Waiting...

It sure seems like there's lots of little gaps between my classes this semester. Little as in, like, 30 minutes. Not long enough to walk back to my room, too long to meditate through. So, I sit in various places around campus, talk on IRC and IM, and post to LJ.

Currently, I'm trying to download a LaTeX program, so I can read the documentation for the LUG server. This is necessary because it crashed--again--last night. It appears that our frontend has bad caps on the motherboard, so we'll have to replace either the whole box, or at least the mobo. It's not too big a deal, actually, because NUXI brought up a bunch of old IBM Netfinity hardware a few weeks ago. It looks like we'll be using one of the 5600's for our frontend, and the two drive boxes for storage. The current backend will stay that way, and we may bring the old backend online again if we can find a decent power supply that will power all the drives we want in it. Currently, the PSU in it is only rated for 220W, and we want like twelve drives in there. Also, we need another power splitter.

Anyway, back to the file. It's only around a 560MB file. I know, only, eh? See, /me is used to downloading Linux ISOs, which tend towards the 680MB range. So, I'm downloading this file while connected to Rovernet, which may be part of the problem, but it's coming down at 5.5KB/s...grr...'specially since, while I was helping Dark and Christian work on the server last night, I was trying to download the same file from the same mirror...at 200+KB/s. The reason that failed was that, at around 22:10, the border router dropped off and thus connections to the outside world disappeared until 22:35. At which point I basically said, "Screw it," and pushed it off until tomorrow (ie, today). That was a mistake, apparently.

So, I stopped riding my bike, because I decided that it would be better for the future operability of said item if I put it into storage now. I haven't decided whether the derailleurs aren't working due to ice or rust. I'm hoping that it's ice, because that will be easily fixed...rust, not so much. Of course, this means that I will have to walk up to the ATDC tonight after EE lab ends at 18:00, and walk back down to Wads G04 by 21:00 for the PSG meeting. Why do I have so many organizations I belong to?

Hmm...still waiting. And the file is only 4% done. Bugger. Well, I can always set up another of my many server accounts to run IRSSI, so if my desktop goes down over break, and some tragedy hits MTU and decimates some of the servers, I will still be able to talk on IRC. Actually, I probably ought to do it on isis, because that's the off-campus one. Yay! I know what to do for the next ten minutes!

Yay! I now have four (count them, four) instances of IRSSI running on various computers around the Midwest. I will not be disconnected from IRC! Of course, that begs the question of what to do now...

5% on the file...I hate to hibernate now, but maybe I can get a different server if I retry the download. /me hopes and crosses his fingers.