So I've had this red light under my dash for ages...

Bugger! Spent the last couple of days cleaning things up and getting ready to drill&tap the head, to put the extra four stud holes in that the turbo manifold needs.. And then I get the extractors off to find this.....

So I spent some time today running a pair of 4AG wires off the battery, to a pair of terminal blocks, and then ran the +ve to an 8-way fuse box.

So windows is starting to tee me off with its startup times on my notebook.. granted, given the specs of the thing it 'only' takes 30 seconds to get to the login prompt, but then there's all the time after login to load virus scanners, and all that jazz..

So I decided to give linux a burl, after a 2-year stint without linux on the desktop..

Stolen from Jase who stole it from lord only knows where...

Here we go...

Ok, it's back to 30 now, and hopefully will get cooler as the night goes on..

Terra came back to life - i'd put a new primary HDD in and gone to install 2k3 server, and got the same stop screen.. At least this time I could read it, and discovered the scary MACHINE_CHECK_EXCEPTION.. That's the one the CPU sends to the OS to tell it that there's a hardware failure... Pulled EVERYTHING out, and put the original primary HDD back in, and it booted XP just fine... OK, add first raid card and disk stack.. Yep boots fine.. Add second raid card and disk stack... Yep boots fine.. Add third raid card and the extra disks.. Yep, boots fine.. Although I notice that as I access disks, the three fans on front speed up and slow down (you can JUST notice the beating of the blade rotation against each other - yay for lit fans..).. AHHHHHH Power is JUST at the limits... OK, so finally plug in the second PSU (it's been sitting there not being used), and move one disk stack off the main ATX supply onto the second HDD-dedicated supply (it only has 12+5v HDD molex's coming out of it..).. Bingo, she boots, and the fans all stay at the same speed... YAY!!

Spent the monring typing up yet more Summernats Awards results pages.. - Almost done now :)

Then terra (see gallery for pics) crashed, so I headed out to the server room (see gallery for pics) to find out why, and got a bit of a shock.. Aircon unit had turned its compressor pump off due to overheating, and it was 36 in there! this was at 2pm.. Went straight to bunnings to get a second unit.. Found they didn't have any more arlec's, so I had to buy a sunbeam 1HP unit (instead of the 1.5HP arlec), which I've put in my bedroom, and then moved the arlec 1.5HP from my bedroom to the server room.. By the time I got the holes cut in the wall and had it all plumbed in, it was sitting just over 39 degrees in there.. ouch! turned both aircon back on, and the temp started to plummet.. after 10 mins it'd dropped to 37, so i headed back inside to wait a while.. Have just been back out, and found BOTH the aircons have shut their compressors off due to overheating and it's sitting at 36 degrees.. hmmmmm.... Will see if it comes down another few degrees when they cool off a bit.. Hopefully..

And terra won't start up.. passes memory tests (and it's ECC on an intel server board so I'd expect big errors on POST if there were any faults) ok, and then goes on to load all the raid cards (2x IDE raid 1x SCSI raid), and then gets to windows booting, gets part-way through and gives the blue STOP screen, then reboots before I can see what the error was... If I can get the temp in there down, hopefully it'll come back up... If not, I'll put another HDD in it as the boot drive and upgrade it to 2003 instead of XP (have been wanting to for a while anyway), and see how it goes...

If I can get 2003 on there, then I can start my AD+Exchange migration project - aim is to get exchange and AD master off the current 'earth' machine, and make 'earth' a dual PIII-1.4 dell 1RU server.. - should clear up 3RU in the rack, and save a little more power..

Oh plus it means the old earth (P4-2.4, 2gb ram) can be pulled apart and used for mum's new computer - the only spare motherboards I have are all AMD chips, so I can't just transplant her HDD... :

Wow, it's been a year. We still miss you Maddy!

Whoa, what an awesome night - the yamaha stunt bike team are pretty damned good, and the fireworks went off like nothing else!




Think maybe I will come back next year, though as Jase said, we a) need staff lanyards, and b) need staff shirts and hats

Sitting here now uploading last night's photos to the web, and catching up on a bit of email before the rush of the day kicks in proper

Long day - didn't finish up yesterday until 2am this morning - taking photos of all the cars for the elite presentations today.. Had to wait until the judges had sorted it all and made their final decisions.. Was meaning to be back in around 8am, but slept waaay through my alarm, and ended up back in at 10, building up the huge (100 slides) presentation, which we just managed to have finished in time for the presentation at 1pm..

Got into the nats easy enough today - came in the traders entrance :)

After the presentation I uploaded all of yesterdays and todays shots onto the website, then spent an hour out with Plucka, the nats mascot, getting photos, then came back and loaded them up on the web... Then met up with jase who'd found toby, josh, and karen, and sat around for a while before they decided to head off, then jase and I headed back up here to the office, where I uploaded his photos from the day..

Now there's a nice quiet time till the supercruise starts at 7:30...