forty-six

Well! What happened to the last 13 days? If you find them, you tell me! That is one of the problems with many ministries here, there are times when we just become too busy, and that is a danger to our communication with you and a potential foothold for Satan to distract us with that busyness.

• Much of what we set out do do in our sweep through ministries to the east went well. I figure we got close to 90% of our scheduled tasks done, and a few that weren't scheduled. I my book, here, that's a good trip! I will try to give a better accounting in the near future at http://dustypenguin.com
• A few days after returning to Niamey, we departed for Makalondi to set up the new machines at the ministry center there. I will have a fuller report of that on http://dustypenguin.com in the near future as well.
• The same day we lost internet connectivity with the VSAT at 3 different stations using the satellite and also lost the internet connection at 3 other places that were using an unrelated local provider! The satellite issues continue, but at least we are back up at the office 4 days later.
• Electrical power here has also been fluctuating, sometimes pretty wildly, as the power grid struggles to keep up with demand.
• A small part of the backup plan was using my dogonay (slow, wireless) phone as an internet access point to at least get emails for the office when it was down, and now the school.
  

I will try to keep up again for a while ...!

33

Pray in the Spirit at all times with every kind of prayer and request there is. For the same reason be alert with every kind of effort and request for all the saints. Pray also for me, so that, when I open my mouth, the right words will be given to me. Then I will boldly make known the secret of the gospel, for whose sake I am an ambassador in chains, desiring to declare it as boldly as I should - Ephesians 6:18-20

trente deux

• Up and at'em
• Preparing a computer to be a backup computer for the files in Maradi
• Back up computer was not on same workgroup
• was using simple file sharing
• needed to restrict access to backup folder to admin group only
• Permissions issues on the old backups ... makes sense since we had to change from simple file sharing
• After last test here I think we will be using Karen's replicator for the backups on the client machines. Pretty good set and forget functionality. Other problem with synctoy is its dependency on dotnet
• New antivirus installed
• Backup jobs loaded and going through initial run.
• security on backup machine a bit harder since that is also the machine sharing its internet connection with the rest of the lan using a dogonay phone. Guest users do not seem to be able to automatially launch the dialer, so will probably have to create a limited user for guests and adjust software and permissions as needed.
• kasum and coke for lunch ... @ 2:30!
• Data is a mixed bag here ... needs to be streamlined, but we will not have time to do that and reeducate the users where things are. Will do some limited cleanup that will be possible with the unified backup.
• 
  

31

Sunday was church and then a travel day mostly

• Got stuff gathered up to travel to Maradi
• Went to church in Galmi
• Went back to the hospital and prepared car to go. It did need 2 1/2 liters of water in the radiator which was a concern.
• Picked Issiakou up in town and headed for Maradi
• Stopped at a village where Issiakou's mom grew up, and met many relatives
• Finally got to Maradi and met Issikou's parents and had a good visit with them
• Went to evening service at Maradi
• Visited with some missionaries here and set up logistics for tomorrow.
• Took a look at X-Pup while I was texting Wanda back home.

thirty

Hey! what happened to the last 10 days you might ask? Well as happens now and then, things just got too busy. I was reminded of that as we are just getting going good out of Niamey and Issiakou truned to me a said,"Hey, know what we forgot?" Yup, we had forgotten to pray before our journey had begun, because we were too busy getting things ready. Good for him to remind me! Yes, we stopped soon after and repaired our oversite!

• Tried to get internet working at the place where I am staying at the hospital
• Working on backup machine for Galmi Hospital.
• Various problems 1-The bios (compaq) was set to economy mode, so the machine would go to sleep after a time, great for a workstation perhaps, but bad for a always on backup machine. 2-USB back up drive attached lost(?) its partition? 3-Supposed scheduled tasks were not turned on.
  
• Getting internet access to work for me at admin
• Power outage! Hopefully they will start the generator. Without elec, we are out of luck.
• Gen on ... good deal
• Starting new computer swap while waiting for backup drives to finish formating ....
• The old Toshiba (EQ 7350s) is so slow... it is agonizing just getting data backed up. I can remember when we set them up on 2001 and we thought they were fast! (although they were win98 at the time)
• Wow, the new Dell Optiplex 755 running XP is very quick
• Starting a backup test on the newly formatted drives.
• Few details emerging here as well ... backup scripts were not mailing a log file at the end, and the actual drive letters have changed now with the reconfigured drives
• Backups now are working and reporting ... part of the problem is that we were so pressed for time last time we were here that there were mistakes in the scripts I wrote.
  
