Posted on

09-May-2011

New workstations setup
It’s been some time before I could do anything else but setting up the working environments – apart from OpenVMS, of course, since Diana runs like a charm….
There has been a lot of work at home, and the datacenter had to be set aside for some time. Just letting it all run as before, except for the ususal access at times, and there has been little time to do whatever was needed to keep the PC’s happy.
At some point, however, I ran into a laptop with a 17-inch wide screen that has a separate keypad. This is a nic e feature to have when you’re planning to run Alpha Emulators with openVMS. And this one came cheap (relatively), with Windows 7 Pro 64-bit and office 2010 Pro, a 640Gb disk and can easily be extended to carry 8Gb memory.

This one became more needed since the usual desktop station Aphrodite, running XP PRO, Sp3, encountered severe problems: CTRL+ALT+DEL for instance caused no action…and other software had it’s troubles as well. So in the end, after havinf re-installed XP and all subsequent updates and other software a few times, I obtained this laptop, ordered the extra 4Gb of memory and started installing. Without trouble – it all went smoothly. Until I ran into software that does have some trouble in keeping connections alive. But it’s not a critical piece of software, so for the time I can live without it.
A last attempt of re-installing XP on the old box, and obtaing the patches, made it obvious I had to install Windows7 on that box as well. Just took the 32-bit version for that one because 3.5 Gb of mem is all it can take. 64-bit is of no use in there. But here I learned that the failing combination is not in the OS, but in the keyboard….Not a problem either. It took some time to get all drivers up and running but now I’ve got no more XP-boxes in the network, except for the older machines that work as ‘life-savers’ in the cluster.

This new system is named “Europa” after a nimph in Greek Mythology – running away from woman-hunter Zeus on bull-back, and landing on the continent named after her.
As for the usual maintenance tasks: this still has to be checked – so stay tuned for more information

Posted on

10-Feb-2011

Beyond recovery
The company that would try to recover the data from my crashed disk has done the utmost possible – even getting a specific part from the US, to recover any data, but without result. It proved it wasn’t just the chip that was broken, the heads were effected as well – and have damaged the platters in such a way that ‘imaging’ – reading the disk sector by sector proved impossible. If the heads weren’t that good, I think there must have been a problem from the beginning. Well, that explains why I had access problems at some time, and why I couldn’t install a new Windows environment….
So the archives on that disk – all since June 2010 – are gone – as far as I don’t had a backup.
Well, I should have made backups…
One luck, though.
All images from our trips this year – two weeks in the UK and a week in Germany – are stored on another system as well – just checked. And: I remembered I carried that laptop with our UK trip, and the tracks could well be on that machine. So I checked today – Behold: the file indeed exists. But the German tracks were not stored on that machine. But they could be on one of the USB drives or sticks, so I’ll dig somewhat deeper.
If no more available: well, it’s a pity.

Posted on

01-Jan-2011

Maintenance
Though a new year – for which I wish my readers all the best – it’s also the beginning of a new month so I had the system save it’s logfiles. The job also collects the mail statistics for the previous month:
PMAS statistics for December
Total messages    :   5390 = 100.0 o/o
DNS Blacklisted   :    545 =  10.1 o/o (Files: 31)
Relay attempts    :   3926 =  72.8 o/o (Files: 30)
Accepted by PMAS  :    919 =  17.0 o/o (Files: 31)
 Handled by explicit rule
        Rejected :    198 =  21.5 o/o (processed),   3.6 o/o (all)
        Accepted :    350 =  38.0 o/o (processed),   6.4 o/o (all)
 Handled by content
       Discarded :    109 =  11.8 o/o (processed),   2.0 o/o (all)
    Quarantained :    235 =  25.5 o/o (processed),   4.3 o/o (all)
       Delivered :     27 =   2.9 o/o (processed),    .5 o/o (all)

I still have to do the count of the relay attempts by hand:
05-Dec     19
06-Dec    288
07-Dec    813
09-Dec    120
12-Dec    203
13-Dec    202
19-Dec   1225
22-Dec    107
23-Dec    165
27-Dec    768

There may have been a few files less than 4 blocks in size but I consider these of less importance. Futher analysis will have to wait until a later date…
Apart from the usual activity, I consolidated all log files of last year in a single file to be stored on CD or DVD – mainly as a source for this analysis and as test data for the suite that I intend to create for it.
New disks for the workstation
I boaught two new 230Gb disks for the workstation: one internal, and one external – as a backup. Next month it will be filled with restored data – I hope.

Posted on

05-Nov-2010

Disk failure
One thing to be done today was another attempt to repair the Windows installation, but there must have been something very wrong, because it seemed to take hours. So I aborted the installation, accepting I would have to reinstall all software.
Starting with Office 2007 – but that failed for some reason.
One other thing I would do is install more memory. The shop offered me a 2Gb DDR-2 DIMM, but the system cannot handle this type of DIMMs – the notch is on a different location so the DIMM didn’t fit.
When I next tried to reboot the system, the first disk was gone in BIOS….
It appears to spin so that is not an issue. I checked power and SAS cable, switched with the other drive, but that didn’t work either. So probably there is something wrong with the electronics on the disk….
A colleague has the ability to try to restore data from broken disks, in some extent. And since there is some data on that disk that is not copied to another location, it’s worth to try to get it off the drive. Otherwise, it’s lost. Pity, but not fatal.

Posted on

16-Jul-2010

WP almost done
Last tests for WordPress 3.0 under WASD 10.0.2 show no real big issues. There are some weird reactions, though: stylesheets not being loaded sometimes, and drag&drop that doesn’t work in all cases where I tried it.
One thing I tested today was themes. I checked the ones I use for the major blogs on site, but it looks these are not supported under 3.0 – at least, I couldn locate them anymore, I may have to copy the files and simply test them.
On the other hand, I found some nice ones I could use instead, so the presence of the blogs may change when the whole lot comes to life.
On the performence side: today I didn’t disable caching on the server, and that seems to make a big difference. Without enhancing the size of the pagefile, the Admin page now appears rather quick, without excessive paging: the disk is quite silent now, the number of processes has dropped significantly.
More new hardware
I obtained a rather new DS10 system, equipped with EV67 Alpha processor and 512 Mb memory: twice as fast, though the external clock is still 600 Mhz, but simply by the processor – and twice as much memory; CD and DVD (readers, that is) are included – but no SCSI controller and disks. Bo big deal, I do have some SCSI controllers available and some disks – but the cables to connect the disk to the controller is missing…
So I installed an older IDE disk in the system, was able to INIT the drive and install VMS 8.3 on it, but the system fails to boot. That is: it does start reading the initial boot loader, but there it ends. I still have to find out what’s going on there.
Or I could install a KZPSA, or KZPBA-CY (or both) in the box, and hook it onto the shared SCSI.Since this is a newer machine than the AlphaServer I tried earlier, it may do the trick.