Back From Camp
Back from camp. It was an absolutely wonderful summer. I’ve been back for a week and have been enjoying the chance to unpack and sleep (On the subject of sleep, I’m suffering from a bit of the phase shift).
In more recent news, my father was kind enough to let me use his old desktop as a new house server. It’s an (only slightly) aged Dell machine with a 1.6ghz P4, 512mb RAM and 40gb hdd. The 40gb disk is what has me most worried. When I booted it up to install Debian Sarge, I noticed a screen out of place in the normal boot sequence. The screen informed me that the Dell Disk Utility had found the hard disk to be “operating outside of normal parameters”. I don’t know what that means because the only additional information I could get out of the utility was that I was supposed to contact Dell support for a replacement disk. I ignored the warning knowing full well that once I removed the Dell Utility Partition, the error message would be no more. Sure enough, after throwing XFS on the disk (after the advice of my friend Ryan), the machine booted into Sarge nicely. I’ll watch the disk and if it fails, I’ll replace it with a nice new 250gb disk.
After getting the server setup and configured, I realized that the minor trouble with my pipe was getting worse. I know have an average ping time of 2.5 seconds to any outside server. I called Comcast to ask them what the deal was and they reported that the cable modem registered an average ping time of 3.8 - 4.2 seconds. Before I continue, I need to pose this bit of wierdness: How is the pingtime from my side of the cable modem less than the ping time from the cable modem itself? I can’t figure it out! In any case, there is a field servoid coming to take a look at things on the morrow. By noon tommorrow, things should be at least on the way to being back to normal. Hopefully, my upcoming experience will be more positive than the encounters of other folks.
