Random Musings

Now that I’m moved, and I’m starting to get settled in, finally, I setup some computers tonight.

• Well, my gaming/desktop computer worked fine (actually, haven’t booted Linux on it, yet, but Windows is fine.)
• My old webhost/server box is up fine, as well.
• Unfortunately, my primary NFS/file server won’t boot.

I get a fun variety of errors:

• Sometimes, I get a recursive fault and the kernel locks (2.6.16, though, I’m not sure it matters)
• Sometimes, I get a “failed to mount /dev/md4, please specify root fs with root=” (etc/paraphrased)
• Sometimes, I get a crc error during “Uncompressing Linux”
• Sometimes, I get an “Invalid format” during “Uncompressing Linux”
• Sometimes, I get partway into boot and a beautiful screen full or random colors and letters flashes, and the machine reboots.

Given how inconsistent the failures are, my gut says “motherboard, ram or CPU”, and not harddrive.  (I did really expect at least one harddrive to fail, though.)

The case for this machine did get a nice dent added to it during the move (on the motherboard side, not the other side).

I think I need to make a DSL boot USB key, and see if that fixes it, just to confirm, otherwise, debugging this is going to be a pain.  Damn fileserver shouldn’t be the broken machine.

So, as a few of the readers of this blog know, I’m moving to California (Bay Area/Silicon Valley)
Well, technically, I suppose, I’ve moved.  My stuff hasn’t quite arrived yet, but within the next day or two it should all arrive.  It will be nice to get my normal computers back and be able to work on a machine that isn’t a laptop, while at home. I suppose I’ll have to finally redefine home to be my new (expensive) apartment, as well.

On to impressions of the area:

1. Fry’s Electronics (Sunnyvale) - what a cluttered mess.  They have an impressive range of stuff, but the place just feels cluttered and disorganized.
2. IKEA (I know, not really a Cali thing, but we don’t have one, yet, in Michigan) - Damn, that’s an impressive place to shop.
3. San Francisco itself: Umm, bring a map next time ‘cuz wow, was I lost.

Admittedly, I haven’t really gotten a lot of impressions together yet.  I’ve spent a lot of time in this first week of my new job at work, and I honestly expect that to resume after I get my stuff settled in at my new apartment, and some older commitments taken care of.  So, I think I’m liking things here, though I’m still not really entirely comfortable with it all.

Anyway, I need to kill my bank account by paying all my bills (I can’t wait until the reimbursement checks hit).  More later when I get some free time and something more meaningful to blog about.  (When my stuff shows up, I think I’m going to be setting up a Sunray, for example)