Last night was Shannon and I kind of celebrated our anniversary. It wasn't really our anniversary, but my gift to her were tickets for last night's performance of Chicago at the Ordway center in St Paul. I have to say I really liked the show, and felt so bad for Amos, the husband of Roxie (the lead girl). We were even treated to Luke Duke from the Dukes of Hazzard, Tom Wopat, playing the role of Billy Flynn:

They also had an interesting set where the orchestra took a large role by being on the back of the stage. The characters interacted with them on a few occasions, and it really helped highlight a component of shows that isn't often seen.

Before the show we ate at the Downtowner Woodfire Grill. From their site it states their menu is American Bistro with a touch of Persian, and I'm not sure what that means, but it was really good. Shannon had salmon, and I opted for swordfish. They're swordfish is prepared skewered over flame, and it was amazing. We both had garlic mashed potatoes and they didn't disappoint either. Throw on a couple glasses of wine, and it was a pretty good experience for the $90 we paid. I'd highly recommend it.

I finally got around to fixing an issue that cropped up when I created my 2006 folder in the gallery. What happened when I did that was all the old links pointing to stuff like:

http://sstorie.com/v/20061224_Xmas_Eve_at_Danettas/

...started failing because the link had now become:

http://sstorie.com/v/2006/20061224_Xmas_Eve_at_Danettas/

Well long story short, with a little mod_rewrite magic this is no longer a problem. Both links will get you to the right place.

I'm writing this from the server room at work while I wait for some patches to finish installing. Rosemount is testing the circuit breakers throughout the plant, which means power to the production floor is off until tomorrow morning. This gave us a small window to do some much needed server maintenance. I was expecting to be done by now, but murphy was alive and well tonight.

I had three things on my agenda:

1. Apply OS and Sybase patches to our primary database server.
2. Apply OS patches to our production file server
3. Apply a firmware patch to our StorEdge 3511 RAID array

Well #1 went smoothly and our databases are back up and running. I was planning on doing #3 next, but when I brought the server down it didn't want to boot up. We use the disksuite package within Solaris to mirror the root disk, and upon reboot the kernel panic'd saying "d2 is unavailable". On our machines, d2 is a submirror of d0, which is the metadevice representing the root mirror. So basically it was stating that one of the root submirrors was unavailable for some reason. But what was freaky is that rather than continue booting, it simply panic'd and rebooted (only to again panic and reboot...). I booted off a cdrom and did some quick fsck checks of both root slices, and saw no problems.

Realizing that I didn't want to spend all night trying to fix this I opted to disable the mirrors and just boot off the good submirror. This machine has been up for nearly two years so it's quite possible the mirrors were setup wrong somehow. This is really the first time we've tried booting off them since they were established. So I got the machine back up, albeit not in the state it started in...

I still wanted to get this firmware update on my RAID array, but this is not feeling too good now. Realizing I've been waiting nearly two years to get this installed I decided I better take advantage of this chance. So I started using Sun's s3kdlres script to do an upgrade from 327R to 415F. I did this last fall to a 3310 array we have over in China with good results. However, when this runs it complains that the SES firmware version we're running is too old. Upgrading that is pretty simple, so while I'm feeling worse, I decide to go ahead and do it. With that done I try again, only to have s3kdlres die with perl errors related to the expat XML parser it (presumably) uses. The script to upgrade the firmware puked. I don't know if this is related to Solaris 10 or not, but fuck it, I'm not messing with it tonight.

So I scrap my #3 goal, and go ahead with #2. I bring the Solaris 10 box back to single-user mode, and kick off the install_cluster script of the latest patch cluster. This is Sun's way of making sure patches are installed in the right order. However, I run into an issue where patch 118822-30 dies in the middle of its installation. It dumps a bunch of warnings and just hangs. Great. Luckily some nice people ran into the same issue and posted the solution. You need to run this one outside of the install_cluster script. No idea why, but I did and it worked. This happened again with patch 118833-24, but I got through the cluster and everything seems to be up and running.

Fun times on a saturday night ;)

Update:
I came back in Sunday morning to help make sure everything is working, and it appears to be. I rebuilt the RAID mirrors on our file server, putting our redundancy back into its pre-patching state.

I also came home last night to discover one of the mirrored root disks in my home system crapped out. Last night was not a good one for computers :(

The Lilacs Admit Defeat Hosted on Zooomr

...until this weekend when it's all melted.

It's hard to believe that Christmas has already come and gone. For us it's not quite over yet because we're heading to Marshall tomorrow to celebrate the with the Clark's. So come NYE we'll be officially done celebrating, but I thought I'd do a quick post about it all.

Our holiday started on Saturday when Brian and Suzanne came to stay the night at our place. We went out to Campiello's in Eden Prairie for some dinner. It was good food, but their prices are a little higher than we would normally pay. They also really pushed buying wine, which they wanted at least $40/bottle for, and dessert, which none of us wanted. It also took us nearly two hours to get in and out of there, which is a bit long on the waiting if you ask me. Despite the dinner it was great to see those two.

Christmas Eve started at our place with Shannon and I exchanging our gifts to eachother. I ended up getting a Tiffen UV filter and Opteka battery grip for my camera, which is actually a bit larger than I expected, but I think the grip will prove a nice investment. Later that day I also received the Canon 430EX flash. It's a huge improvement over the on-camera flash that comes with the Rebel XTi. So now my entire setup looks like this (sans the battery of course):

It's quite a bit larger and more intimidating than just the camera, but it produces very nice shots indoors. That afternoon we headed to my parent's place to celebrate with them. Then in the evening we headed to Danetta's place to celebrate with our other family. It was my first attempts at using the flash, and even though it worked quite nicely, there's a lot I need to learn.

Christmas day was spent at my Dad's side of the family. We mostly watched YouTube videos and caught up with people we hadn't seen since my Grandparent's passed away earlier this year. I did manage to get some shots of my cousin Tammie's two little kids. They're so cute!

Then on Christmas evening we drove down to Shannon's family to celebrate the holiday with them. We played a lot of games and enjoyed two delicious meals, and really just had fun. I ended up taking Wednesday off from work so we didn't get home until then. I wanted to get out and take some shots that day, but we were both just wiped after being away from home for a few days. I processed my holiday shots, did some post-xmas cleaning and relaxed.

So all in all it was a very nice Christmas weekend. This was the first year that I felt very fortunate as I took it all in. It sounds corny, but I just really liked that we have so many loving families to go visit, and that things are generally going very well. So here's hoping your holiday was also a great one! Now on to 2007...

This is a pretty cool application of time-lapse photography:

This was pretty good:

http://www.glumbert.com/media/consent

Shannon brought this guy to my attention a couple of weeks ago:

Matt Blum Photography

He's a professional photographer who does weddings and senior portraits. While his paid work is pretty sweet (judging by his online portfolio), what I really like is his photo blog (might be NSFW due to nudity). It's not very often you find someone with this kind of talent talking about different shots, especially considering the variety of content he photographs.

We both wish we found him before we hired our photographer for the wedding. However, his prices start at $3500.... yowza.

I don't know what my deal is lately, but this entire week has been a horrible one for getting a good nights rest. Right now it's 4:50, and I decided to crawl out of bed after waking up at 3:30 this morning. At least today is my holiday party at work, which means we play Unreal Tournament all day, so it's okay to be a little tired.