17 days until Christmas and all is well. Had a nice weekend of relaxation intertwined with my latest technological struggle. Over the past few months I’ve had many complaints about network connections dropping off while connecting to our server. The problem is that, dispite the 1 gigabit network card and switches to ensure that up to 10 clients on the network get a complete 100mb/s to the server at once, there is still not enough reliability. Solution; Starfrit… errm… Distributed File System. It allows the share to be available nearly all the time because it’s in more than one spot. Technically it would solve my problem, so I decided to set it all up. No such luck though, my 100GB file share didn’t exactly replicate very quickly. Still going, only about 20GB done. My suggestion to anyone who’s planning on using file replication; don’t start it in a production environment, set it up first if you’re going to have more than 15 people accessing a share all day long.
Another thing I tackled today was my broadcast fax system. It uses ghostscript to convert the PDFs to g3 files which are faxable with mgetty+sendfax. PDFs are supposed to have true type fonts embedded in them but for some reason when you print from Word, it sometimes adds all these odd fonts that just don’t seem to be in the document. I was playing with ttf2pt1 which converts ttf files to pfb files which can be read into ghostscript through it’s Fontmap file which can be easily added to with a little toy called type1inst. It makes a new Fontmap file which you can cat into the existing one.
In less geeky news, Brianne’s out in the back riding Mylo this evening. I went out to play on the ice earlier. Fun stuff. Cricket’s not strong enough to pull me accross it though. That would have been cool. Maybe I need a sled.
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