New Toy!
The new toy is a 3.5" 160GB PATA Maxtor hard drive, inside of a new brushed aluminum USB2 enclosure. The photo does not say much. The enclosure is hardly larger than the drive itself. This USB2 stuff is decently fast too... rsync-ing my MP3 collection was relatively fast:

wrote 3720589301 bytes read 13860 bytes 12464332.20 bytes/sec total size is 3720080570 speedup is 1.00

In other news, first day of work was nice, though I am currently overwhelmed by the summer-long project. Also, ordering power supplies from Nortel is surprisingly difficult.

May tomorrow!

Hack of the Month
Today started out great. The weather was fantastic, I was rested. Took the laptop out on the deck and started working away at finishing Celestia/Gnome. It's definitely ready to go out now. The perfect onion in the photo contributed to a delicious lunch. But the real fun started in the evening.

The Evening Story
The connection to the EngSoc machines was down. At first, it appeared that Carleton was down, but then that came up. I could even access other EngSoc machines not on the main subnet, but the core machines were definitely not reachable at 23:00.

There were three options: fire, UPS failure, or router-machine failure. Upon arriving at the office, I noticed all the machines were running, the router was misbehaving in terms of network interfaces; restarting networking on it seemed to help, but actually did nothing.

The next step was to turn my attention to the back of the rack. Immediately I noticed that every LED on the main Nortel BayStack switch was lit up, and very, very dimly: "shit."

I unplugged everything, took it to the workbench, plugged it in: still no good. I opened it up, nothing seemed torched. "Power supply? Maybe. But where am I going to get a 5.0V 4A supply at this time?"

I decided the best bet was to try to rig up some of the Linksys and 3Com wireless routers, each with 5 ports or so on the back, and maybe get minimal services back up. As I was about to do this, it hit me that they use 5.0V 2.5A power supplies! Sure enough, a D-Link power supply made the BayStack work just dandy with no load. Indeed, the original BayStack power supply smelled quite charred.

I considered for a while just using the D-Link power supply, but with the switch fully loaded, I worried it would overload. That would make everything bad happen again and cost a power supply. So, I started thinking how to run two of them in parallel. Too much work, far too delicate without a good supply of solderable plugs.

As all this was being considered, an old AT power supply caught my eye. Hm. Perfect! The label even says +5.0V 5A.

In the end, I found a wire and plug that was already severed from a dead 12V power supply, shoved some solder into the plug's hole to make it about the right size for the BayStack, shoved the stripped its leads into the holes for the red and black wires on the power supply, moved all this into the rack, plugged all the network cables back in... you know, it works!

That's the story of a Pat Suwalski solution. It is 01:28 and I shall go to bed now. First day of full-time employment in the morning.