After winning the Regional Silver Stick in Pembroke, Logan’s Carleton Place Cyclones is now traveling to Sarnia to compete in the Internation Silver Stick.
Logan and I had a 7 hour drive and arrived last night. It was a sunny beautiful drive through Tortonto and London and over to Sarnia.
Please follow the teams progress at Sarnia Girls Silverstick
Good Luck Cyclones, go get ’em!
More snow today! The forecast calls for an additional 30-50cm this weekend as we inch toward the record of 444.1 centimeters set in 1971.
Ottawa is really struggling from the second major storm this week.
Our plans to travel to the Pocono’s on Sunday look like they may be in jeopardy, but hopefully the snow will let up soon. We are looking forward to some time off skiing and relaxing.
Well, after 15+ years with my ISP Primus (Originally known as Magma) I have cancelled my service and moved to a new provider call Teksavvy.com.
I started with Magma in the early 90’s with a Dial-up account because High-Speed wasn’t available where I lived. In the late 90’s I moved to High-Speed and have been please with DSL service ever since.
Magma was purchased by Primus in 2005, and I must say that I have been disappointed with their service and Tech Support. I haven’t had problems with the High-Speed Service, however, simple tools that were provided by Magma disappeared. I have made calls to Tech Support and have been treated rudely, had arguments with in-experienced techs and have even been hung up on.
And finally, the back breaker is the cost. I am paying $20 less per month with Teksavvy.
Some friends at work recommended Techsavvy. They have been with them for years and are quite happy with the service. I called them and had a couple conversations wrt their service, the activation process and the migration process. Everything went smoothly. My domain, website, and email server all came up with no proplems.
So, here’s to a long relationship with Teksavvy! :p
I started backing up my fileserver Friday morning (as I usually do every weekend) and when I came home I discovered that the backup had failed. When I started looking into the problem, I discovered, to my horror that my d: drive had failed.
My fileserver is a windows machine that serves as a DNS, DHCP, print and mass storage server. In this server, I have a Promise FastTrak TX4310 SATA II raid controller with 4 360g Seagate HDDs configured as RAID5. 1TB of disk space filled with music, pictures, installation software, video files and DVD movie ISO backup files.
I always believed that backups were important, so I have a DLT tape drive that I use to backup only the important stuff. Email, documents and other files from my workstation. Pictures, music and installers from the fileserver (approx 200G) but the rest I cannot afford to backup. 600G of videos (mostly tv shows) and DVD movie ISO backups.
I originally installed the raid controller and 4 drives to protect against an HDD failure, but it looked like from the windows server logs that I have had 2 simultaneous drive failures. What a dissappointment, it appears that I have lost all my data.
I started doing some basic debugging, testing the HDDs to see if they start spinning, reseating the connections etc, but to no avail. Promise controllers have a web interface that shows the status of the device. It appeared (as reported by windows) that drives 1 and 2 had both failed. This seemed odd to me, so I decided to switch the HDD/controller connections to see if the failed drives moved as well. They didn’t. It looks to me like it is a controller problem.
I have opened a case with Promise Technologies to see if they can help.
Hopefully, if it is a controller issue and not drives so I will be able to replace the controller and still get to my data.
Stay Tuned!!
Update: Feb 19th 7:28pm
OK, so after a full day of back and forth with Promise Technical Support they are in agreement that it is most likely a controller issue and have asked me to open an RMA to see if I can get it replaced. They have also confirmed that simply replacing the controller will allow be to rebuild the Volume Group and get my data back.
I will keep my fingers crossed!
Update: March 4th 7:49pm
Promise Technical Support have agreed to replace my card and the replacement in on its way. Finally! One step left, install the new card and hopefully find all my data.
I am a NASCAR fan and I really enjoyed this years Daytona 500, however, I am getting increasingly frustrated with the boring finishes.
Speedweeks was great with the time trials, the Gatorade shutouts and the media build up to the big race. I love the newer faster cars with the bigger restricter plates and better acceleration at high speed. The new drivers and teams made for lots of pre-race drama.
The race was exciting, 16 leaders, 42 lead changes, 150 + laps with only 2 yellow flags and then the wheels fell off. 6 in the last 50 with 2 in the last 10! 5 of the last 10 laps were under caution. BORING! I would much rather see a long run to the finish.
Congratulations to Ryan Newman, Kurt Busch and the Penske team on winning. The last 2 laps at least were exciting.
I am off to Chicago today. After the reorg in December we are holding Strategic Planning sessions and working out the next level of our Org Structure.
Currently I’m sitting in the Ottawa airport (with a 90min wait because Kelly thought I should go earlier) trying to get my OpenVPN connection working to my house.
Its snowing and very cloudy, hopefully the flight isn’t delayed or canceled.
How it All Started
I have always been interested in and played with computers, the newest OS versions, Microsoft applications, website development and setting up new computers just to play with something new.
In late December, a collegue at work introduced me to VMware so I installed it on my home workstation and started playing with it. I installed different VMs and eventually decided I wanted a permenant VM as a BIT Torrent download system. However, after a short time and many reboots (by other family members) which left my VMs down, I came to the conclusion that I could use a dedicated VMware Server in my landscape and wanted to get it off my workstation.
I already had a windows server that was the center of my landscape. An old Pentium III was runing DNS, DHCP, File sharing, Webserver, and OpenVPN as well a really OLD Pentium II I used exclusively as a BIT Torrent system (mainly to segregate that type of activity to a stand-alone computer for availability and virus/hacking peace of mind) that I accessed via a web interface.
In early January I came up with the idea of getting a new computer with lots of memory and using it as a VMware Server farm. However, after looking into new computers the price ranges quickly became to prohibitive. One day I was driving home from soccer and I heard a commercial on the radio for The Trailing Edge. When I got home I went to their website and to my great delight found they had an IBM workstation with Dual (2) 3GHz Pentium IV cpus and 4G of RAM for less than $300. I was so excited I couldn’t beleive it was true. I explained my find to my friends at work and they all agreed it would be the perfect workhorse for a VMware Server at home.
I began by installing a base Windows 2000 Server config on a 60G ATA drive and tuning it down to have a minimal memory footprint. Next I installed VMware Server but I new I wouldn’t be able to run many VMs on only 60G so I installed a Promise Fasttrack SATA2 controller and a 500G Western Digital HDD where I would eventually put all my VMs.
Well after a few hours of installation (Apache, MySQL and PHP), playing around with the configuration and security setting my newest project is finally on-line.
I have lots of learning to do and some additional config to get working (email, account requests) but it should be fun.!