Up In Smoke had a tasting of the Bolivar cigars from General Cigar today. I tried out one of the Toro (6.5″ x 52) sized offerings. It’s a rich, full bodied smoke with a cool, even burn. I really enjoyed it and added a couple to the humidor.
Monthly Archives: November 2005
Vonage, Part Deux
I picked up the box today and after a little fiddling around with my firewall (the D-Link DI-604 that Verizon provides with it’s FIOS service) I figured out that in order to forward a range of ports you need to go to Advanced–>Firewall and add the following rules:
Name: Vonage 1
Source: WAN,*
Destination: LAN,<PAP2’s IP Address>
Protocol: UDP
Port Range: 5060-5061
Name: Vonage 2
Source: WAN,*
Destination: LAN,<PAP2’s IP Address>
Protocol: UDP
Port Range: 10000-20000
I got that done, did the magic on Vonage’s site to enable that ATA, and got a dial tone on the phone I plugged in. After that a quick test call to my mobile phone confirmed that everything’s working. The final step to completing this is going to be when Verizon transfers my current number over to Vonage.
Vonage!
Thank you Black Friday! Circuit City’s doing a sale on the Linksys PAP2 VoIP adapter. I’ve been planning this for a while now, but they’re offering a bunch of rebates and a $75 gift card as well, so I’ll be making money on the deal in addition to saving a lot of money on my phone bill. More updates as things progress…
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
The latest Harry Potter movie debuted this weekend and I managed to get enough free time to go see it this afternoon. It was really well done, though there’s a lot of stuff left out, but that’s unavoidable because the book is just so long. The only thing I really missed was the Rita Skeeter subplot. That one actually carries over to the later volumes in the series. But other than that it was a really enjoyable 2 1/2 hours. Especially the dance lessons!
Dead Hard Drive
I got woken up at 4:00 this morning by a page from Big Brother notifying me that one of my Seagate ST3160827AS SATA drives died. I’ve got two of them in a RAID-1 configuration so there was no data loss. Here’s the relavent log entries:
Nov 19 04:04:06 notanut kernel: ata1: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
Nov 19 04:04:06 notanut kernel: ata1: error=0x40 { UncorrectableError }
Nov 19 04:04:10 notanut kernel: ata1: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
Nov 19 04:04:10 notanut kernel: ata1: error=0x40 { UncorrectableError }
Nov 19 04:04:13 notanut kernel: ata1: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
Nov 19 04:04:13 notanut kernel: ata1: error=0x40 { UncorrectableError }
Nov 19 04:04:17 notanut kernel: ata1: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
Nov 19 04:04:17 notanut kernel: ata1: error=0x40 { UncorrectableError }
Nov 19 04:04:21 notanut kernel: ata1: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
Nov 19 04:04:21 notanut kernel: ata1: error=0x40 { UncorrectableError }
Nov 19 04:04:21 notanut kernel: sd 0:0:0:0: SCSI error: return code = 0x8000002
Nov 19 04:04:21 notanut kernel: sda: Current: sense key: Medium Error
Nov 19 04:04:21 notanut kernel: Additional sense: Unrecovered read error – auto reallocate failed
Nov 19 04:04:21 notanut kernel: end_request: I/O error, dev sda, sector 53104600
So I got out to Fry’s and picked up another one and set about replacing it. I first tried to “warm swap” it using some SCSI commands. That didn’t work at all, so on to plan B. Boot off the rescue CD, rebuild the partition table on the new drive, resync the RAID, reinstall the grub boot block, and bring the system back up. Thankfully everything went fine, just a little trouble with paths in the grub-install script that was easily fixed with vi. Two hours later the machine’s back up and running
Cold Weather’s Here
It looks like winter’s finally arrived. I had a nice, chilly ride in to work this morning since it was 37° F when I headed out. The Fieldsheer pants worked out well. The only part of me that was cold was my neck, so now I’m trying to find something to cover it up.
BIOS Update Disaster
I decided to update the BIOS on my GA-K8NSC-939 motherboard today. If you’re running Linux, don’t do this. Every BIOS version above F2 doesn’t work with Linux. There are multiple problems with hardware initializtion, APIC initialization, and IDE interrupts that keep the system from booting. So I’m back at the F2 code, hoping that Gigabyte will fix them.
Microsoft Visual Studio Express
Microsoft’s giving away their Visual Studio Express IDEs for one year. I’ve already snagged the Visual Basic component and am rewriting Currency Catalog to take advantage of .NET and newer operating systems. It’s actually going to be a little work because they’ve changed a lof of the language, and it seems like I’m using most of the features they changed.
The most important thing that I’ve learned so far is to do the development on a local drive because the .NET security model makes you jump through a heck of a lot of hoops to get an executable to run correctly from a network drive.
A New Chair For The Library
After church I went over to Ikea and picked up a Poäng chair and footstool, both with medium brown frames and kungsvik sand covers. This really completes the library since now I’ve got a comfortable chair to relax in. Hopefully this will mean that I’ll spend a little less time in front of the TV.
More New Flooring
The flooring installers came back today to install the laminate flooring in the dining room, library, and closet under the stairs. The dining room got Natural Teak and the library got Mohawk Essex Oak
This stuff looks great, and the rest of the house will be done as money permits.
