New year and new beginnings, but before I kick off the new year I’m going to provide a quick look back at what happened during the year that’s passed.

• Fulfilled one of my childhood dreams and begun working for IBM.
• Bought a car.
• Decided I needed a drivers license and begun taking driving lessons.
• Found shopping at eBay and bought some cool stuff and a new server, IBM of course.
• Became a proud owner of a DEC PDP-11.
• Had the opportunity to see a DEC TOPS 20 at University of Uppsala.
• Thanks to my new job at IBM I had the honor to meet a bunch of IBM System Z mainframes in real life.
• Got acquaint with IBM AIX and IBM PowerSystems servers.
• Had one of the rooms at home become my computer collection room (a.k.a. the computer museum) .
• Bought an old Rital server rack for my computer collection room.

Well, that’s pretty much the interesting parts of my 2011 and I hope that 2012 takes on the challenge to top that. However there’s one thing more important than everything else, I managed to not scare away my fiance and my friends by being my crazy self. Since I had them drive me around and carry my heavy computers I’m grateful they haven’t told me to fsck off.

As supposed even I have a few new years resolutions, some more private than others. Two I can share with all of you is that I’ll be working hard to get my drivers license and the other is the same as I have given every year for a long time and that is to learn something new every day.

At last, but not least I want to wish you all a Happy New Year!!!

I’ve been working on moving all my computers to one room where I can play around with them. It’s almost finished now and all computers and network equipment is in there, but nothing is hooked up to anything yet. That will have to be a later project. Here’s a sneak peek on my computer room, and don’t forget to check out the gallery for all pictures.

See full gallery album here: http://www.linuxchick.se/gallery/computer-room/

Today we had an entertaining and exciting afternoon at work. Yesterday I did the last check about data migrated from our old SAN and today some of my co-workers decided it was time to get it out of the data center. Some short info on the SAN: it’s an IBM TotalStorage Enterprise Storage Server 800 a.k.a IBM Shark SAN, it provides the enormous amount of 6(!!!) TB of disc space and it’s HUGE. See for your self:

I’m relived and lucky that no person at all got hurt, but I can not promise you that the SAN is still fully functional. However it wouldn’t surprise anyone if it was, it’s an old IBM giant steel monster.

For more pictures take a look at http://www.linuxchick.se/gallery/ibm-shark-san/

It’s been a long long time since I wrote my last blog entry. Frankly, I don’t find myself a very interesting person and I certainly don’t have any interesting to blog about. I just do the ordinary boring stuff every day like go to work and study. Well, not that I think anyone still reads this blog by now but I could write about just that, my ordinary boring life. Except that I just don’t get why people do that, why would you tell the world about all the boring and plain stuff you do every day? Who is interested in that?!

What I find even less interesting and actually a bit frustrating is people that have a blog and never post anything on it. Yep, that would be people like me. At this point I’m considering to just delete my blog forever or if I should bother to try posting something interesting or at least somewhat entertaining a bit more regularly. Since my website would be even more boring if I didn’t have a blog that’s a pro for keeping it, the con on the other hand is that I don’t have anything interesting to blog about.

I could blog about things like that Ubuntu 10.10 was released today, but mostly everyone I know that got a blog are doing just that. More interesting could be to try it out and blog about it, but wait a few hours and the same people that bloged about the release will have that subject covered as well. I guess people find that interesting to read about and I don’t blame them, but myself I’m a RHEL/CentOS/Fedora user who don’t find it very interesting to read about new releases. Oh okey, I admit new RHEL releases is a bit interesting to read about. A side from that, why does everything seem so utterly boring and uninteresting to blog about? Could it be that everyone else already did or is it because they already know?

If we, for now, assume that I will keep my blog and I want to write about things that would interest not only my nearest and dearest. Assuming that the possible topics are within the categories about me and my life, computers or all of the above. What would you find interesting to read about from my point of view?

I’ve realized, the hard way, that there acctually is something like to many servers. Soon after i pulished my gallery my AC in the computer room broke and it became VERY hot, VERY quickly. Now barely half of the servers are back online and that’s how it’s going to have to be until I find some co-location.

I’ve been looking into a few different options when it comes to co-location, but of course the best thing would be if I could have my servers at my work. If that’s not possible I have a few other options that are up for discussion, until then let me know if you know where to get a sweet deal on co-location in Stockholm, Sweden.

Unfortunately I can’t keep the servers at home as I would like to do, happy servers means a happy Amelia. :)

Today I’ve been re-arranging my servers in the computer room, installed an AC to keep them cool and changed my small Cisco Catalyst 2940 to it’s bigger friend Cisco Catalyst 2950. As you always do when you’re going to move your servers and change switch I planned to get rid of that horrible cable mess that suddenly appeared from nowhere all around your servers.

