Well, I'm finally done with all my Christmas (wait, is that word banned here?) shopping, and as a result, I just had to pay a pretty hefty credit card bill. But that's ok, since igxglobal gave its employees a nice bonus for the holidays.
I took the time the other night to upgrade my webserver to FreeBSD 5.3-STABLE from 5.2.1-RELEASE hoping that it would fix the oversized framing errors with the rl driver (see previous post). The upgrade went smoothly, with only a couple minutes of down time for reboots, but failed to address the rl driver issue. This seems to indicate a potential problem in the NIC's transceiver or the port on the NETGEAR switch that powers the lab. I might consider switching to the onboard Broadcom BC4401 NIC. However, the driver for this device (bfe) presented major problems in the past, but might have been cleaned up for 5.3-RELEASE. I'll worry about this later.
In other news, I tried to add a couple of fans to my file server, and had quite a scare when LVM failed to find three out of four of the physical volumes (physical drives, in this case). I bitched on IRC, and dilinger help me realize this was a bug, so I filed a bug report against the package, and then downgraded lvm2. Then I installed my fans, and now my case looks a little freaky in the dark.
Also, in a little over a week, I'll be flying down to Sarasota, Florida to spend some quality time with parents and grandparents. Considering the crappy weather we've had over the past week, some nice warm weather will be a welcome change. Knowing my luck, though, I bet I'll miss another white Christmas in New Jersey, just like two years ago. Ah well.
