File Server Blues
Working in technology usually means a fair amount of fixing stuff that’s broken. The advice of Roy and Moss from The IT Crowd is often handy: “Have you tried turning it off and on again?” Strong Google/DuckDuckGo skills and some free time are usually all you need to fix almost anything these days. I’ve really only had one situation in my tech career that had me stumped for a long time: bad networking at HSRA. That issue eventually got resolved with new hardware, but it’s a terrible feeling when technology doesn’t follow a logical troubleshooting process.
A week ago, another issue surfaced that may join the troubleshooting hall of shame. It started with a team member who couldn’t login to the file server on our office network over the weekend. With most of our staff working remotely, the on-premise file server is usually accessed via VPN, from both Mac and Windows clients. I connected from home and was able to see the file server (and thankfully all of the files) from my office iMac, but could not connect from my MacBook Pro. I find it useful to keep troubleshooting notes for future me, so please continue on if you’d like some nerd-tastic reading.
First new tickets in a long time
Rosalia by del Prado – we have so many great pizza options in Minnesota
Classic Zantigo
First ride of 2021: 22.5 sloppy miles along the river and through tropical St. Paul (47F!)
Finally crossed Mavericks off the list – the reality matched the hype, we will be back
Luna ❤️ BC Slots
Restaurant Week @SaintDinette – the Happy Meal and the cronuts 💯
Change in Saint Paul?!?
That’s me in the middle
One sleeve down
Squares Rule
Why is my head so big?
Now Paul is a real estate novelist, who never had time for a wife. And he’s talkin’ with Davy, who’s still in the Navy, and probably will be for life…
- Piano Man
Believe I have entered the “wardrobe by Crazy Shirts” phase of my life
Lombard Revisited
Today I needed to get from I-94 to Brake Bread on West 7th, so I exited at Snelling and headed over to the infamous Short Line. When I got to St. Clair, I thought, “why not swing by Lombard?” Lots of changes starting to appear at the two former family residences (more pics after the jump).
Twitter marketing 100% works on me
‘Tigo Fries and Chilitos
BANZA! Got 3 out of 6
Peak Duluth
Mid-week pizza treat from @bigriverpizza
Happy birthday, kid one ❤️
Lots of change in Prior Lake
Special delivery from kid one
This little man is a good boy
Been a while, Davanni’s
A Week of Gremlins
Experienced some weird technical glitches this week:
- The older of my two AWS instances just stopped running right after midnight one night. Uptime Robot notified me right away via email, but I didn’t see it until around 8am, so there was some significant downtime (relatively speaking). The instance restarted fine, but I don’t know what caused that (and Amazon didn’t notify me of any issues).
- I made one late night attempt earlier this week to move this site to my newer AWS instance, but had two issues: 1) my nginx virtual host config is apparently wrong, as it started sending requests to a different domain after I updated DNS and 2) creating a new Let’s Encrypt certificate failed (probably because the domain name didn’t match). Decided to just revert back for now and make another run at it later.
- The iOS WordPress app update this week seems to have now broken all functionality with this site. Before, I just had issues uploading featured images (they would upload to the media library successfully, but the app would never get a “finished” acknowledgement). Now it doesn’t even get that far. I’ll just post from macOS machines for now, but that’s a pain for mobile posting away from the house.
- My office workstation wasn’t set to automatically restart after a power outage, so it’s been off for a week. I have other machines to use at home, but that machine does my automated network share backups to the cloud, so I needed to get that issue resolved in person today. I went to check status when I returned home and initially couldn’t see it, but that turned out to be an issue with the DHCP lease expiring. All good now.
- Not a glitch, but decided to take a look at my Twitter settings tonight. Dropped some dead accounts (actually really surprised at how many accounts I follow that haven’t been active for 100 days or more), unmuted some people and started looking for a new profile picture. Twitter remains my last social media account – can’t decide if it stays or goes this year. Leaning towards keeping it, with a renewed focus on pruning and more active curation of what I mute and what I follow. Might go private too.
Thankful for a long weekend – stay warm, Minnesota peeps…
MyFishBurger
Nice job by @EdKroics and crew on flipping the field
Looks nice out (but really not)
Pitchers and catchers, a week from tomorrow
Shadows on the hills. Sketch the trees and the daffodils. Catch the breeze and the winter chills. In colors on the snowy linen land…
- Vincent (Starry, Starry Night)
65 Days to Go
The vintage Mäser has arrived
Late lunch or early dinner?
Noodles’ Sweetest Flip
Baron von Raschke
Peppy Pit Stop
Cheers to the staff in Tampa 🏈
Much ❤️ to the @MuccisItalian Fam: @cushy651 @debrouillard52 @tniver
Solid (not stellar) AT&T 5G
67-year-old American Utopia David Byrne might be the most impressive David Byrne
Well, damn, it appears that Mäser of Austria is no longer a thing
Guess who’s back, back again. Nive Man’s back, tell a friend
We’re blushing & blooming up
Hello again @tbtduluth
Celebration pizza 🍕
Coming Soon
No
Loaded Libby on the iPad, hooked it up to my library card; book one is 14 week wait, book two is 6+ months
My siblings know me
Excellent job by @joenayday at Carlson School 1st Tuesday – you’ve grown so much since “back in the day” @ChadAGermann
Streaming in 2021
In the not-so-distant past, I was very much an advocate for cord-cutting. Everyone likes to bag on the cable companies, but to be honest, the only real issues I’ve had with them my entire life are cost and channel selection. The former always goes up and the latter never seemed to include exactly what I wanted. Cord-cutting seemed to be the solution – just let me pay for the channels I want. Unfortunately, the TV provider also being the internet bandwidth provider makes it difficult to get one without the other. The last time we moved, Comcast basically offered me internet plus a bunch of channels for the same price as just internet (which also turns out to be a very good deal if you like live sports).
Today, I seem to have a bit of everything (and the amount I pay to Comcast continues to rise). I have an old AppleTV connected to our Sony set, which streams multiple services that I get billed for in addition to Comcast: Netflix, Hulu, HBO Max, Apple TV+, Disney+ and CBS All Access (which we just added so Colleen could watch The Stand). At some point, I need to catalog all of these accounts, see how much I’m paying in total and decide if we really get that much value out of them. In normal times? Probably not. During a stay-at-home pandemic? Likely a bargain.
Two Minnesota courses will host U.S. Open qualifying in 2021: Legends Club on May 4 and Medina on May 10
First time at Afton Alps since Vail bought them – @sushirocks and I had a nice, safe experience
Paulie Gatorade!
The little present to myself arrived today – thanks, @billamend
Pork Royalty in Saint Paul 🐖 👑
It’s like an apocalypse movie
IT’S HAPPENING – welcome to the neighborhood, Chef Facundo 🍕
Sqrel should totally be a winner
Nice.
American grocery stores are really pretty amazing
