I'm soooo tired
Apr. 1st, 2009 09:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
altivoWhat a long day this has been. Nothing special about it, just another one of those darn W days.
Well, a couple of incidents on the geek front. When I got my Alphas (18 months ago) some may recall mention of the Compaq RA3000 RAID array tower that came with them. I tried but was unable to obtain the configuration software for it, and my attempt to get that actually triggered a minor flurry as someone at the library software company that owned the original software on them tried to insist that we had to give the hardware back. We didn't, they backed down. The consortium had paid for it long ago. All they could really ask for was a certification that we had erased the hard drives. They never asked for that, but since the drives contained Digital Equipment Corporation Tru64 Unix, which is no longer sold or supported, and we didn't have the passwords anyway, of course they were erased.
I reformatted the tower drives, three of them in a RAID 5 configuration, and just used them that way since I had no ability to change the configuration. They've been running fine ever since. This week, though, I learned how to do the reconfiguration without the custom SWCC software that came with the tower. It turns out that you can just hook up a serial cable to one of the ports on the back, run a VT100 compatible terminal emulation, and boot up the tower. It prompts for a password, and sure enough, the password had never been changed from the default setting. I'd wondered about this, but the documentation says not a word about it. I tried it, but it didn't seem to work back then. And the reason it didn't work is that I had the wrong cable. Even though the connectors on the tower are set up to look like DTE, they are DCE. You need a modem cable rather than a null modem. With the right cable, I was in like Flynn and will be able to reconfigure. Probably will do it, too, when I upgrade the version of Linux that's on there now. By splitting the three drives into separate units, I can install OpenVMS on one, Windows NT on one, and keep Linux on the third. This will give me a lot more flexibility for the testing and experiments I've been using that machine to perform.
There was apparently a tornado scare here last night, just about the time I was driving home or had arrived home. I never heard the sirens or anything, but supposedly an actual warning was issued. It was a bit gusty, but no lightning, thunder, or rain. Weird.
Well, a couple of incidents on the geek front. When I got my Alphas (18 months ago) some may recall mention of the Compaq RA3000 RAID array tower that came with them. I tried but was unable to obtain the configuration software for it, and my attempt to get that actually triggered a minor flurry as someone at the library software company that owned the original software on them tried to insist that we had to give the hardware back. We didn't, they backed down. The consortium had paid for it long ago. All they could really ask for was a certification that we had erased the hard drives. They never asked for that, but since the drives contained Digital Equipment Corporation Tru64 Unix, which is no longer sold or supported, and we didn't have the passwords anyway, of course they were erased.
I reformatted the tower drives, three of them in a RAID 5 configuration, and just used them that way since I had no ability to change the configuration. They've been running fine ever since. This week, though, I learned how to do the reconfiguration without the custom SWCC software that came with the tower. It turns out that you can just hook up a serial cable to one of the ports on the back, run a VT100 compatible terminal emulation, and boot up the tower. It prompts for a password, and sure enough, the password had never been changed from the default setting. I'd wondered about this, but the documentation says not a word about it. I tried it, but it didn't seem to work back then. And the reason it didn't work is that I had the wrong cable. Even though the connectors on the tower are set up to look like DTE, they are DCE. You need a modem cable rather than a null modem. With the right cable, I was in like Flynn and will be able to reconfigure. Probably will do it, too, when I upgrade the version of Linux that's on there now. By splitting the three drives into separate units, I can install OpenVMS on one, Windows NT on one, and keep Linux on the third. This will give me a lot more flexibility for the testing and experiments I've been using that machine to perform.
There was apparently a tornado scare here last night, just about the time I was driving home or had arrived home. I never heard the sirens or anything, but supposedly an actual warning was issued. It was a bit gusty, but no lightning, thunder, or rain. Weird.
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no subject
Date: 2009-04-02 10:29 am (UTC)Swashbuckly Clydesdale
Date: 2009-04-02 11:46 am (UTC)I did this sketch back in 2004 after some exchange with
Re: Swashbuckly Clydesdale
Date: 2009-04-02 12:39 pm (UTC)*noses*
Very shwashbuckly. And yummy :)
Re: Swashbuckly Clydesdale
Date: 2009-04-02 10:44 pm (UTC)Re: Swashbuckly Clydesdale
Date: 2009-04-03 12:23 am (UTC)Re: Swashbuckly Clydesdale
Date: 2009-04-02 01:24 pm (UTC)Re: Swashbuckly Clydesdale
Date: 2009-04-02 10:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-04-02 05:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-04-02 10:45 pm (UTC)