Month: May 2005

New York Language Center

While we around Dr.Simos Kitiris office, I noticed a small office with a strange sign above its doors. It said: “New York Language Center”. I giggled. I mean it’s really funny. In the country that inheritted English language from the British Empire, there is this little language center which teaches you, no, not English… not even American, but New Yorkish.

You’ll probably have to take a couple of weeks of courses, learn some brooklynisms, find out how they call places, and than have to pass an exam. Or I don’t know what they are doing…

Three month

Three month. One quarter of the year. It is almost ubelievable how much time is in three month. Maxim is three month old today. I try to remember things that happened within the last three month of my life and I have only few blurry images in my head for all days except for today. It’s a good thing I keep blogging and photographing. This way I can go back to my memories much easier.

He’s growing so fast that sometimes I want to measure him three times a day. He learns a lot of new tricks every day. He tries new sounds. He attempts new facial expressions. He looks at more and more things around him. Things that we were gladly jumping about one week ago are a daily routine today.

We took him to pediatrician today for his three month check. We decided to stick with the simple vaccination plan and not give him any extras, so he has a vaccination day off today. His weight and size were measured. He weights 6600 grams and he is 63 centimeters long. These measurements confirmed out observations of his growth – he gained about a kilogram of weight in the last month. His measurements are closer to the upper (or maximum) curve rather than minimum or medium. He’ll probably be bigger than most of his peers. A bunch of other things were checked and everything appears normal and develops as planned.

Dr.Simos also made an appointment with nephrologist for 11th of July. He explained how to find the Makarious Hospital and said that during our next visit scheduled on 23rd of June, he’ll give us a directing paper for the registration there. Nephrologist should observe and investigate Maxim’s kidneys and shred some light on how serious his condition is and what are the positive limitations in his life (although Dr.Simos said that there will hardly be any).

30th Cyprus Internation State Fair

30th Cyprus International Fair opened its doors for visitors on May 20th. About 280 companies from 25 countries will be displaying their products until May 29th. The range of goods is really impressive: furniture, building materials, plastic products, mattresses, solar energy systems, foodstuffs, pumps, travel goods, baby items, aluminum products, industrial machinery and equipment, electric domestic appliances, cars, telecommunication equipment, sanitary ware, tools, spare parts, kitchenware.

The Fair will take place at the usual location – Cyprus International Fair in Nicosia. Open hours are daily from 18:00 until 23:00. On Saturday the Fair is open from 18:00 until midnight. On Sunday – from 18:00 until 23:00 again. Tickets are very reasonable priced at 2.50 CYP for adults and 1.00 CYP for children and students.

You can find more information about the Fair at its official website.

Finding uptime on Windows 2000 machines

I tried to check the uptime on some of our Windows 2000 servers, but discovered that there is no such command. Neither there is utime or anything alike. Puzzled I turned to Google and found this article.

In short, I had to issue net statistics server command. The first line of the result says something like “Statistics since ” and than provides the date and time the machine was started. Figuring how much time has passed since that date is trivial with Perl and Date::Calc module.

Uptime records

It’s been a while since I checked uptime on few servers that I manage at work. And by “a while” I mean “a while“. Here are five records for you to be impressed.

ldap-master – this server has a pretty easy life. It is a master node of our internal LDAP cluster. All it has to do is answer the queries of about 20 other servers and a couple of web applications.
```
[leonid@ldap-master leonid]$ uptime
2:39pm  up 462 days,  9:19,  3 users,  
load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
```
news – this server is under bigger load constantly. It runs as a slave of our internal LDAP cluster. It hosts one of the havier used web applications with database backend. It also runs a news-mail-news gateway, which allows employees to read and post to several heavy mailing lists via a single subscription.
```
[leonid@news leonid]$ uptime
2:40pm  up 455 days, 10:59,  1 user,  
load average: 0.11, 0.03, 0.01
```
devzone – this is our main development server. About 20 people are constantly using it. It also hosts one of our RT ticketing systems, as well as a few other web applications. There are also a few processes running in test mode.
```
[leonid@devzone leonid]$ uptime
2:44pm  up 404 days, 13:12, 11 users,  
load average: 0.07, 0.06, 0.00
```
gorilla – our main file server. It hosts homes for more than a hundred users. It also has a bunch of file areas accessible via FTP, NFS, and Windows file sharing (SMB). It also hosts mirrors some mirrors of apt repositories and even Tucows. Some of it is also used for network backups.
```
[leonid@gorilla leonid]$ uptime
2:46pm  up 394 days, 10:36,  2 users,  
load average: 0.00, 0.01, 0.15
```
backupsrv – this is our backup server. It is one of the most heavier used servers on our whole network. It is responsible for backup and restore of about a hundred hosts and devices. Most of these are done on the daily basis. This server gets most of its reboots from the SCSI equipment errors.
```
[leonid@backupsrv leonid]$ uptime
2:51pm  up 284 days,  6:55,  2 users,  
load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
```

I checked uptime on several other hosts and all of them are either approaching one year, or passed it already. All of these hosts are running some version of Red Hat distribution. Versions vary from Red Hat Linux 6.2, through Fedora Linux Core 3, to Red Hat Enterprise Linux ES 4.