The Thrill House

When I first started out in college I was planning on going for a Computer Science degree.  I started taking the math classes and the intro CS courses, I didn’t have much trouble with the actual work, but I really didn’t enjoy the headaches of software programming.  After my second quarter of C++ I decided to switch to MIS, and I really haven’t programmed since.

 These last 3 days at work I’ve had to dig back into it to write a little program to help us test our game on our dev kits.  It’s been both fun and crappy as I do like the process of writing code, but I hate testing and debugging.  I finally got my program done and working though, and I’m quite proud of it.  I think it will really help decrease downtime.  I don’t have much interest in writing more code for a little while though.

I’ve spent the past few days at work building a new backup server.  Big RAID array for backup-to-disk space and a mega-tape drive with 400GB native capacity.  This is some pretty serious hardware, and deservedly so.  I’m expecting to need to back up 300GB on a nightly basis in the not-to-distant future.  This isn’t the first time I’ve built a beefy server of course, but this is the first time I’ve decided to use a backplane to mount the drives.  In the past I’ve just bought cases with 4 internal HD bays, but I realized that this makes it hard to spot a bad drive, and harder to replace it. 

For this server I bought a no-name SATA backplane from some company called Athena.  It holds 4 serial ATA drives and takes up 3 5.25″ bays.  The unit is actually quite good quality, with an integrated 80mm fan, status lights for each drive, and easy loading drive caddys.  This is definitely the way to go if you’re building a 4 drive RAID array, I wish I had started doing things this way earlier.Â

I’ve spent the last couple of days at work setting up a new IRC server.  We’ve been using a cobbled together BSD server running IRCd-hybrid for the last year and a half,but the old 9GB hard drive died the other day.  Since I know Windows a lot better than Unix I set up a new server running UnrealIRCd on Windows2000.  UnrealIRC is actually really easy to setup.  There’s alot of options in the config file, but they all make sense.  The tough part was getting services running.

 As with so many things I’ve done at Zombie, I had never worked with an IRC server or a services system before.  The programmers have been clammoring for channel services, so I decided to try Anope as it is still being developed and seemed to have the best windows support.  This means I’m running two open source applications together, which always creates strange problems.  Thankfully Anope is built to work with UnrealIRC, so all the problems were just in figuring out the nuances of each application’s config file.  After spending about 5 hours researching and trying different configurations I finally figured out how everything was supposed to be setup, the big key was figuring out that the servername specified in the link section of the UnrealIRC config needed to be the exact same as the servername variable in the Anope config.  Once I figured that out everything seems to be working as it should.