Almost there

Well, my server issues are finally resolving, now that I have reapplied the ownership and security information to all of the folder...Thank goodness that is over! In the 10 years I have been working with computers (Professionaly), I have never had an upgrade go south like this one did. I guess it hapens to the best of us eventually (Thank you Microsoft!)

Now, I am 98% complete with my carPC project. I received my memory module from LogicSupply.com and installed it, and was baffled that the module was DOA (Dead on arrival)....I have all of my software loaded onto the system, my GPS adapter is here, I have my wireless adapter and everything else that I need...

I sent their support line an e-mail and hopefully I will get a response on Friday morning so I can ship it out from work immediately and hopefully get a replacement next week. I am so anxious to get the unit installed by Memorial Day weekend.

Purchasing the Casetronic C134 case definitely showed me that my ideas are much better. Whomever thought up this design was on the right track initially, but then must have had one too many drinks and threw the rest of the unit together. Now all I need to do is start laying out my designs for my prototype case, which will use an Opus power supply (Which is a very nice unit with startup/shutdown delays and starting protection built in :) ). I am also looking at building my own cable connectors to make for better routing. Granted, this will limit the type of board that can be installed into the case, but I am also looking for a motherboard manufacturer to built a custom mini-ITX board to my specific design. I have talked to a buddy at another company, and he might be interested in coding a custom interface software package for my carPC unit.

I even joined Microsoft's OEM System Builder's program because that is what I hope to become...a single source package for carPC units. From what I have seen people doing (And some of them are pretty wild designs), they are mostly either computer geeks or gear heads putting the units in, and not a good enough blend of the two.

I am looking to design an all-encompassing unit, which limits the need for so many extra purchases. With my design, it is virtually all inclusive. I have it all speced out in my head, just not on paper yet.

I would like to get my hands on a version of Windows XP Embedded to use, but I still think that a slim version of Media Center Edition would be more suitable. Hell, if I knew how to program in Linux, I would develop something for that but I want to sell something that contains a more mainstream OS that can grow with the customer. Soo many details to work out... I heard that Microsoft is looking to build an AutoPC version of their software, but I am sure that it will be severely limited on functionality (And who wants to be limited???).

Oh, well, thank goodness tomorrow is Friday!

The light at the end of the tunnel (I hope)

Discovered today that with the upgrade, it broke all of the owner permissions and user permissions on all of the folders on the image drive...

Now I have the dubious task of rebuilding all of the basic owner and user permission on 26 million files within over 100 thousand folders.... Not fun at all.

Then, I have to go back and shore up all the permissions on the more secure folders.

The first part will take over 12 hours to complete...Just in time for the next shift to come in on Thursday.

Leave it to Microsoft to break more than they fix...Valve is shortly becoming that way as well, but that is another rant for another day.

A Monday Wednesday

Well, problems are still about at work due to the Windows upgrade.  It looks like it reset all of the security permissions for all the drive shares and User Rights, which is a major problem.  Now, millions of files on my image share have to have their security permissions reset to what I need them to be so that users can access those images.  That will probably take most of the day to complete, which is not good.  I still have not been able to figure out why my users cannot write to the SQL server.  Obviously there is an underlying user rights issue there as well, but I have yet to find the correct setting.  This has to be the worst week ever for me because of all this crap.  In almost 10 years of doing this, and thousands of upgrades performed on both servers and clients, this upgrade is easily 100 times worse than anything that I have ever had to deal with.  I have slept maybe a total of 12 hours since Sunday, and have been at work for the rest of the time.  As of now, I have easily put in over 50 hours in working on this server.  Windows Server 2003 sure does shore up security, so much so that it has damn near brought our company to a halt.

 

Still on the phone

Well, I am still on the phone with Microsoft, so that is what, almost 5 hours?

 

I had one tech who was able to help me get one issue resolved with the server not logging into the network, however my SQL database security issue still exists.  Now I am in a queue waiting for an on-call tech to pick up….I may just be here all night after all.

