adrian's home: May 2003 Archives

Kelly and I went by the house this weekend, and found that it was open, which is weird for a Sunday afternoon. So we're in the house, hear voices, and then the front door opens, and in walk our future neighbours -- they couldn't get in to their house, so figured they'd take a peek through ours. Anyways, they seem like fairly nice people.

We've found the desk we're going to buy for our office area in the loft at the new place, it's a modular set from Idomo. We haven't bought it yet, but it's only a matter of time. :)

Kelly's back from Ottawa now, after a month at Health Canada. I went up a few times in April, and it was nice to see Ottawa in the spring time again. Stopped in at Mitel to see the old work crowd, and last week found out that the SME Server group is no more, many are laid off, and the rest have been amalgamated into other departments in Mitel.

There's a new computer in the house now, phoenix, a Sun Ultra 5 that I picked up from a friend in Ottawa. It's running Solaris 9.

I've also overhauled beast, which is now running Windows 2000 Advanced Server, and is an Active Directory Domain Controller. It's my first foray into the world of Windows administration. Now, with convenient centralized management thanks to Active Directory, all the Windows desktops in the house are easier to manage. Thanks to Group Policy, I can now also have Roaming Profiles, but exclude some directories, and also redirect the "My Documents", and "Application Data" folders to a network share so that changes to those folders are visible immediately from other workstations logged in as the same user. It's an ongoing struggle to try to get my Linux workstations talking to Active Directory via Samba, so I caved and enabled pre-Windows 2000 authentication as well. beast also still hosts my VMWare GSX server as well.

I added a second 80GB drive to gambit in Ottawa when I was there, and now both the system drive holding home directories and the drive holding MP3s and ISOs are part of RAID-1 arrays. I also setup rsync and hard-link based backups for all home directories.

Haven't been finding much time lately to play StarCraft, but hopefully will find some time later on this week. ;)

Kudos to Staples on this week's stupidest customer service award. In their latest printed ads, you'll find that they advertise they'll beat any advertised price by 25%. ie., they'll match the advertised price, then beat it by an additional 25%, up to a maximum credit of $50. So I walked in there the other day, and asked them to match a price advertised at Canada Computers. They told me that they have a policy against matching prices from Canada Computers because of rumours that their stock is stolen, and they participate in "shady" business practices. Whatever.

May 2003 Archives

May 5, 2003

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