26-Feb-2005

Yet some more updates...

Venus and Athene have their updates - quite a few (again) - where applying them went smoothly but Athene now has a problem with one service...Which one, is unknown, it does just tell SVHOST cannot be started - but that's a general one and which one is now missing ????
Could be the one for wireless since that one gave a message on Thirsday - after the update....

Got the patch alert from HP, another VMS patch to be applied - a basic one of all drivers (the fisrt one in 2 years) and got that from ITRC - and found there was one more (for LINKer). Applied both them which required a reboot because of the new drivers.
Had a lecture on Advanced Server last week, found where I made the wrong settings. Updated the configuration (actually: redid it) but nor Venus, nor Athene is able to get into the domain.....To find out, why. Settings on XP and AS are conform the specs. Will ask, it's a requirement for development (well, more or less, can do without, butv it would be nice if I could do it from Athene (Venus is quite likely not able to handle it)

I now have a contact that uses Yahoo - and that's one of those locked out domains. Putted this address into the Allowed List so the messages do come through.

Received the VMS licenses so Diana will run up to March 2006.

20-feb-2005

One more patch to VMS - "to be installed by all customers" - has been applied, which required Diana to be rebooted. Took the opportunity to install a new version of RdB as well, and SQL-services (SQL*Net for one) and the JRDBC driver. Not any problem - the system was up and running within 2 minutes (includeing shutdown).

Take that to Venus and Athene - it may take up to 5 minutes to reboot them - and both are now "optimized"....(I have no idea what takes them to take over a minute to shut down - especially Athene takes her time to shut down).
Startup takes a lot of time as well - when Virsu scanner requires an update, Venus is hardly usable for about 5 minutes! Not download strips her performance, but installation....
Well, it's just once a week, but always when I want to do something. Augh....

VMS licenses for Diana - valid up to March 2006 - have arrived, to be installed this weekend. Current ones expire on 28-Feb.

15-Feb-2005

Updated the webs - minor, but still.... Put a link to SYSMGR blog on the OpenVMS page, have the whole lot (at least - what has been changed since last October) back to Diana. I did have a complete environment on Athene but deleted it - expecting I had the whole web on Diana. Alas - not true! So I had to caopy is all back, to have a correct environment for further development!

Oops....

Venus is still causing weird problems with the keyboard. Once in a while it freezes; repeating arrow keys lock text selector (to be freed using Shift...) or lock up Capslock - including the shifted keys on the top row. I don't know where that bahaviour comes from. Perhaps it's the KVM???

This week new licenses should arrive for Diana. Cross my fingers....

For the rest no problems apart from the usual spam attempts, attemps to push files onto the server and the occasional connect attempt. No, not really problematic. These all to no avail - of course, thanks to Diana's near-to-perfect Operaring system!

10-Feb-2005

Time for some updates
Exchanged ZIP drive in Venus with a spare disk (a small one : 2,4 Gb) to contain the page file and cache - that makes a difference! Loosing the ZIP drive is not really a problem, could put that in Diana as a backup medium (for small amounts, since each disk is just 100Mb)?
Installed XP updates on Venus, On Athene all seems to be up-to-date - I don't get it, there should be updates as well????? Or did I miss an upodate on Venus? Probably because speed problems before - now partly solved, by that extra disk.
Updated Diana with latest patches ("To be installed by all customers" so there was no way to get around it) , reboot without any problem (I guess problems arise when power is cycled).
Installed new Java version (1.4.2-24) . Database (RDB) to be updated (7.1.4), downloaded it and related files, but installation is pending.

HERA has been put off-duty: too much trouble for installing Linux on that old box (actually impossible) and FreeBsd wasn't the real answer - same trouble, since the hardware was REALLY old and there was no further use for the machine...

Shame on me!

From the beginning, Charon and Mars are part of the configuration but they were never mentioned yet. If you know your classics, you may have guessed that Charon is the firewall and Mars the gaming machine (but I'll rename it since that is no longer the case. Have to find another female name from Greek mythology that fits it's multi-personality character)

For the rest: nothing special.

02-Feb-2005

Nothing really happened last month.
Some patches are to be applied to Diana (next weekend?).
Venus and Athene have their disk defragmented (using DiskKeeper) and their startup smoothed up - it really helped shortening up the time required to get the system up and running, especially Venus (which is effectively not really fit to run Windows XP...).

As usual, no problems for Diana. Even with 256 Mb it runs nicely and without supervision. There have been some attempts to push things onto the anonymous FTP site, some attempts to hook up to the website, virus-infected e-mails and numerous spam attempts, but, as ususal, I do not have to fear: all failed (as could be expected).