Cricalix.Net

Took last Friday off so I could get more work done on the house. Moved 1.5 tonnes of gravel with the help of a spade and wheelbarrow; sorted out the parking bay and all the gaping holes behind it. Got three quotes from estate agents, and had the place measured for carpeting. Did some touch-up work on gaps in the architraves, skirting etc.

Saturday saw the moving of Mum and Dad from the flat to their new house; 2 loads in a 3-ton van, and a bit of extra in the car. Unpacked stuff too. Fell in to bed.

Sunday saw more work on the house. Radiators are back on, but not yet tested. Rented a two-stroke powered disc cutter to chop the top off of some posts; hot knife through butter type effect. Wanted to use it to take a post out at the front of the parking bay, but it wouldn’t have been possible, and the post is bedded in several cubic feet of concrete. Therefore, the post got left in peace.

House painting is well under way, living room is done, back bedroom is done, hallway and landing are done.  Front bedroom, some architraves and doors, a closet and the kitchen remain - the front bedroom has had the undercoat done.  Representatives of 3 estate agents will be viewing the property on Friday to give me an estimate (and I’ll be getting their % costs etc), along with the carpet fitting company.  Need to order two 1-tonne bags of aggregate for the parking bay, put in a cement slab and cut out a post, and job done.

I hope.

I also ache from working on the property yesterday - building a surround for the gaping hole that is the upstairs fireplace, fixing some skirting board, fixing some broken flooring and general cleanup.  Couldn’t have done it alone though, had help from Mum and Dad.

Today, I had the joy of trying to troubleshoot why server A couldn’t talk to server B on port 5432. Packet traces on server A showed that the far end (or something in the way) supposedly said RST, ACK to any connection in the app server pool once that connection timed out. Packet traces on the far end showed no connection at all, so I decided to use telnet to test the connection.

-bash: telnet: command not found


So, given that telnet didn’t exist, I tried perl. Yep, perl exists. IO::Socket::INET exists too.

Code time!

use IO::Socket::INET;
$socket = IO::Socket::INET->new(PeerAddr => '10.151.2.1', PeerPort=>'5432', Proto => 'tcp') or die $!;
$socket->close();

That proved that I was actually getting connectivity to server B, so we were able to chase other avenues to solve the problem (and did - Sun’s app server has 3 ways of verifying that connections in the pool are working, and only one of them actually tests the network connection).

I’m currently looking at three screens on my desk. That’s not too unusual for a computer geek. What is cool is that I’m controlling them with one mouse and one keyboard, across two computers. I’ve mentioned this before, it’s a tool called Synergy2.

What’s even cooler though, is that I popped Word 2007 (which really isn’t bad for what I need to do, and the default document theme is quite nice) on to the 22″ display (which is hooked on to the back of the 12.1″ laptop for $work), and it promptly started displaying my document as two side-by-side pages. That’s just nifty. No idea if OpenOffice is that smart, never tried doing it.