 

Brian Reeves

Where has all the time gone?

The last four days have been somewhat of a whirlwind….  I will break it down the best that I can:

Saturday/Sunday:  Finished working on my wife’s car and got it up and running.  What a difference a week and about $500 in parts makes.  I know she hates the car (And now I don’t particularly care for it either), but it is damn near a new car now with all the parts that I just installed.  Oh, well.  At least I am back to driving my Neon.  I had spent the last week driving my full-size conversion van, and it was eating me out of house and home.  I spent over $60 in gas just to drive it for 1 week!  I don’t even spend that in a month, and I drive the Neon twice as much per week!!

Sunday night began an odyssey that I will not soon forget.  I arrived at work about 7pm on Sunday to check on the status of some disk utilities that I was running on a drive on my database server, and started finally updating the OS to Windows Server 2003 to resolve some security issues….Boy was I in for a ride…

Microsoft made some big changes to their service pack 1 for Windows Server 2003, and that set my night off.  After updating my firewall server and my database server, I got a call from the floor that the night shift could not connect to the AS/400 at our other site.  Thinking it was just a poorly seated wireless card on the terminal station (Which is usually true 99% of the time), I went out on the floor to investigate.  Then, after seeing that it was not the card, I check the communications room to see if the T-1’s between the two plants were down…and all 5 were down.  Now, it is already almost midnight, and I am still waiting for one server to finish updating, so I called my provider and we could not figure out what was going on.  All of the sudden, the T-1’s came back up and stayed up, so I cancelled the ticket and went back to my office to verify that I could ping my servers…and I could only hit two of the three NT servers and the AS/400 was unresponsive as well.

It is already midnight, so I had to call the AS/400 admin and wake her up so she could get to that plant (Since she only lived 3 miles away, and I was about 27 miles away) and get the servers back up.  I found out then that there were power issues in that town earlier in the evening, with some lightning.  So, with two servers down, I knew that there had been a long power outage at that plant because the battery backup that powers the NT servers can stay up for almost three hours…

Needless to say, by the time she got there the AS/400 was up but my domain controller at that site was still unresponsive, even though it was up.  First though in my head was that the network card was fried, so I immediately knew that my night was not going to be short….Little did I know that I was right, and it was going to be a long week ahead.

Finally, around 2am the database server was done upgrading and I left for the other plant.  I got there around 2:45am, walked in, rebooted the server, and all was good with the world again.  At this point I am thinking that I will sleep in a little late and show up to work around noon…WRONG!

I got to my house around 4am, laid down, and my phone went off at a quarter to 7am…The database server was inaccessible.  I opened up my VPN and connected to my work network, only to be denied a Remote Desktop connection to any server…CRAP!  You can’t begin to fathom the bad things that I had to say about Microsoft at that point.

I got showered, hauled ass into work, and could not get out to the Internet….now my day is getting worse already.  I ended up having to call Microsoft, only to find that there was an issue with SP1 for Windows 2003 server that prevented communication across VPN connections as well as outbound traffic..Just great.  I ended up having to uninstall SP1 from the firewall server, rebooted, and all was good after that.  My two external VPN sites came back up, and my external VPN users could finally access the internal network and the internal users could get out to the Internet.  One down… one to go.

The database server is a different issue.  I worked all day on that server, working with one of my application vendors that runs software on the database server to see if it was an issue with their application due to the upgrade, and of course it was not.  I did not get home until 8:30pm that night, and went right to sleep.

At 5am Tuesday morning, I got up, went back into work and have worked on this server all day so far.  We have finally narrowed it down to security issues with the Windows upgrade, where it had  mangled the connection to the Active Directory, and so this evening I cam in so I could remove it from the domain and re-add it.  This used to be a fairly simple task, and always worked when attempting to resolve a security issue….WRONG.  Now, it is almost 10pm, I have been on hold with Microsoft for over an hour waiting to talk with a tech to get this server back on the network…This has to be the longest Monday on record…And I have to be back in here by 6am in the morning because I need to support any issues that may arise and I also have someone from my vendor’s office coming in to assist with any application issues.

