I’m still at work, and it doesn’t look like I’ll be going home anytime soon…

There’s a medical office that we support.  They’re open every single day of the week.  They’re seeing patients from about 8:00 in the morning until 7:00 or so at night.  Every day.  So downtime is nearly impossible to schedule.  Which means that things kind of pile up and when we can schedule downtime, there’s a lot of work to be done.

So, they’ve got a HDD that’s failing, and we need to replace it.  We need to upgrade them to MS SQL 2005, so that they can upgrade their software, so that they’re compliant with some new registry or law or something.  Their backup has been doing odd things.  Their antivirus has been doing odd things.  They’ve been running out of space on their C: drive.  All sorts of stuff to do.

And tonight was the only time we could get downtime scheduled.  So I showed up at 6:00…  Waited for the last patient to leave…  Waited for the doctors to all go home…  And started in on their server.

Now, I should tell you that I’ve been dreading this job all week long.  Normally I don’t mind late night or weekend jobs…  Normally I don’t worry too much about working over here…  But, for some reason, I’ve been dreading this job.  Just a feeling that something wasn’t right.

Now I know why.

One of the first things I wanted to do, before touching anything else, is get a good backup of the whole system - in case anything breaks along the way.  Turns out their tapes are way over capacity.  They’ve got a DAT72 drive which typically holds about 60 gigs or so…  And they’ve got about 120 gigs of data.  So I can’t get a backup of the whole system.

The next problem is the speed of their backup.  I guess I’ve gotten spoiled by all our clients with LTO drives…  But I was amazed to see that even after I pared down their backup to the bare essentials it would still take about 5 hours to run.  There’s no way I’m going to be hanging around here until midnight.

So I’m dumping their databases to my USB HDD and sincerely hoping that nothing horrible happens.  With the way their backup has been acting lately, and the capacity issues, I’m not sure how much we’d be able to restore from a tape should the absolute worst happen.  And when you’re swapping out hard drives, even in a RAID, the absolute worst is entirely too possible.

Slashdot | Greek hackers Target CERN’s LHC

The Telegraph reports that Greek hackers were able to gain momentary access to a CERN computer system of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) while the first particles were zipping around the particle accelerator on September 10th. ‘Scientists working at CERN, the organization that runs the vast smasher, were worried about what the hackers could do because they were “one step away” from the computer control system of one of the huge detectors of the machine, a vast magnet that weighs 12,500 tons, measuring around 21 meters in length and 15 meters wide/high. If they had hacked into a second computer network, they could have turned off parts of the vast detector and, said the insider, “it is hard enough to make these things work if no one is messing with it.”‘

Wow…  So, maybe the LHC will wind up destroying the world after all.

Slashdot | San Fran Hunts for Mystery Device on City Network

With costs related to a rogue network administrator’s hijacking of the city’s network now estimated at $1 million, city officials say they are searching for a mysterious networking device hidden somewhere on the network. The device, referred to as a “terminal server” in court documents, appears to be a router that was installed to provide remote access to the city’s Fiber WAN network, which connects municipal computer and telecommunication systems throughout the city. City officials haven’t been able to log in to the device, however, because they do not have the username and password. In fact, the city’s Department of Telecommunications and Information Services isn’t even certain where the device is located, court filings state.

Honestly, I’m a little surprised that they’re having so much trouble with this…

If it is communicating on the network it should be pretty easy to look up its MAC or IP address.  And I have to assume that a network of that size has smart switches installed on it, so they should be able to track that MAC/IP down to an individual port.  And at that point it should just be a matter of tracing the network cable.

Looks like they successfully fired up the Large Hadron Collider, and geeks everywhere are celebrating.

Right now they’re basically just warming up the collider…  Sending protons through it…  They won’t actually begin colliding anything for a couple weeks yet.

There’s been a lot of talk in the media lately about how the LHC could possibly destroy the world…  Talk about strangelets and miniature black holes and whatnot…  And that’s largely been a bunch of bad reporting.  The fact of the matter is that, while this is the largest collider we’ve built so far, it is still nothing compared to what nature can do.  There is absolutely nothing happening inside the LHC that doesn’t happen in our upper atmosphere on a daily basis.

Still, it might not be such a bad idea to keep some crowbars handy just in case…

Slashdot | AMDs New Card Supports Linux From The Get-Go

Back in September AMD had announced a new ATI Linux driver as well as opening up their GPU specifications, and today they have taken an additional step to better support the Linux OS. With the just-announced Radeon HD 4850 RV770 they have provided same-day Linux support, and the Linux driver is now shipping alongside the Windows driver on their product CDs. In addition, they are encouraging their AIB partners to showcase Tux on the product packaging as a sign of Linux support. Last but certainly not least, AMD is committed from top-to-bottom product support on Linux and they will be introducing high-end features in their Linux driver such as MultiGPU CrossFire technology. Phoronix has a run-down on AMD’s evolutionary leap in Linux support along with information on the open-source support for the RV770 GPU.

I almost hate to see this news…  I’ve been a big fan of nVidia’s video cards for a very long time.  I honestly don’t know which one is ahead on performance at the moment…but I’ve always preferred how nVidia’s drivers worked.  ATI’s always seemed kind of clunky, cludgy, and bloated.  And I never seemed to get the performance out of ATI that I thought I should be getting.

But ever since ATI and AMD merged they’ve been becoming more and more Linux friendly.

And now this…  Linux support right out of the box.  Linux drivers shipping along-side Windows drivers.  Encouragement to actually put Tux on the box.

I may have to give ATI/AMD another look…