• One computer is switched... need to see about what we can do at the pharmacy, and some lunch along the way...
• STILL have not left for the pharmacy, the second computer we were going to switch here would not even start in the office we were in (still on generator, and that office has old wiring, so it is not getting full voltage.) Had to move it to another office and it started right up there. The pharmacy has reported the same issue there and we are finally on the way out.
• 3 and a half hours later and we are finally back. Pharmacy ended up to be a project, swapping UPS for the old one and getting a new one for the new workstation. We weren't going to put the old machine back on the network for various reasons, but decided to in the end for efficiencies sake.
• The old computer, and the last one we are going to switch was still virus scanning when we returned ... It had not found anything so we stopped it were it was for now to proceed on. Hopefully we will be done by 7:30, 12 hours + since we started. Bad thing is we could still work here another 12 hours!
  

Changing batteries in UPS's

Batteries are one of the things that do not last long in the heat of Niger

twenty!

• Did some more extensive tests on the problem UPS ... seems to be functioning properly now
• Answered emails to the hospital out country and an agricultural station as well about issues that need to be addressed if we go out that way.
• Continue to add the French application pack to the balance of the youth center computers
• prep work on 2 more of the computers for the hospital.
• Final config for the youth center computers is to have OpenOffice save as MS Office format by default. They are now all done and packed and ready to go
  

19

Linux, Windows, Windows, Linux

• The delay in the generator for the youth ministry out country has at least allowed me to find some additional free software for the machines. Was able to install some nice typing tutor programs that speak French, a couple of French language bible programs, OpenOffice in French, a free French dictionary, and a neat program that allows you to read the whole French (and other languages) wikipedia offline! So we installed these packages to the machines as well.
• The first of the hospital computers are configured, and are really nice machines.
• Found some lost files for an upcoming orientation
• Installed a new battery in a UPS
• Received M&M's that some nice people had packed for the Niger field missionaries in the container. And they were not melted! Great stuff.
• Had a friendly discussion with the UPS vendor about why we are getting new UPS's with dead batteries!

Eighteen

• Looked at a machine that had been sent in from another mission agency. It was typically dirty, and unfortunately the hard drive was beyond repair.
• Another laptop of one of the nationals was unresponsive. Even five minutes after starting it was not responsive to mouse clicks, or even alt+ctrl+del. Turns out it was infected with viruses. Booted to safe mode, uninstalled the (two!) antivirus programs installed, pulled the drive and scanned it with NOD32 on another computer. Then reinstalled the drive and installed Kaspersky. Patient cured.
• The reoccuring, returning, computer with the email issues and faultly USB ports, came back again. We finally convinced the owner to dump Windows Mail and use something sane, like Thunderbird. The USB ports are a mystery after trying many different things, the problem keeps returning. Can you say, "Upgrade to Windows XP?" (Actually, LinuxMint would really be the answer on this.) "Thunderbird gets the mail that Windows Mail cannot get." Good motto.
• Tried to work on a spreadsheet for the guesthouse, so that the one they use to keep track of accounts is as much the same at what treasury uses so that information can be cut and past instead of having to retype information every month. Got close to done, but the other stuff got in the way of finishing.
  

seize et dix-sept

• Saturday a container arrived with materials from overseas. We spent most of the morning helping to unload. While there wasn't anything on this container for us personally, there were some computers for a hospital out country that we will need to do prep work before they go out. So yippee! more work!
• Looked up some drivers for an HP printer. When did printer drivers become such huge downloads?
• We need to get some pictures to our home church for our sons graduation. They have been kind enough to include him in their graduation presentation. So we spent quite a bit of time trying to narrow some down for them ... and wondering where the time went.

quatorze et quinze

• Good that these are together since I still get them mixed up occasionally!
• The machine with the amazing disappearing ports came back ... After more research I think I have it fixed. (See Sabre's comment at that site, his was what seemed to work so far. Some of the comments do have bad language :-( )
  
• The computer with the bad fan was a bit of an adventure. The fan that was sent out was still not the right one. We had to totally disassemble the fan enclosure itself and exchanged the internal small fan motor and blades to the old enclosure. During reassembly two pins that go into the monitor cable socket got bent causing the machine not to boot. We had quite a time trying to figure out why it would not work. After some fine work straightening the pins, it boots and the fan keeps it cool so it will continue to run.
• Catching up on documentation today. Part of the process for our departure is for me to leave good descriptions and potential fixes for the system. This is always the most tedious and time consuming task, which is why for many systems it does not get done, or get done well. Unfortunately, I also have the unenviable task of doing that for other locations we service as well. It is a task I have imposed on myself, but in my absence I do think it is an imperative.