I could post a whole page of links on this subject, I’m a woman in IT and its not easy. The women I know in the area will already have read all of them anyway, so there’s little value in that.
This one is for the guys. If you only read one of the why-don’t-women-join-tech-groups articles, read this one. Please?
http://www.devchix.com/2007/06/09/let
So today’s post is about a different bit of the house, the five day conversion of a store room:
to a party venue:
Yup, the big table has moved rooms and we easily sat eleven round it for takeaway and then a poker party :)
Well, we’ve been in the house almost four weeks and so far we’ve been flooded twice1.
Last Friday I headed down the stairs for my breakfast, to the kitchen which is in the basement. pitter … patter … splish. splash. splosh. I’m standing in about an inch of water, in the kitchen, at 8am, in my slippers.
We’re new home owners, we have no idea how to cope with this crisis. So I shouted upstairs for Kevin and together we started to mop. About 6 full buckets later, the level was definitely dropping but we still couldn’t figure out where it was all coming from. The water was clean, not soapy or muddy (or worse!) so we figured it was rain water as it had been raining very heavily for a couple of days. A check outside revealed that the well outside the kitchen window (which is sunken underground by about 6 feet) was filling up. So, in torrential rain, Kevin climbed in and bailed the muck, the water and the general rubbish out of this six foot deep hole until we found the drain. And then he bailed some more until it started draining. Really not fun. And of course by now we’re both hours late for work.
After that, we thought we had it sorted. The rain receeded, the water level fell and we found a wet-and-dry vacuum in the garage. We hoovered up the worst of it with that and left the dehumidifier running, and by the next morning it didn’t seem too bad. It’s not nice but nothing important got damaged and we thought with the drain clearing we’d solved the problem. It was upsetting and not fun but we’re home owners and we knew this came with the territory.
Last night, we had a friend staying over and we were in the kitchen when a thunderstorm started up about 10pm. Just as a precaution we picked stuff up off the floor in the kitchen and tripped out the electrics down there. At 3:30am Kevin and I were standing on the steps of the kitchen watching helplessly as the water literally approached us across the floor. Kevin tried to hoover it up but it just kept on rising and in the end we gave up at 4am as the rain stopped and the sky began to lighten with the dawn. By 7am there was definitely water in the kitchen but not lots, we think it had come up and gone down again before we got up. We’ve vacuumed it up now and left the dehumidifier running.
We’ve got a house with no damp proofing and it looks as if rather than a leak, the level comes up with the water table. Two floods in less than a week and the work to put the basement right costs a year’s salary. I’m not absolutely sure what we can do from here.
1 Not strictly true, we had an additional minor flood when the shower started leaking through the living room ceiling, but that’s minor in comparison. Although the repairs did involve gutting a portion of said ceiling and replacing the plaster board, and the room is out of action and has been for a fortnight.
Last week I learned a valuable lesson about backing up MySQL, it was this:
The thing with copying files is that if the mysql daemon is still running, there’s no guarantee that the physical files are up to date or even consistent. MySQL can do its own housekeeping whenever it would like to which means file write operations. It also keeps information in memory and will write it to disk at a later time to suit itself. The recommended backup method for MySQL is to use the mysqldump tool – more on that later.
Having had a server failure and discovered that file backups taken while the mysql server was running was all we had, I was unsure if we were going to get everything back. I did manage to recover the databases, by doing the following:
In the event we seem to have most things and to be honest that’s more than I dared hope. There are some corrupt tables but nobody can swear that they weren’t like that before so with a bit of luck we won’t make any nasty discoveries further down the line [1].
I’ve been doing some setup on the new servers and backing up what was salvaged from the old one. I’ve devised a simple loop which dumps and zips each database in turn, using a shell script. The code for the script is below:
#!/bin/sh
for i in `mysql -B -u root -e “show databases” | tail -n +2`; do
echo $i
mysqldump -u root $i | gzip -9 > mysql/$i.`date —iso-8601`.gz
done
Its nothing that isn’t used by sysadmins everywhere but its simple and it works for me so its here (for when I forget what I did!). This example writes a .gz file for each database into a folder called mysql in the same location as where you call the script from. You probably also need to add -p switches to both the mysql and the mysqldump calls unless you are running with no root password which is rarely a good idea.
I hope this is all helpful to someone; I know I learned some useful lessons this week!
1 I’d also like to point out that this was an internal server with little critical information on it and a backup routine that’s been running so long nobody can remember setting it up. Which isn’t great but its less bad that it might be.
Its the downstairs loo door – here are the photos of it from either side:
Can you spot the deliberate mistake?
The cross-piece bit that over hangs the door has been switched sides at some point, so that the handle and latch-lifting bits now don’t operate anywhere near the bit they’re supposed to. So if you go inside, and shut the door, …. then the latch drops and you are locked in!
Happily I’ve removed the hook for the cross-piece. OK so you can’t shut the door on the loo but at least you can’t shut yourself in :) Sing while you’re in there?
Some of you know this young lady and I’m sure she won’t mind me posting a little shot of where I was this weekend:
I’ve packed the camera as I’m away this weekend, so I’m sorry but a word-related house post is all there is for today.
We’ve got most of the furniture assembled now, or at least in the room it is destined for, and the process of unpacking begins. Remember that quite a lot of stuff has been in storage for 18 months. I’ve been entertained by some of the labelling on the boxes and though I’d share.
On the other hand, every box is labelled and dated, which makes me feel like I might be quite organised. There was a comedy moment when someone helping us unpack brought a box off a sainsburys dinner service and asked what was in it as we hadn’t labelled it … the answer is “the dinner service”!!
Here’s the offender:
And the “after” shot:
Ah, that’s better :)
So we’ve just moved into our new house – its quite large and the mobile signal is quite poor. We’ve got a wireless doorbell and can take the chime around the house with us which is very useful. We had not got round to screwing it to the wall yet so for the last few days its been hanging off the front door handle.
Yesterday, the doorbell rang and when I went to the door, the doorbell had been stolen!! Someone had walked off with it and was ringing it. That’s a really great welcome to a new neighbourhood, isn’t it?
I’ve been having fun over the last few weeks, writing about the fun things that you can do with Unix (see earlier articles about cowsay, fortune, mesg and go fish). This is the last in the mini series unless anyone has any other good suggestions for things that should belong here, and its MOTD or “Message of the Day”.
When you log into a unix box (or linux box, I’m using the term fairly indiscriminately in this instance) you will get a standard greeting message, usually telling you what kind of a system it is and adding a bit of a disclaimer. They aren’t very interesting messages but they are easy to change. Look at the contents of /etc/motd and you will see the text that gets displayed to a user on log in.
Traditionally this file is used by sysadmins to let users know of any changes that have happened or perhaps to warn of scheduled down time. However its also pretty usual to find something a bit more light-hearted there. My particular favourite is to add some ascii art as a welcoming banner to the user … what’s yours?