Leave it to Microsoft to shit in my cornflakes… They secured Windows 2003 alright, so tight that it took down one of the most important servers in our company…

On another note:  The memory module for my carPC unit finally came in today…and it was freaking bad!  Now I have to RMA this and get another one sent to me.  Just what I needed, another disappointment this week.

 

TGIF!

I will surely be glad to signoff this week….

I was so exhausted when I got home last night, I took my son upstairs and we both fell asleep watching Star Wars II:Attack of the Clones J One of these nights, I will actually get to watch it all the way through so I will be back up to speed for next weeks release of Episode III.

I am still at work now, having to do maintenance on my database server which has an unhealthy drive.  I am dreading working on this server, because the drive that is having problems has millions of files on it, and will take almost 40 hours to run the disk utilities on it.  Not fun; Period.

Hopefully I can get home by 8pm tonight and put my wife’s car back together…Finally found someone who had a Ford service manual, and it showed the camshaft alignment tool that I needed – basically a 10”x2” piece of 3/16” flat steel.  You know, Chilton needs to fire the dumbass that wrote the chapter on timing for the Contour, because they failed to show the diagram and left out a few very important paragraphs on performing the timing of the camshafts and crankshaft.  That would have saved me two days of searching.

I am not looking forward to tonight, because the final episode of Enterprise airs.  I do not know why this show did not take off as well as the other series did.  I found it very interesting, as it put the missing puzzle pieces in for a lot in the Star Trek Universe.  Granted, the writers greatly abused time travel, which was highly unnecessary.  This show could have easily gone another four years had they not stained it with that.  Now for the first time in 18 years, I am left without a new Star Trek episode to watch.  I was really hoping that they would have been able to show more about the development of the Federation, and the building of Starfleet.  I am such a trek nerd, ain’t I?

I did get a new cool gadget that will soon make its way onto my carPC:  A GPS antenna along with iGuidance software from http://www.inavcorp.com.  I won it on eBay, and it came with an adapter to hook up to my Dell Axim X3i, and let me say that this is some very cool software.  I especially like the speed output and voice guided directions.  It definitely beats Streets & Trips.  However, I am unable to update it with the latest maps because the registration has not been transferred over to me just yet.  Hopefully that will happen soon.

Also, my hard drive for my carPC should be at home now, so I will be able to get it configured and ready to install next week.  The only two things that are holding me back right now are my ultra low profile memory module and my USB adapter for the GPS antenna.  I can’t wait to get it installed into the car J

Damn Ford Engineers....

Before I start my rant, let me just say that I have always been a fan of Ford cars.  Twenty-five of the thirty cars I have owned over the last 15 years have been Fords.  But today, that changes.

My wife’s 1996 Ford Contour started showing signs that the water pump needed to be replaced, (Just after doing a brake job, replacing all the tires, and having to replace a ball joint and half-shaft on the passenger side) so I pulled it up into the garage, supported the engine and pulled the passenger wheel off so I could get started.  This is where my problems just start.

To get to the water pump, you literally have to take off half of the components on the front end of the engine:  The engine support, power steering pump, accessory drive belt, valve cover, radiator overflow tank, engine mount, crankshaft pully….you get the hint yet?  All this just to replace the damn water pump….I am just getting started.

Now, as I get most of this removed (I am still looking for the last bolt holding the power steering mump in place), I notice that the timing belt needs to be replaced as well, because it has cracks all along the belt.  No problem since it has to come off to get to the water pump anyway, set the engine at TDC (Top Dead Center) and remove the belt and then after you finally swap out the water pump replace the belt and all is good with the world…Not even close.

