Pablo Averbuj

Interesting Screenshot

I was just about to start looking for somethingon the Costco site when I saw a smaller picture of this Dell Laptop. Before I even read the caption my first thought was “Neat, Costco is selling MacBook Pro’s”. I clicked through and found a Dell. I confirmed that sure enough that is the default OSX Tiger aqua blue background. I find it hard to believe that Apple would ship with stock art, so I think someone decided to co-opt the background for marketing purposes.

Why I paid extra for a NAS chassis

As you’ll see below, the main fan in my Infrant ReadyNAS NV died recently. It died on Wednesday and I didn’t notice until Saturday. Good thing it turned itself off before the drives overheated. Below is the transaction of emails I received before it turned itself off to prevent damage to the disks (this is an option, but I can’t remember if it’s on by default or not).

Subject: Unexpected enclosure status detected [nas0]
Date: Wed, 06 Jun 2007 05:25:07 -0360
Fan 1 has failed.

Subject: Unexpected enclosure event detected (nas0)
Date: Thu, 07 Jun 2007 02:32:56 -0360
Disk on channel 2 has reached warning level (55C/131F).
[Thu Jun 7 02:32:36 EDT 2007]

More emails after the jump but you get the idea. I just noticed the odd notation for the timezone (-0360 == -0400). Also the host monitoring I use (‘spong’) also caught the shutdown and emailed me. The reason I didn’t notice until Saturday is because I’ve been too busy to keep up with my personal e-mail.

Thursday, 06/07/07
——————————————————————————
red S 02:54 nas0 http no response from http server
red S 02:54 nas0 ping ping failed for 10.0.0.7

I submitted a ticket to Infrant support and they responded Monday, I provided them a copy of my invoice on Tuesday and they shipped out the replacement fan this morning (hoping to have it by Friday or Saturday before we leave town). It would have been nice to get the replacement part faster (or be given the option to upgrade the shipping) but it’s not usually critical to have access to the data on a day-to-day basis, just very very convenient.

It’s odd that I didn’t get a shutdown email from the NAS, but given the choice between sending an email and shutting down, I’d rather the device shut down. It’s clear from the message trail what happened. Also, I should configure spong to page me on NAS outages.

Continue reading Why I paid extra for a NAS chassis…

Where I’ve been

The last time I had the time, energy, and opinion to write something was December, nearly six months ago, and it ended an unprecedented 10-month streak of posts. Around that time the speed of life shifted into fifth gear and slammed the accelerator because although I’ve had things I’ve wanted to post aboud I rarely had the time or energy to do it.

In December I changed roles at work. I went from being a programmer to an architect, and I moved from Internet Operations in the CTO organization to the Product division (in Video). I’ve been doing video-y things since then. The move was dramatic in many ways; we spent nearly the entire month of January visiting our remote offices, meeting with our new colleagues and getting to know them, what they do, and how they do it. It was a whirlwind trip in and of itself, except at the end of the month of January, we closed on a house, a work in progress since Thanksgiving.

Combine the duties of a new job and the stress of a moving and a new house and you’ve got yourself a perfect storm.  In case you might think I’m over dramatizing the whole thing, consider the following. We were scheduled and locked to close on the house on Monday, January 29th. On Sunday the 21st, I flew to California. On Tuesday in California I was diagnosed with an ear infection and advised not to fly until Sunday the 28th. On Wednesday, my colleagues departed for the Tucson office, while I boarded the train that would take me across the country for the next three a half days. I arrived back in DC on the Saturday before the closing (incidentally, the following Tuesday I still had the same ear infection, so the gamble paid off).

I’ve had a lot of things on my mind, especially regarding work and video and I’d like to share them once I’m clearer on the blogging policy at work. Hopefully this post is a prelude to turning the slow drip of postings back on.