Backups

Holy cow batman, the backups haven't been working.

I have a nice little script that is supposed to backup my server to an ftp site, but I just discovered that it has not been working, and there is a file which is 0 bytes in size on my backup server, with no incrementals whatsoever, argh!!!

btw ncftp rules, I just wish it were true free software :(

tar czf - /service /home /etc /data | ncftpput -c -u -p -v ftpbackup2.serverbeach.com /backup/backup.tar.gz

no idea why this wasn't working, maybe becuase it was running from cron PATH was mostly blank so it couldn't find ncftpput?

Alex

ECS RS485M-M

Well - in the continuing saga of Sarah's Mum's computer. We got a call from her this week saying that she was having problems with the thing shutting itself off. It would beep like a cell phone in the distance, then shut off. I knew what was going on, the CPU was overheating. Oh crap I thought, I really hope it's not a bad CPU. So anyhow, we get the system here today, and I take a look. The Heatsink looks like it's coupled to the CPU ok, but the fan is running too slow. So we take it down to Microcenter to their tech support. They have a couple of guys that you can bring computers too and they help you with them. Well this guy was in a bad mood, and he was absolutely no help at all. I mean he didn't even bother to check the BIOS settings at first until I told him to look in the BIOS at the CPU temp. Somehow he thought that the temp sensor in the CPU Heatsink reading 43 Celsius was normal. Wow. Has this guy even taking a Computer's temperature before? So after waiting about 45 minutes for him to poke and prod the computer and tell us nothing, we decided to go with Alex's hunch - a bad motherboard. The BIOS was clearly reporting the CPU fan spinning at 0 RPM which was a bad sign. And I figured it was a mobo problem, so we got a new mobo. We got back here to home and I got the new board installed. Booted it, CPU idle temp of 34 Celsius. Much better. Clearly the fan was spinning faster too. So we started up one of Jacquie's programs and it worked fine, in fact it ran nice and fast. Total success.

Well - this was the first ECS mobo I tried, and I'm none too impressed.

Evil Gardening

So after the debackle with the computer, we decided to go to Lowe's to pick up some paint for Riordon's room to re-touch the sealing edge, and we also needed a weed whacker (Yes, we got paid! yay! marnanel if you are reading this, send me an invoice!!!

I got the weed whacker together and started it up, wow it's loud. I go back into the yard to start working with it, and it's really not working as well as I had expected, plus it's kinda awkward to work with, and there is no easy was to rotate the head for a good edging on my lawn, so I gave up on that idea. Finally I went into the back yard to do our piece of lawn at the top of the back. We have a three tier thing going on with our back yard. The bottom tier is ground level and has grass. The second tier is about 2 feet wide and about 3 feet up and has flowers of various kinds, and the top tier has trees and grass and extends into our neighbours yard behind us and is about a foot and a half about the second tier. I get up onto the top tier to weed whack the grass. It doesn't really work very well - it was more work than using the mower, which in future, I think I'll just do that. Anyway, getting up to the top tier is a bitch because there is a tree, and a big holly bush right there. When comming down, I figured I would just take a short cut down the tiers. Heh. Stupid Alex. I put my foot on the wood edge to the second tier to jump down, and my foot slipped, and I fell. It was a big relief that I didn't break anything. I'm kinda sore in my leg and my shoulder, on which I think I landed.

I think I'm gonna go hack that holly bush back a bit and walk around the tiers next time.