Some over-paid hippie bastard decided that timing marks are unnecessary on this engine (The crankshaft pulley is supposed to have notches according to Chilton), so you pretty much have to use a compression tool to gauge when your engine is at TDC.  Well, I got that far, and remove the timing belt and of course one of the two camshafts still had some life in it, and rolled at least a quarter turn on its own.   Now, on any other car that it would have happened on, it would be no big deal to time the camshafts because there would be aligning marks on the camshaft sprockets.  But not on this POS….You have to have some god-awful special camshaft alignment tool and use the force to judge whether or not you have the camshaft in time.  God help you if you are one tooth off, because this is an interference motor, which means that the valves can and will puncture the piston if one of the camshafts is not properly timed.  Not to mention that your motor will run like crap if the two camshafts are just one tooth shy of being in time.

You would think that it would be simple to just run down to NAPA, Advance Auto, Carquest, O’Reilly’s Auto, or even Autozone and either purchase or rent this tool…..NOT!  None of them carry it, and none of them have one in their rental program.  Ford is even less forgiving, because they will not rent one out to you, but they would be more than happy to bend you over the counter and either sell one too you at 200% the actual value of the tool, or charge you $50/hr to fix it for you.  I am not the type of person to let a dealership work on my cars, because more often than not I have left there with more car problems than when I brought it in…

What every manufacturer needs to do when these hippie engineers come up with a new fangled engine design, they need to stick them in a garage with a normal set of Craftsman tools and make them do the most common tasks, such as change out the waterpump, belts, oil, etc. and if they cannot do it very easily or within an afternoon, then they should go back to the drawing board and re-design it until they can.
It is getting to the point to where you almost have to have a PhD in automotive technology just to perform the most remedial of tasks.

Hopefully I can find this tool on eBay or something, fix this car, and then sell it because I am going to buy something else.  At least the Japanese do things right, and make it easier on the mechanic to do the job….Maybe I can convince my wife that she needs a Honda or Mitsubishi instead….

 

So tired...

Ever notice that when something happens, it tends to snowball and get more unmanageable?

 

Well, that is what is happening to me over the last week.

 

For instance, my wife’s car has been a decent car (Even though she does not like it) and we have been contemplating getting rid of it and getting her something better.  Then, all of the sudden, the brakes are crap, the tires are crap, the water pump starts to leak, and then the timing belt is showing wear from the water getting drained onto it.  Not a good combination if you ask me.  Lucky for me, I am mechanically inclined and can do most of the work myself (If I had a tire machine and a lathe, I could do it all J ).

 

This isn’t the beginning of my problems, either.  I sold my 1988 Mustang GT convertible to a friend last week, however I still need to do some fixing up on it (Oil change, relay swap, charge the battery…) because I haven’t put more than 50 miles on it in the last few years.  So, I had to delay selling it to him because I need to make sure that I have all of that done before it leaves my hands (I am just that kind of person that likes to make sure that it is all in good working order before it goes to someone else).  This will now leave me with three vehicles, my wife’s Contour, my Neon, and my Conversion Van.

 

Now, while I have my wife’s car torn apart in my garage, she has to drive my Neon, which also is showing signs that it needs to have the timing belt replaced, as well as the brakes.  Not to mention, that I have been working on my carPC project to install in the Neon.

 

That leaves me stuck driving the van, which needs a new transmission soon, plus I need to install the new brakes.

 

If only I could afford to take a week off to get all this done.

 

I would take them all to a shop, but at $50/hr. for labor, I would end up having to sell one of the vehicles to pay for the work….

 

On top of all this, we are going to be going home to Texas at the end of June and taking the van… No pressure at all.

 

If the government would just legalize cloning, I could clone myself and get everything done in no time. J

Oops!

Well, I was testing out using buzznet.com’s picture publishing feature, and accidentally wiped out all of my posts somehow.

 

Oh, well, only four posts anyway.

 

Hopefully it will not happen again!

Everybody loves Mondays!

Everybody loves Mondays!
Posted by: breeves.

Sorry, K, but I just had to. I was browsing through my phone, cleaning out some old pictures, and for the first time today I really had something to laugh about.

Monday's almost always suck, and today was no exception. I woke up today with a serious "Case of the Monday's". I did not want to go to work, I did not want to be at work, I did not want to stay at work, Sam I Am.

