Wednesday, October 13, 2004

bginfo

Drew found a fantastic little application from sysinternals called bginfo. Its job is to write useful and/or important information about your machine onto you desktop background. It has the capability of extracting information from the Windows registry, from WMI, from files and from a VBScript script.

We're thinking of using it at Rhodes to display information that's commonly requested by the helpdesk, but usually involves lengthy instructions to get. Some examples of things like this are the computer's MAC address, IP address, processor, etc. I'd also like it to display the computer's asset number, which involves fetching data from a database. This necessitated my quickly learning enough VBScript to fetch a web page. I hate VBScript.

posted by guy at: 14:18 SAST | path: /systems | permanent link

Tuesday, July 13, 2004

Powercuts suck

We had a town-wide powercut for about forty minutes today :(

We had the electricians in our machine room at the time installing some new emergency lights, and so got to test one of them within minutes of it having been installed.

Unfortunately power cuts always mean work. In today's one, two machines suffered badly. The first was our voicemail server, the second was the software library machine. Both had serious disk objections to the power failure.

While the power was out, we noticed another little orange light on the mail server. We've lost a second disk in the raid array in two weeks. I'm not sure why, but I suspect this is bad(tm).

Anyway, all this got me thinking about how much we're dependent on power these days, and how a relatively small power outage creates an disproportionate number of problems, particularly for the computer side of things.

When did the world become this dependent on the flow of electrons? When did the flow of electrons become more important than the flow of water? Or is it? We need water to make electricity and electricity to get water to us. It is a sort of cycle, kind of the carbon cycle or water cycle. What do we call it? The hydroelectric cycle or something :)

Maybe I only become philosophical about things like this when I can't have coffee because there is no hot water ...

posted by guy at: 16:44 SAST | path: /general | permanent link

More on an Internet Exchange for Grahamstown

Today has seen two useful developments on the GINX front.

posted by guy at: 16:36 SAST | path: /systems | permanent link