Kool Aid Served Daily

Your results:
You are Spider-Man

Spider-Man 80% Hulk 70% Green Lantern 65% Iron Man 60% Catwoman 60% Superman 45% The Flash 45% Batman 45% Robin 42% Supergirl 35% Wonder Woman 25%

You are intelligent, witty, a bit geeky and have great power and responsibility.

Anyone who knows me right now would have picked Green Lantern. :>

I read a couple of web-comics daily - to make the list, it has to be consistently good. Well, a new comic just joined the ranks. It is A Miracle of Science.

In the year 2148, the biggest threat to interplanetary civilization is a plague of mad scientists. The Vorstellen Police were formed to track down and neutralize these threats to society using whatever technology they can bring to bear.

----192.168.2.108 PING Statistics----
3517 packets transmitted, 1926 packets received, 45% packet loss
round-trip (ms)  min/avg/max/stddev = 0.291/1.949/1004.311/39.549

It kinda says it all. I noticed I couldn't get mail, then that my PuTTy sessions to adept were hung. Using my troubleshooting skills, I knew it had to be the last thing I had done in my office. Except all I did was clean.

Okay, I could get some connection, but I couldn't do squat. And the box is now headless. I quickly established that I could ping it, but I did that from a Command Prompt, i.e., on my WinXP box. I shut down my Cisco 831 box (which sends a lot of VPN traffic) and logged out of my other VPN session to work. Still no joy. But now I pinged from a unix box and saw the packet drops.

Okay, time to get a head on that box. I've got adept in my office data closet. Now, remember I claimed that I cleaned:

Bonus points. The tube on the top shelf is a xmas present I didn't give to my wife. It was too sticky. But anyway, it should say "Block Up!", but it is turned just enough to say "Lock Up!". How fun! And does anyone recognize the only soft drink I've had in the last decade or so? It is the only stuff I'll drink and I rarely get it.

adept is the Shuttle SS-51G. It is next to the APC UPS and below slugo, the NSLU2. The external harddrive is soldier. If you peek just right back into the corner behind them, you can see the hole to the rest of the office. That is how I get power and cables back there. With no room for a monitor in there and not wanting to futz with a serial cable (need the head to configure it), I ran my video cable and USB cords from the desk next to it:

The printer doesn't have a name. Neither does that 5 port Netgear GigE dumb hub. You can see the lightswitch sized hole into the closet. I tried to get the video cables in. I had to call my wife in to help - the wall is thicker than before. :> Well, I let her leave before I tried pushing the USB cables through. I figured she might get testy if I called for more help - so I pushed an empty toilet roll tube through the hole and pushed the cables into it. It worked really well:

Anyway, I did a ctl-alt-bksp and the video started. By the way, the box had been up for 17 days. I did reboot it before all of this, remember that rebooting clears many sys-admin ills. The box was very responsive, the logs didn't show much. Pings were dropping 50% to the gateway router (janus).

Okay, I moved the cable from the GigE to another port on janus, no difference. I tried another cable over to the box, no difference. I rebooted janus, no difference. I then rebooted the Netgear box, big difference. I've got another one of those Netgears in the other data closet and it has been up since the last time my dad messed with the fuse box (I did shut all of my systems down first).

Grin, I didn't check the cable that went into the data closet, too much work to fix that.

If your logs don't show a problem, if both sides are up, then check every piece of network gear (which includes cables) between the two boxes. I'd also argue you should start a petition to your favortite BIOS provider to get serial console support into their systems. If this had happened in the other closet, I wouldn't have been as hosed. Well, yes, I would have - my portmaster is in there and I couldn't have gotten to it either. But that would have definitely told me it was the infrastructure and not my servers. So there.