![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
What did I do this weekend?
Well, Moira and I had talked about going to see Margaret Cho at the Milwaukee pridefest. We also talked about driving out to the Bong recreational area and going for a walk in the woods. Neither of those things happened, but that's ok.
Instead, the two of us did go for a nice (and I don't mean nice in the traditional sense; I've never been big on fancy restaurants. I just mean nice) dinner at a Chinese buffet with![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
posicat, serinthia, and todd_riverden. After stuffing myself, the group of us went back to my house where, Andrea having left for the night, the remainder of us began field-stripping a Comapq ML570 server.
We pulled all the easily pullable parts to make it easier to get up the stairs, and Posi and I hauled the shell up to the bedroom. At the top of the stairs, we swiftly reinserted the hard drives, power supplies, and other miscellaneous bits before rolling it down the hall to the computer room.
The immediate results were dissapointing; after plugging all of the necessary techy-bits into it and pushing the button, nothing happened. We spent a while researching on the internet trying to track down a manual and, though we didn't find one, we were rewarded with places to buy less expensive non-OEM parts for the thing.
Eventually Serin and Todd had to head home for the night. It wasn't until just about 1:30 in the morning that Posi and I finally realized where the indicator lights that the sticker on the inside of the case cover were and what they were telling us. We reseated the memory board and then the blank in the third processor slot and powered it up again. Success! With a roar not unlike a vaccuum cleaner, the server throttled up its fans and booted into a Windows 2000 server installation. Now I just have to find a password reset tool that works on this hardware; that's the next step. At the time, I was happy just to find that it's operable.
It's a dual PIII Xeon 700Mhz machine with 2GB of RAM. Beyond that, I just won two more processors for it on Ebay that will make it a quad PIII. I don't know what I'm going to be doing with it at the moment, but Whenever I get to the point that I have some cool background process intensive apps to run on my webserver, I'll be all set. In the meantime, I'm looking forward to seeing how fast it will do things like crank out fractals and crack WEP codes.
Speaking of which, remembering a conversation I had withevil_dwagon about how easy it is to crack WEP keys, it occurred to me that I should probably stop talking about such things like a poseur and actually learn how it's done. A quick search brought me to the guide on WEP security and cracking on a site that, while it was heretofore unknown to me, definitely bears some future perusal: Tom's Networking.
I ended up burning a copy of an absolutely fantastic tool package contained in a bootable knoppix-based CD-ROM, the Auditor Security Collection. Loaded with innumerable interesting network utilities for both bounded and unbounded media, not to mention password utilities and other tools, this is invaluable for someone trying to learn a bit more about how the bits of a network under the surface work.
I didn't bump into the package until Sunday afternoon, but I was up 'till about eleven o' clock at night with it, learning how to hack my own wireless network. Neat stuff!
Of course, playing with all these Linux tools made me wish that I knew Linux a little bit better. I've done extremely little with it, apart from having tried installing it once or twice and never doing much else with it. So I asked Serinthia for her opinion on a good distro to start with and began downloading Suse 10.1. Which I then stopped downloading after the third disc because I got a phone call from one of our network admins indicating that I should really stop what I'm doing because if the head of the server team found out, he would be grumpy. It was stupid of me to not even consider that I might be clogging the network.
So instead, I VPNd to my home network, jumped on my server via VNC, and downloaded the last two discs onto that machine. Gottakill catch 'em all! I was thinking about giving installation a try tonight, but it's been a long Monday: Serin would rather just head home and, while I may give it a try by myself, I may be too brain-fried to concentrate too heavily on it. We shall see. I may just set my laptop up to sniff packets through the evening and try to learn a few more Hiragana.
Oh yeah; I've started teaching myself Hiragana. Having finally fully cleaned up the computer room (did I mention I've finally got the computer room all clean?), I wanted to do something that would let me sit down and enjoy the space, so I popped in the Japanese instructional disc I bought at Goodwill a while ago. I soon found that I would either need the instructional booklet that had originally accompanied it (and that I was distinctly lacking) or a better knowledge of Japanese than I had.
I did another Google search (Google is entirely deserving of deification) and found The Japanese Page. Following along with the beginner's lessons there, I taught myself the first five Hiragana symbols: あ, い, う, え, and お, which are roughly equivalent in function and importance to English vowels. I'll see if I can get another five in my head tonight.
For some time I'd thought that I'd end up teaching myself to speak Japanese and end up learning the written form far later, if ever, so it makes me more than a little bit excited that I'm starting to learn the written form. I'm even planning to see if I can getwooisme to come with me down to Mitsuwa to see if I can find any children's books written in Hiragana that I can pick up and practice with.
Well, we're almost to Evil Bob's house, which means that I need to get into my car and give Serin a ride home. That's about all I have to say at the moment anyway, apart from the fact that I've had nine more hours that can each serve individually as a singular examples of why work sucks. I need another weekend.
