have to make a few corrections to this article. First the BIOS does the POST then it goes onto do some other things then it goes onto “Verifying DMI Pool data”

The “Cable Select” jumper on hard drives allows the hard drive to determin if it should be a master or slave depending upon it’s postistion on the IDE cable. This only happens during the POST and is then set by the time of the OS gets to see the HDD. DOS and Windows couldn’t care less weather the HDD is set to MASTER or SLAVE via a jumper or Cable Selection with the Cable Select jumper.

However it is still best practice to set the drives jumper to Master or Slave manually rather than using Cable Select.

Also ECP and EPP are both backwardly compatable with SPP.