No DICT for you!

For some strange reason, I’ve been unable to access dict.org for the last week or better. DNS queries are returning the correct information, but the trace of the path gets lost after about 15 hops…and can’t go any further.

What’s more strange about this is that I can access dict.org from mzonline.com (the machine). So there must be some strange link down somewhere… Beth pointed out that the dictionary queries weren’t working initially…and I just assumed it was our end…but it’s not.

With that said…and with the (eventual) inclusion of a second server box on the network, I’ve decided that I could just as well download and install the dictionaries themselves (the indexes) and query one of our local machines instead of dict.org, leaving it as a backup if for some reason it became necessary.

The problem: How do I find these pieces without (easy) access to dict.org? The answer: search for a while online…and it will come.

I’ve found a mirror of dict.org which gave me enough information about how to actually get access to the indexes. I don’t need the client/server software (that’s already taken care of), but I need the actual files these things read from. It’ll be several MB worth of data, but the new server will live on a box with a 20GB drive…so I think I can spare space. And if not, I’ll just run it off the older server box which has about 7GB of space.

I really need to invest in some more (large) drives… Ah well. It’s not like I’m storing terabytes of information or anything. Hell, with all the drives on this home network, we’ve got about 75GB of drive space…of which maybe 1/3 is being used currently. The main problem is that this is stored between multiple drives (in the case of the older server, it’s 7GB between three physical drives).

Five years!

I just returned an electronic survey for my 5-year high school reunion. Strange. Doesn’t seem that long, yet it does. I’m kinda stoked about it, actually. For the first few years, if I ran into a classmate, it wasn’t that big of a deal. Now I (still) occasionally run into one of them…and it’s kinda neat…if only brief.

Ah well, that’s all for now…

This post was upgraded to the MZ Online Blog on 8/20/07