It’s been a while since I’ve posted something, but I haven’t really been doing much, besides maintenance at work.  As some of youu might know, we are busy  building/moving into a new server room at the office. The old one is from he 1980’s….

Anyway, the new server room gets it’s own 30kVA UPS and redundant Aircons, fire resistant floor, gas fire suppression, etc. The old one’s wires look like spaghetti and the aircon is a dodgy old self install  unit, probably purchased at DION’s…

As you can imagine this aircon barely keeps up with the heat produced by 7 servers…

So, Monday morning arrives, everyone is back from leave and all the girls in the office turns their heaters to full-blast. It wasn’t 10 minutes and the main circuit breaker tripped… It was a bit odd, but then I realized that there’s 5 x 20A circuits fed from a 60A mains breaker. Individually the circuits are OK, but together they’ll overload the mains. This breaker powered the aircon as well.

I was not in the office at the time and the IT guy sorted the power out, but forgot to restart the air con. He was quickly remined when the servers started shutting down… (I know this is terrible for a company our size, we are moving into a new server room… )

Anyway, since I work for the electronics miscellaneous department, it became my problem to install a temporary “Early warning system.” I’ve been designing the new UPS/generator backup system. (we purchased a 100kVA genset to power the whole building.) I was planning on installing a GSM modem/sms gateway to sms me the status of various things. (Eskom power fail, genset power on, Genset alarms, etc.) Everyone was in a state of panic and wanted a solution NOW, so I figured this was the ideal opportunity to get one of these toys ;-).

After picking it up, and a quick stop at Pick ‘n Pay for a 99c simcard and some airtime, I hokked it up to my laptop’s serial port and started playinf. It took me a while to remember all the AT commands, but withing 30 minutes it was setup. I shorted some of the alarm pins with a piece of solder and about 20 seconds later I got the SMS! I know that it was going to happen, I’m just always amazed at what our blobs of jelly can think of and make work. I discovered that the unit sends a SMS for an alarm state and when it returns to normal. Pretty cool!

It is only a temp solution, so I hacked an old PSU and a relay into a box with the modem and it was installed by 4:30pm. I tested it and again it worked like a dream. How do I know this? About 40 seconds after I urned off the Aircon’s power the IT guy stormed down the corridor to he server room…

I never thought I’ll blog about something like this, but yes, I installed MS-DOS 6.22 today.

We have an Amek Recall console at work. Amazing console, Rupert Neve pre-amps, Virtual Dynamics, etc. Long story short, one of the VD cards died. These parts are not available easily in South Africa, so we ended up buying an old written off desk. It arrived in Kit form. After we re-built it most of the parts seem to work OK.

Now the console uses a PC running an app under DOS6.22 to control the VD and recall functions. This is where the fun started. We have one PC for the original Amek. The plan was to make another duplicate of this machine to run the new console. (We were lucky enough to at least get the comms cable with the desk, so only a PC’s required.) I started off by digging up the oldest PC I could find in the IT department. I found an Intel 400MHz PII with 128MB RAM and the all important STIFFY drive. (The original PC is a 386)

After beg,steal and borrowing some stiffy disks from the Lighting department (they use it for HOG1000 consoles), I was ready to begin. I downloaded DOS 6.22 with a boot disk image. When I wanted to copy that onto the stiffy I soon discovered that my workstation’s does not work. I first thought it was the disks, but after formatting them in the other Amek’s machine I found 2 out of the 7 or so that was good I gave up on my drive. So I went from desk to desk looking for a working drive. After about 30 min and 6 machines, I found a working one on the opposite side of the building.

The DOS image is 3 disks. I only had two. OK, I figured two strolls accross the office couldn’t be that bad. I copied the images onto the disks and strated installing MS DOS.

Error reading source file. Abort, Ignore, Retry?

Yip, the first disk died.

I ended up walking accross the office a few times. Every walk I’d copy an image onto the disk, go and install it and then walk back for the next one. Luckly the Showtime software was only one disk.

Then I had issues with memmory, but Himem and memmaker is your friend

When I saw that blue install screen It brought back memmories from when I was in STD 2. It was frustrating, but in the end fun.

L