So much for everyday

So a lot has happened since my last blog.  I now have a new client. BlackBox.

It is a budget client but at least it has some current-ish hardware. It has an Athlon II 250 @ 3.0 Ghz, 2 gigs of ram, and some old 80 gig drives.

I have windows 7 on it….  I really want to play with ubunto, but i get nervous every time it goes into the partition screen it doesn’t address each hard drive separately.  It wants to set up a sata raid (which is weird cause it is on the IDE chain.)  I may just install it on top of 7 as an application.

My windows 2k8 server is up and running as a basic file server right now. and my old client is now running XP, soon I will get into really getting things configured.

I know I wanted to learn about nix, but with the technet subscription, the MS option is so easy to play with.

Happy birthday to me

So This weekend has mostly been about going birthday stuff, seeing the fam and such. But I just found out my win7 box is all virused up. So right now I am backing up all my data, then doing a through scan for viruses via nix, then blowing away win 7 and re-installing. I have a 6 hour wait on the backup process so I am probably bed bound soon.

It has been a few days

But not all is lost. It just took a few days to get started. With a new lab set up, we now have a full network running upstairs. Right now, we have my wrt320n working as a wireless bridge to the upstairs from the crappy d-link down. I have to get another mimo n router to bolster my network a little, but all and all it is good.

I now am writing this from my dual boot p4 2.53 box in debian install. j2geeks station is running puppy and we installed server 2003 on a amd 64 3200+ None of it is doing anything yet, but they are up with an OS. Tonight, I am going to try getting this OS to look a little cleaner, and I am going to try to get the network to play nice with my windows 7 box.

Update

Well, No Net BSD tonight, but I think I have made a valuable alliance. J2geek and I are pooling our resources to maximize our ability to come up with new and great things.

While he was here he convinced me to flash my WRT310n. AHHH, That was a leap of faith! We installed ddwrt on the router and it took it flawlessly. Now that I have gotten over the fear of bricking my $120 router (I am sure it is cheaper now I got it when it was a brand new model) We are going to try openWRT and see what tricks we can make this thing do.

I am already excited that I will now be able to bridge my wireless network to a wired one in the Nerdary.

Little Progress

Unfortunately, I had to work at the JSK today and that hampered most of my plans, I was able to get all my distro's out to CDr or DVD respectably. Tomorrow, I have some errands to run in the morning, but by mid afternoon I am re-arranging the "creation station" (Read: me and my fiancee's shared office) into geek central, I also plan on searching craigslist for some free desks, table or shelves. I am kinda excited to re-establish the geek lab. World of Wires here I come.

On a related note, I wanted to take my old router and flash it with ddWRT but alas it is not compatable. I would freely trade anyone my dlink router for one that supported ddWRT.

I am also stopping by my parents to pick up an old CRT, keyboard, mouse and 8 port switch.

So tomorrow, I should have at least two machines going in the geekitorium.

*** New Geek Update! j2geek is stopping by and we are going to throw net bsd on a box and see what happens *** updates to follow.

My first Post --welcome to the beginning of the end

Well, I hope at the end of this journey I will be well versed in linux and have a better understanding of networking as a whole. I have finally come to the realization that I am a geek. I have tried to fight it for years now, but there is no denying that growing up on an apple IIc and HP Vectra ES/12 has indelibly scared me.

But I now have a goal, sort of. I am trying to achieve a job in the computer administration field. That isn't saying that I am doing nothing now. I was/am one of the first "gig"ers in the "gig-o-nomics" era. I should say, that actually I have a full right to call my self a gig-er as I am a stage hand and my work was always called a gig. but I digress.....

Here is my starting points. and some early goals...

1. Hard ware
PC 1 - (current specs)
Name - mediabox
O/S - Windows 7 (this probably will not change)
General Purpose:
Games movies and audio
Specs:
Form Factor - miniITX
CPU - Athlon 64 X2 5200+
Memory - 4gb g.skill
HDD - 1tb WD Caviar black SATA
CDR - Blu-ray reader DVD R/RW
PC 2

Name - VPR Matrix
O/S - Windows XP
General Purpose:
Office Applications
Specs:
Form Factor - Full ATX
CPU - P4 2.53 pre HT
Memory - 1 GB oem
HDD - 2x 80GB WD Caviar ide
CDR - HP DVD R/RW
PC3
TBD

I have 3 cases and lots of junk hardware, this will probably be a duron 700 with whatever i can come up with for hardware.

Starting goals:

My media box is getting left alone, Although I may put on some VM and use it for testing in a virtual machine setting.
The VPR matrix is going to be my first full on server. I want to run this as a Samba, Apache, Qmail, etc that also acts as a domain server. Up until now I have only been able to make samba work under root with full privilege (Lame I know)

I have an old D link router I want to flash with ddWRT and get familiar with the interface I would like to make it bridge with my router downstairs and bridge it to a wired connection upstairs in the lab.

Thirdly, at this point, I would like to play with clustering and integrating windows and Linux. Also I would like to test out new OS's as they come along.

So Tonight I started the painful journey into Linux. I have downloaded about a dozen distro's the big dogs are:
Slackware 13.x
Debian
DSL
Puppy
I plan on updating this blog every time I work on any project. I have started a number of blogs in my life, so my hopes that that will happen are kinda mediocre, but can't never did anything