Today is the last day of the 2006 hurricane season, and it has thankfully been a good deal calmer than last year. Out of a forecast of 12-15 named storms, this year we ended up with 9 named storms (4 tropical storms and 5 hurricanes).
I’m glad this year was a bit of a non-event storm wise. It was a good break from last year’s hectic season. Hopefully next year will be more of the same. 6 months to relax a bit before the 2007 season starts up.
Things to do, geeks to meet
A few things coming up on the calendar.
Just heard about an attempt to revive a local Linux Users Group that’s supposed to be meeting tomorrow at the main branch of the library. A chance for local Linux geeks to get together and meet. Might try to see if I can make it to that and see what kind of people are about.
Heather‘s trying to get a blogger Happy Hour gathering going next week at The Dog & Duck over in Mt P. From the comments so far, it looks like Tuesday might be the night. Should be fun.
Tape to tape
Sometimes there are little side projects I help tackle just because they’re interesting.
So at work we’ve got this LTO tape library that’s used for archiving images. We’re in the process of migrating off the tape library onto SAN and an IBM Tivoli tape library. In the meantime, there are a handful of older tapes (that we’ve found so far) that the LTO library has managed to mangle over the past few years. Fortunately it’s just the leader section of the tape that’s been mangled or broken, so we don’t think there’s been any actual data loss.
It’s only a small number of tapes out of the hundreds of so in the library, so it probably wouldn’t be a problem if the data on the tapes wasn’t recoverable. Naturally the easy thing to do would be to send the tapes to one of those data recovery services and have them do the salvage work. But, that costs big bucks and being a Department of Very Little Budget, it’s a last resort option.
What we do have are a bunch of spare LTO drives and a bunch of unused Sun Ultra servers. ding!, on comes the light bulb and we figure if we can connect the LTO drives to one of the Ultras, we can copy one tape to the other using dd(1)! Brilliant! Then we can brag about saving the department thousands of dollars!
Only if it works.
Found a couple of spare molex connectors in the Ultra box to provide power to the drives, and a SCSI cable lying around (just need to find one more now). The tape drives are high voltage differential SCSI-3. I’m not sure what the computer’s SCSI card is, but with my luck it’s the low voltage version.
So that’s where we are now. One LTO drive connected and scrounging around for another SCSI cable to connect the other one. Might end up having to scrounge up some HVD SCSI cards too. Who knows. I have no idea if this will even work but it will be very cool if it does.
Puppy sitting
Yesterday the wife and I got to puppy-sit for Gabby’s latest litter (she also happens to be Simba‘s mom) while her people parents were out celebrating their anniversary. Gabby was a little defensive about her puppies at first but she eventually warmed up to us being in the room with her. She even let us pick up and hold some of her babies too.
The puppies are only a few days old, but already really cute and fun to watch. They’re a little bit bigger than my hand, and very feisty and wriggly. At this stage they’re all about sleeping and nursing on mom. In a few short weeks the six little puppies will be up walking around and tumbling all over each other. It’ll be cool to go back and see them again in a week or so to see how they’ve grown. It was so much fun to watch them.
Happy thanksgiving!
Happy thanksgiving!
Turkey’s roasting away in the oven, cranberry sauce is done and we’re working on the mac and cheese. In a few hours, the house will be stuffed with people and about an hour after that, stuffed people.
Hope everyone else has a good one!