The Dancer in the Shadows

Sunday, December 26, 2004

... Christmas ...

Christmas Day has past and we now find ourselves within the 12 days of Christmas. i wonder if there are any who still remember the old tradition the song of that name comes from. i wonder also if there are any who still follow that tradition...

--- The Dancer in the Shadows

Friday, December 17, 2004

A Prayer, closer to the source .....

this is a prayer, but not in the form we are acostomed to seeinh it in. after a while, i will post the source. for now, i would appreciate comments as to where people think this may have come from.

i am curious how many can identify this without being told it's origins:

O cosmic Birther of all radiance and vibration!
Soften the ground of our being
and carve out a space within us
where your Presence can abide.
Fill us with your creativity
so that we may be empowered
to bear the fruit of our mission.
Let each of our actions bear fruit
in accordance with our desire.
Endow us with the wisdom to produce
and share what each being needs
to grow and flourish.
Untie the tangled threads of destiny
that bind us,
as we release others from
the entanglement of past mistakes.
Do not let us be seduced by that which would
divert us from our true purpose
but illuminate the opportunities
of the present moment.
For you are the ground and the fruitful vision,
the birth power and the fulfilment,
as all is gathered
and made whole once again.

the common cold

this was in response to a post on the Spicy Cauldron blog. i've been thinking about it and finally decided to post it here too:

in all honesty, i hope we never find a cure for the common cold. humanity as a whole has become too arrogant already. we are far too certain of our supremacy in the grand scheme of existance. we need something to humble us every so often, and the common cold does a remarkable job of bringing us to our knees and reminding us that we are not the end all be all of existance.

--- The Dancer in the Shadows

Sunday, December 12, 2004

time off

today i ran around most of the day, the basic idea was to give the spouse an afternoon off. it worked. she spent an afternoon relaxing, played 3 games of chess and a game of chinese checkers, talked for quite a while, and most importantly, didn't have to worry about anything today.

every so often a break is needed.

this was her break. it isn't what we had planned for today, but she needed it anyway. i'm glad i was able to give it to her.

--- The Dancer in the Shadows

Thursday, December 02, 2004

The Server has Died ...

... through no fault of mine (sort of). the day before and the day of thanksgiving i was working on keeping the server running. we all knew it was on it's last leg and had been building a replacement server ... actually, we had been building up a full network core replacement. due to some of the problems we've had, we are outright replacing the entire structure. everything will be redone from scratch. all of this was on schedule for replacing everything during the christmas break. then the current server crashed. the one that houses our mail and our network logon information. yeah. ouch.

we brought it back up and found that the filesystem was severely corrupted. appears that as it crashed, it basically scribbled on parts of the hard drive. imagine trying to sort out and read 10 pages of contract type fine print after a three year old has drawn some lovely pictures on it ...

anyway, we broke the mirror (hard drive array was setup to have two identicle copies, mirror is the normal term for this) and placed one half in another machine for a file systems check while we brought the server up with the other half of the mirror. the filesystems check took more than three days. during this time, we built up a new server and began transfering services to the new server. as we were transfering, the old server continued to display corrupt file system messages and to periodically crash. since i am the "security specialist" *and* "data recovery specialist" guess who had the bulk of the complex recovery of the security database ... yeah ... that was all day wednesday and a good chunk of thursday morning. after we finished and decommissioned the old server, we finally got the results of the file system scan (three days after starting the scan) which said that due to the massive number and severity of the errors corrected, we should really rerun the scan for errors that could have been missed due to the severity of the damage found.

we didn't bother.

after moving all services to the new server and removing the old server from the security configuration, we started one last search through the old one to see if we could find anything that was missed before. during this search, the server crashed again and this time wouldn't come back online.

so the old server is now officially dead.

and the new server is scheduled for wiping in less than a month when we bring the new network core online.

was all of this a waste of time?

--- The Dancer in the Shadows