Triumph and Tragedy

Triumph: Mostly installed qmail on Mack’s newly reinstalled server, rhapsody. A few things to finish off today.

Triumph: Installed and configured a second private hub for UCCN, hub02. Will install backup services at a later date.

Triumph: Kelly put in a job application yesterday, and another will go in tomorrow.

Triumph: The package of stuff from New Zealand arrived today, albeit slightly beaten up from its travels.

Triumph: Shaved.

Triumph: Received most of the outstanding eBay items purchased up until last week.

Triumph: Got the new router installed and running smoothly. Could use a RAM upgrade, but that will come in time.

Tragedy: A bump while drinking water last night resulted in a spill occuring directly above the macbook. It was quickly shut down, but after being left 24 hours or so, it won’t turn on. Leaving it beside the heater for another 48 or so to see if this changes anything, but my hopes are not high.

Productive

Today was fairly productive. Kelly, for the last 3 nights, hasn’t slept much at all. Thursday night she had Nyquil, and Friday night was Tylenol PM, partly for her sick, partly to help her sleep. These were an epic fail, resulting in not sleeping longer than 10 minutes at a time, and being paranoid about all kinds of things (mostly my alive-ness). Wednesday night she had Nyquil and was fine, except for a short patch where she rolled onto me, looked up towards me and said “WHAT?” before rolling back over and being quiet again. I prefer this to being constantly asked “Are you OK?” and giving the same answer “YES” — in her defence she thought I was dying.

Anyway, last night she didn’t sleep either, though this time she didn’t have the paranoia either. She instead slept all day, and it worked out as I had planned for Sunday School too. We’re working our way through Romans, last week reading chapter 1, today looking at it a little closer and reviewing the importance of Romans to the bible and to Christianity as a whole.

This afternoon Matt and I went and picked up about 15 boards of cherry wood that a family friend is giving away to anyone with a good use for it, I’m planning on building a special coffee table – more on that later. I also played Command and Conquer (Yuri’s revenge), and beat 3 brutal enemies having lost my construction yard (the first one was eliminated by the other two computers, and I was able to commandeer an MCV from one of the two remaining – my good income had allowed me to create enough troops to overpower the enemy base.)

I also did some more rough plans in church regarding how I want to set up I-aL/Infinitech, particularly server utilisation and what-goes-where type stuff. Small web stuff will go on Rizzo, the VPS. Also probably 10 paid eggdrop accounts, and the administration server for the entire thing. Rizzo will also likely be the master DNS server, and secondary MX. Rhapsody, Mack’s server, I’ll be able to utilise for web, secondary DNS (he’ll be using it as primary), and secondary MX. Telly will be secondary DNS, master MX, and also house backups. I plan to write a basic secured administration site to run from Rizzo providing dynamically updated DNS zone files, Apache Virtual-hosts files etc, and potentially controlling who can and can’t log in and how.

Also, I’m trying to decide between postfix, exim4 and qmail for each server – I’m guessing that the secondary MX’s should be configured the same as the primary rather than mixing MTA’s, the question is which.. All 3 servers are running debian, and all three have a different MTA. Fortunately Rhapsody is likely to be reinstalled this week, and Telly may be going the same way soon too, that just leaves Rizzo with a reimage if required..

Finally, today also marked the completion of the immigration package. We put together all the paperwork that has been requested to date and a folder will be purchased tomorrow to permit the sending of the paperwork to USCIS on Tuesday. We continue to hope and pray that this time we have everything together, and that everything will be approved quickly (or we’ll be told what we need to do and we can do it quickly).