For the first time ever, I’m actually enjoying all of the classes I’m taking. You would think this is would good thing. Unfortunately, reading all of the assigned scientific papers, journal articles, and textbooks, coding, managing a small team of developers, and living with five of my best friends has taken time away from personal projects that I’d like to peruse.
The Xen thing took off nicely, but crashed. Not literally, it ran fine, but I had issues dealing with networking as doing things outside of the standard operating procedure (SOP for you home-gamers) isn’t horribly well documented. I had wanted to create that documentation, but then the semester started. I’ve been feeling a need to want to start again, but I am now adverse to doing it on babbage, my Linux desktop. That said, there is no glory in not taking a risk.
I got into IBM DB2v9-C for a while, with a desire to learn it thoroughly before starting my job next August. I got to through the relatively painless installation and slightly less obvious configuration and it runs well. DB2v9 has some good tutorials and excellent documentation support it, encouraging me to pursue this learning project. But, this stopped.
Then, a professor who is an IBM distinguished engineer pointed me towards a contest that IBM is running called Master the Mainframe. IBM gives entrants a mainframe ID on a z9 located in Poughkeepsie and issues a sequence of challenges in three parts to get them to learn their way around z/OS, ISPF, and other mainframe technologies. I learned more in the first 1.9 parts than I have from any class in the same time period (three days). I originally entered because I wanted a t-shirt with a mainframe on it (awarded after the first part), but I continued with the contest out of curiosity for something novel. Then I realized I had a lot of work to do and stopped.
Finally, Horde. I quit my (ex-)unix systems job at CUIT and am no longer paid to write small Perl scripts and hack bug-fixes and new features into IMP. I’ve been making Matt angry by not being able to dedicate as much of my time as we’d like.
Curiosity may have killed the cat, but ambition is time-consuming.
The last few messages left in /var/log/samba/log.smbd referred to trying to find CUPS: "cups server left to default localhost" and "Unable to connect to CUPS server localhost - Connection timed out". I don't use CUPS since I don't have a printer and the service was not active.
Why would it hang on connecting to a service that doesn't exist? For kicks, I started up CUPS without any defined printers to see what would happen to SMB. No luck, smbd still hung at exactly the same place.