*Storm curls up and tucks his tail under his head to rest for a few minutes and let the tension headache that began to make itself known around four o' clock begin to dissipate.*
Well, Moira and I had talked about going to see Margaret Cho at the Milwaukee pridefest. We also talked about driving out to the Bong recreational area and going for a walk in the woods. Neither of those things happened, but that's ok.
Instead, the two of us did go for a nice (and I don't mean nice in the traditional sense; I've never been big on fancy restaurants. I just mean nice) dinner at a Chinese buffet with
posicat, serinthia, and todd_riverden. After stuffing myself, the group of us went back to my house where, Andrea having left for the night, the remainder of us began field-stripping a Comapq ML570 server.We pulled all the easily pullable parts to make it easier to get up the stairs, and Posi and I hauled the shell up to the bedroom. At the top of the stairs, we swiftly reinserted the hard drives, power supplies, and other miscellaneous bits before rolling it down the hall to the computer room.
The immediate results were dissapointing; after plugging all of the necessary techy-bits into it and pushing the button, nothing happened. We spent a while researching on the internet trying to track down a manual and, though we didn't find one, we were rewarded with places to buy less expensive non-OEM parts for the thing.
Eventually Serin and Todd had to head home for the night. It wasn't until just about 1:30 in the morning that Posi and I finally realized where the indicator lights that the sticker on the inside of the case cover were and what they were telling us. We reseated the memory board and then the blank in the third processor slot and powered it up again. Success! With a roar not unlike a vaccuum cleaner, the server throttled up its fans and booted into a Windows 2000 server installation. Now I just have to find a password reset tool that works on this hardware; that's the next step. At the time, I was happy just to find that it's operable.
It's a dual PIII Xeon 700Mhz machine with 2GB of RAM. Beyond that, I just won two more processors for it on Ebay that will make it a quad PIII. I don't know what I'm going to be doing with it at the moment, but Whenever I get to the point that I have some cool background process intensive apps to run on my webserver, I'll be all set. In the meantime, I'm looking forward to seeing how fast it will do things like crank out fractals and crack WEP codes.
Speaking of which, remembering a conversation I had with
evil_dwagon about how easy it is to crack WEP keys, it occurred to me that I should probably stop talking about such things like a poseur and actually learn how it's done. A quick search brought me to the guide on WEP security and cracking on a site that, while it was heretofore unknown to me, definitely bears some future perusal: Tom's Networking.I ended up burning a copy of an absolutely fantastic tool package contained in a bootable knoppix-based CD-ROM, the Auditor Security Collection. Loaded with innumerable interesting network utilities for both bounded and unbounded media, not to mention password utilities and other tools, this is invaluable for someone trying to learn a bit more about how the bits of a network under the surface work.
I didn't bump into the package until Sunday afternoon, but I was up 'till about eleven o' clock at night with it, learning how to hack my own wireless network. Neat stuff!
Of course, playing with all these Linux tools made me wish that I knew Linux a little bit better. I've done extremely little with it, apart from having tried installing it once or twice and never doing much else with it. So I asked Serinthia for her opinion on a good distro to start with and began downloading Suse 10.1. Which I then stopped downloading after the third disc because I got a phone call from one of our network admins indicating that I should really stop what I'm doing because if the head of the server team found out, he would be grumpy. It was stupid of me to not even consider that I might be clogging the network.
So instead, I VPNd to my home network, jumped on my server via VNC, and downloaded the last two discs onto that machine. Gotta
Oh yeah; I've started teaching myself Hiragana. Having finally fully cleaned up the computer room (did I mention I've finally got the computer room all clean?), I wanted to do something that would let me sit down and enjoy the space, so I popped in the Japanese instructional disc I bought at Goodwill a while ago. I soon found that I would either need the instructional booklet that had originally accompanied it (and that I was distinctly lacking) or a better knowledge of Japanese than I had.
I did another Google search (Google is entirely deserving of deification) and found The Japanese Page. Following along with the beginner's lessons there, I taught myself the first five Hiragana symbols: あ, い, う, え, and お, which are roughly equivalent in function and importance to English vowels. I'll see if I can get another five in my head tonight.
For some time I'd thought that I'd end up teaching myself to speak Japanese and end up learning the written form far later, if ever, so it makes me more than a little bit excited that I'm starting to learn the written form. I'm even planning to see if I can get
wooisme to come with me down to Mitsuwa to see if I can find any children's books written in Hiragana that I can pick up and practice with.Well, we're almost to Evil Bob's house, which means that I need to get into my car and give Serin a ride home. That's about all I have to say at the moment anyway, apart from the fact that I've had nine more hours that can each serve individually as a singular examples of why work sucks. I need another weekend.
*Storm curls up and tucks his tail under his head to rest for a few minutes and let the tension headache that began to make itself known around four o' clock begin to dissipate.*