All into my idea of a perfectly looking computer room without this cable hell behind the servers I did shutdown every computer in the room, including the one with over 500 days of uptime, even though it did hurt a little bit inside me.

After a few hours of moving servers around, pulling out and pluging in of cables I’m finaly done and my computer room does have a lower temperature, the servers that needs it is hooked up for the UPS and another cable mess, atleast it’s a slightly more stylish cable mess. :)

More and larger images of my servers can be found at http://gallery.linuxchick.se/album/3

Here are my new sweethearts that are going to run CentOS. I brought them home yesterday and today after some re-arrangements of the harddrives I’m ready to install them. They’re going to take care of everything my poor P3 700Mhz with 312MB ram has been doing for about 2 years, which is everything from MySQL databases to Nagios monitoring system.

A short specifications on these cuties are:

forth: HP DL 380 G2, 2x PIII 1,266 Ghz, 2GB RAM, 6x 18.2 GB hdd

perl: HP DL 380 G2, 2x PIII 1,266 Ghz, 2,5 GB RAM, 6x 9.1 GB hdd

draco: HP DL 360 G2, 2x PIII 1,4 Ghz, 2 GB RAM, 2x 18,2 GB hdd

dibol: HP DL 360 G2, 2x PIII 1,4 Ghz, 2 GB RAM, 2x 18.2 GB hdd

pascal: HP DL 360 G1, 2x PIII 1 Ghz, 2 GB RAM, 2x 9,1 GB hdd

prolog: HP DL 360 G1, 2x PIII 1 Ghz, 2 GB RAM, 2x 9,1 GB hdd

I’ve found the love of my life on IRC. Thanks to our friend vacum I ended up in #data.se @ FreeNode where I found this cute geek. He’s the most wonderful geek and so far he seems to put up with all my strange ideas and projects. There’s only two not so good thing with him, one is that he lives 483,5 km (~300 miles) away from me in Gothenburg and the other is that he loves his Mac, but at least one of them is possible to change.

You’ll find Eric’s blog at www.emj.se.

It’s been a little more than a month since I resigned as Chairman for Svenska Linuxföreningen (The Linux Society of Sweden) at the annual meeting and since then I’ve been thinking about what to do now. I’m a very restless person and I need a project to work on or a dream to work towards to feel happy. Since sometime in high school I’ve been dreaming about working with Linux in business critical environment and tomorrow I’ve been doing so for exactly two years. I love my job and I wouldn’t change it for anything in the world, but I need a new challenge – a new long term project to work on. I’ve set my goal to become one of the best in Sweden at administrating Linux and open source systems on IBM midrange/mainframe hardware.

I’ve got the time and the interest, but no matter how much money I save I’m not even close to my own IBM server and my search for someone that has one they don’t need continues. In the meantime I’m not just going to sit around and wait, I’m taking up an old project of mine that’s been put aside for a while.

In February 2007 I published the first version of my book Fritis Datorkunskap A which is a textbook for course in basic computer knowledge at upper secondary school here in Sweden. The book has only been published in Swedish and i doubt that it would be translated to any other language since it follows strict rules from Skolverket according to what subjects are brought up in this book. More specificaly the book brings up what a computer is together with a little history about computers and Internet, how to search and how to behave (netequitte) on the Internet and introductions to office applications such as the OpenOffice.org suit and the Mozilla products Firefox and Thunderbird.

In November 2007 I released a new version 1.1 which contained some clarifications and spelling correction. I’ve got some feedback during these one and a half year as the book has been online, but not as much as I was hoping for. Anyhow, since the OpenOffice.org project is working hard on release 3.0 I’ve decided to upgrade my book so it’s compatible with OpenOffice.org 3.0 when it’s released.The book surely needs a face lift with new front page, click-able table of content and new screenshots.

Aside from being compatible with OpenOffice.org 3.0 and look better than ever the version 2.0 will most likely be written in LaTeX instead of OpenOffice.org because of it’s ability to convert into a lot of handy formats. Another thing is that I’m giving up on GNU FDL and consider a BSD-like license instead. If you have any useful input on the license subject feel free to comment this article with your opinion or send me an e-mail at amelia {at} linuxchick {dot} se.

Does your company have an old IBM iSeries or zSeries with the POWER processor architecture that’s not in use anymore? I’m looking for an IBM iSeries or zSeries to have at home to learn about how to virtualize Linux or IBM hardware. If you have one you don’t need anymore or if you know someone who does, would you consider giving it away to someone who wants to learn about it’s hardware and systems? .

I already have one IBM AS/400 with the 48-bits CISC-processor from 1993 running OS/400 V3R5 that was given to me in 2004 from a company where my dad was working at the time, my most grateful thanks to them. Now I look forward to combine the knowledge I’ve gathered from working with both Linux and IBM hardware to take the next step and learn how to virtualize Linux on IBM midrange and/or mainframe with the POWER processor architecture.