Although this was a reasonably mild Monday, I just didn't have it in my heart to do anything. I have had a heavy heart and mind as of late, more than I really want to discuss here at this time. Some of it, though, has to be homesickness.

I have not been back home to see my brothers, friends, or any of my family (Except for my parents) since Christmas 2003. Work just would not permit it. In the 11 years since I moved to Iowa from SE Texas, I have never gone more than a year without being home. Between November 2001 and January 2004, I was home many times, especially after my aunt died just before new years day, 2002. That was a rough eriod, for our entire family, because it was not expected and completely sudden. She was only 11 years older than me, and more like a big sister than an aunt. I have lost friends and family members before, but nothing hit me as hard as her death did. Worst part about it, is that I did not really express how hard it hit me until now.

I am usually a very well kept person when it comes to emotions, and I still am to a point. There are just some things better aired out in a private place, where nobody can hear you yelling. I don't believe in keeping things bottled up inside, because they will end up eating away at you. But there are just some things that I just don't feel comfortable talking about to even my closest friends, because I am afraid of how they will look at me.

I am used to being the one who is always there for others, listening to other people's problems and helping them cope with issues and make their own decisions. However, I suck when it comes to my own problems and issues, and just can't deal with needing someone to lean on. Crazy, huh?

When I was setting up my buzznet.com account, it gave me a chance to go through some old photos that I had stored on a backup disk, and it was an emotional rollercoaster. There were some good memories that made me laugh, there were some pictures that made me feel old, and there were those of my aunt and some of me and my friends that brought tears to my eyes and made me long for home even more.

I moved up here in 1994 with one purpose, to be with the woman that I loved and a child that was brought into this world. I left my friends and family behind, put my dreams on hold, and sold my prize possession (1969 firebird convertible) just to accomplish that. It was not an easy choice by any means, and it definitely was not a easy road to follow. We had some really hard times, living paycheck to paycheck, trying to put food on the table and barely even able to pay bills. It got even harder when I decided that I needed to go back to school to get my AAS in Electronics, just so I coud get a better job and at least have something to backup my technological expertise. Without that paper, nobody would have ever given me a second look (Thank you, Cliff Salmons). I was right, and moved up and now I manage a network for a growing manufacturing company. Of course, the more I climb the rank, the more responsibility that I get and the more people take advantage of my diligence and generosity. That, in turn, put a strain on my health and my marriage, both of which may never fully recover.

I am so burned out anymore that I don't even know what I want. On one hand, I can stay, and maybe things will get better but I will continue to go through these phases of homesickness and have to deal with watching my brothers experience parenthood through pictures in my e-mail.

The other choice would be to move back home, start over again with my family, working at the chemical plants and going back to school to finish my engineering degree that I started almost 14 years ago, but then I would miss seeing my close friends that I have made here in Iowa, and my wife would end up having the same homesickness that I have been experiencing for the last 11 years. Worse yet, she woud possibly even leave me because of it.

See my dilemma? No matter what I do, I cannot win.

I have this driving force deep within my gut that keeps telling me that it is time to go home, the same force that led me to cancel a skiing trip in 1992 to go on a road trip to Iowa with a friend only to meet someone that I fell in love with the first time I laid eyes on her, and ultimately married. This is also the same gut feeling that told me to turn down a very good job offer to make that move to Iowa.

There is a lot more to this gut feeling that I am just not ready to talk about yet, because I have not figured it all out yet myself. I tell you what, it is making for some extremely confusing dreams. (None of which I will go into detail about, unless I had many, many drinks in me)

Damn, I hate Monday's......Why doesn't anyone make a pill for that???

Molded Dash installed

Molded Dash installed
Posted by: breeves.

Here is version 1 of my molded dash for my 1995 Neon.

One bad spot due to a weak fiberglass spot, but I painted it anyway because I came up with a few new designs for Version #2.

I just wanted it in for right now so when I complete my carPC later this week, I will have the chance to fully test the system!