Thursday, August 25, 2005

Dreamweaver MX 2004 = Slow

I am typing this as I am waiting for typing that I did in Dreamweaver to show up. Now I am waiting for something to delete.

Tedious.

Wednesday, August 17, 2005

Another Mysterious Disappearance

My morning has been rather interesting. I will update later, but this mystery, rather than involving ATMs or Radmind, involves G4s, the Armory, and cut security cables.

More fun than a barrel of monkeys...

Friday, August 12, 2005

Mystery Solved

Well, there were actually two mysteries that developed this week.

One had to do with the Great ATM Heist of 2005. Yes, our ATM machine was stolen from the Atrium. Yes, they finally found the ditched machine. No, the thieves could not break into it. But enough about that, even though it's pretty interesting, and has been the subject of many CSI-like discussions among the staff.

The real mystery, the one that was critical to the labs, was why Tiger seemed to be a lot fussier than Panther when forced to shutdown via the power switch.

Basically, what happened was this. If a machine had to be shutdown by pressing the power button for 8 seconds, on boot, it would hang. I would have to boot into single-user mode, run fsck, and reboot. Which is not practical, as I am not here every hour that we are open. So, I started digging around as to what would cause this problem.

It ended up being traced to Journaling, or specifically, the lack thereof on these systems. For some reason, I did not turn on Journaling when I created the new lab image.

Luckily, it ended up being an easy fix (open Disk Utility, select the volume, turn on Journaling). Even luckier, this setting is evidentally stored in an area that Radmind ignores, so I was able to touch each machine, turn it on, and have it stick. If it HAD been in an area refreshed by Radmind, I STILL would have had to touch each machine, and it would have taken longer.

So, one mystery solved by Journaling.

The Great ATM Heist, however, is still under investigation...