Dysmey Blog Archives > linux box
Summer threaten to return, but a cold front gave it a swift kick. Now the fall weather promises to give us the driest Museum Days weekend in years. Something to look forward to.
My last visit to Fry's netted a small black case in which to put one of the new pico-ITX boards, a tiny power supply and a 2½" hard drive. Why? To create a Linux box that is small, powerful, yet out of the way. There is enough room for all the boards and other stuff: I made cutouts of the motherboard and hard drive out of black foamboard, and they fit comfortably inside the case. The tricky part is to make holes in the side panels for ports and power jack.
When this is finished (which I anticipate by Halloween) I will load Fedora 7 and make the box into a personal Web server. I can do a lot more Web projects on a Linux box than I can on my Windows box.
I have even thought up a name for the coming Linux box: Janovac, after a former student who used to hang around the Indiana Public Radio offices during pledge breaks.
The mother of a friend of mine from my book-stacker days in the Bracken Library had a stroke a couple of weeks ago. I did not find out until a week afterward after overhearing her co-workers talk about it. I visited her a couple of times since then. She seems to be doing okay, and she is in good spirits even though her right side is paralyzed and she can't talk. I have been doing a lot of talking, which is a reversal because when I visited her during her days at the library, she was the one who did all the talking!
I discovered the main source of trouble on the library iMacs. What I thought was an improvement to logging on and off the campus network turned out to be the cause of a lot of trouble. It was because I did not understand LDAP well enough to know that while dc=xxu,dc=edu is good, cn=users,dc=xxu,dc=edu is not better when the users list of thousands upon thousands of entries! Anyhow, I will get the iMacs fixed before Friday.
Meanwhile, I am working away at the proposed institutional repository. First, I installed the program. Then I got it to work well enough that people can put documents in it. The latest stage was mostly editorial, fixing instructional documents and arranging fields in the deposit workflow. There is one more major step I need to do, after which comes testing by actual users (faculty). The final step would be to load the repository onto a production server and make it available to the public.
My boss offered lunch to whoever could get the printers back on the workstation of one of my co-workers with the need to rebuild her workstation. It was a Windows print server failure, and I fixed it with instructions off the Microsoft site. My lunch is Monday.