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ADMINISTRIVIA: I must be crazy!!!!!!!

Hello weather.admin.niu.edu users,

It is now 10:50 PM Friday night as I type this up in my office on the 6th 
floor of Davis Hall. And I can't believe what has happened.

I went nuts tonight. No, not mentally--I went "there" years ago. ;-) No, I 
did something crazy in the office tonight. Something I've never done 
before.

You see, the new "weather.admin.niu.edu" came in yesterday, in the form of 
a Pentium 4, 3 GHZ, 2 GB RAM machine that will hopefully carry us through 
the next 3 years or so as our primary web server. This would allow us to 
have a weather3.admin.niu.edu machine again for routing email bulletins 
(the old weather3 died a few months ago). I decided tonight to see if I 
could set it up. I originally was going to do this next Wednesday, but 
since the weather looks bad for next week, I decided to "go for it" 
tonight. I asked Dave Bukowski, the network administrator for the College 
of DuPage, for help on the phone, which took about an hour and a half, 
since I have never done this before: taken a machine, clone it to a new 
machine, then make the new machine think it's the old machine...and 
making the old machine think it is something else. After Dave gave me 
lots of pointers, I went to work once I learned what I had to do.

6 hours, nonstop of copying files from the old "weather" to the new 
"weather". Reconfiguring printing, scripts, etc. And I think---minus 
minor printing problems from weather3.admin.niu.edu---everything seems to 
work now, including email, as of 10 PM tonight.

If you experience ANY trouble with your accounts now, please let me know. 
All email was backed up and stopped before the switch, so you should have 
lost nothing. As of right now, you can log in on weather3 using the 
account you have on weather...they are mirrors of wach other. BUT, email 
is only accumulating on weather3 only if it is sent directly to weather3 
(say, address@hidden). I have rigged it so that all email 
to me on the old machine bounces to my new machine.

On Monday, weather3.admin.niu.edu (the old "weather.admin.niu.edu") will 
once again become our official server for routing weather bulletins and 
forecasts to (Jason Starke and myself are the only ones who need to conern 
themselves with this minor detail---we'll be sending the bulletins to 
address@hidden, instead of address@hidden 
like we do now, where listname is the name of the list, like "forecast" 
or "weekend").

So, there you have it. I'm going home now for dinner. It's 10:56 PM. And 
all is well. And yeah, I guess I'll have to call NIU's ITS department to 
let them know of the MAC address changes, for you computer geeks who know 
what I am talking about.

I must say, the new weather is speedy. At 10 PM tonight, when the "load 
average", or how busy the machine is, is normally right around 6.00, or 
600% on the old weather...it was only .66, or 66% on the new "weather". 
We will STILL peak, my estimate, around 150%, on busy "storm" days, on 
this Pentium 4 bad boy. THAT should tell you how much traffic I get here!
But at least now everyone will be able to get through to my site once 
again on busy days here! And the emails will flow to our lists more 
timely. Thanks to all who assisted in making this a reality! We really 
needed this to keep our system working.

Good night,

Gilbert

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Gilbert Sebenste                                                     ********
Internet: address@hidden    (My opinions only!)                     ******
Staff Meteorologist, Northern Illinois University                      ****
E-mail: address@hidden                                 ***
web: http://weather.admin.niu.edu                                      **
Work phone: 815-753-5492                                                *
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