27.06.2003
Posted in Uncategorized at 13:13 by nlawren
And rather a busy week it was. Still coming to the end of it is good in one way (done the exam, did various other things that I had to do) but bad in others (didn’t really even scratch the surface of what I really wanted to get done). One of the things I had meant to do was work on isileth.org which I have done a little of, but not that much.
I need to look at dotfiles and get them fixed. I don’t use most of those anymore (found newer, more interesting ways of doing some of it) and I need to write up the files in there to give some idea of what they do and how they are used. It seems like I get a fair few referrals into that directory and I would imagine most people are disappointed with the contents. I got the idea of a “dotfiles” directory from perkypants.org - the website of one Jeff Waugh (from SLUG - the Sydney Linux Users Group). SLUG are a very friendly group of linux users and have some very good mailing lists (I’ve been subscribed to them for many a year now). Jeff is now Gnome2 Release Manager and doing a very good job from all accounts - his site can be found here.
Which brings me to a point that has been interesting me all week - the whole morass of interesting weblogs (for some reason, I don’t like the term “blog” - don’t know why) and trying to keep up with them. It seems the RSS or News aggregators are the way to go but I’ve been trying to find one I’m happy with. It need to run on linux, preferably outputs html and doesn’t run as a webserver. One candidate I’ve found is blagg - but this either needs a local copy of Movabletype (which I don’t have) or blosxom which I don’t have either (yet). I am looking at running it on my local linux gateway (then I can rysnc it up to isileth.org).
One of the reasons why I’ve been looking at aggregators is that I use a lot of different machines these days. Between the Zaurus (which with the new Opera is a very capable web browsing machine these days), my linux laptop, my work windows2000 laptop and my main machine at home, I have far too many browsers and far too many bookmarks. Normally I try and remember where the hell I last read the site I’m thinking about but then I can’t remember and didn’t bookmark it on any of the machines either:(
A nice linux console based aggregator which is still in early development is raggle which is written in Ruby (not a language I have ever looked at) - might play with that today if I get time.
I have been looking at bookmark managers but I would need to be able to update from anywhere (which most of them do offer) but I’d rather not run a mysql database for it (although I would if I had to). I will probably end up writing my own little perl cgi script to do it (after all, there is nothing quite like re-inventing the wheel yet again, is there?) and host it on the linux gateway. That way, I can get to it from anywhere.
Although I could try and use bookmarks.yahoo.com again - I normally have a backup of the work bookmarks on that - we’ll see.
Now I have things to do - although I’ll probably just read about trackbacks 
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26.06.2003
Posted in Uncategorized at 12:46 by nlawren
It was a week late but I finally got around to actually sitting 217 AD Implementation and Management. It wasn’t too bad and at least I’m now a MCP again (after my NT4 server one lapsed - I assume anyway). Only took 45 minutes, a lot of which was spent reading the question looking for hidden traps and strange verbage - of which there was a lot.
As you may have noticed, there have been some changes around the site again. I’ve been reading the O’Reilly CSS book and have been inspired to try and create some valid CSS/XHTML pages. Therefore I now have a new front page and howto page which validate (well, they did the last time I checked). I also found a very nice little perl script (album.pl) which has (finally) tidied up my screenshots page. This is just a first draft of it and is using the default theme that album uses. A very nice perl script (found at marginal hacks.com) and one I’ll play with some more and look at the other themes. Admittedly I should create my own page for this but it seems a bit silly to do so when I am still learning.
I need to book my next Microsoft exam and have decided to do 216 (Network Infrastructure) next. I figure I’ll get the easy ones over first and do the harder ones last (workstation and server ). Depending on how the study goes over the weekend, I’ll either book it for next Thursday or the following Monday.
Reading at the moment: Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (who isn’t?). I’m enjoying it as a light, easy reading book that is a lot of fun.
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16.06.2003
Posted in Uncategorized at 21:00 by nlawren
Well, I got off my fat arse today and booked 217 (AD Implementation and Management) for Thursday at 09:30. The way things are at work, the sooner I get myself m$ certifed the better.
Reading through the various study guides that I have for that exam, it is odd how quickly doing something sinks in. Two years, the concept of “preferred bridgehead servers”, “GPO inheritance follow LSDOU” etc would have been “say what?”, whereas now it is “yeah, of course”. Fun stuff nowadays is scripting site creation using ADSI edit to show what sort of containers and objects you need to create.
That is just an example of how doing something for an extended length of time changes your idea of how much information is too much information. Being able to understand how USNs work, how to look at a replmon output or read a netdiag /fix /v entry and make sense of it changes your perspective on things.
Mind you, another friend of mine from work is doing the Clustering exam for Win2k the day after and that stuff is freaking scary. The more I learn about clustering in Win2k, the worse it gets. I would suggest you have all your clusters on UPS and treat them very nicely. Applying hotfixes and service packs had better be a manual process and praying to your designated $deity$ is a good idea….
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12.06.2003
Posted in Uncategorized at 23:36 by nlawren
TGIF
Almost the end of another week….
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03.06.2003
Posted in Uncategorized at 20:09 by nlawren
Hmmm, so much for the posting regularly lark - last week was not a lot of fun 
My new manager called our first team meeting last Wednesday - not a lot of surprises in it. He doesn’t really know what most of us do and will probably be more than a little concerned when he does find out.
In other news, the windows2000 platform that I look after the AD for, has gone very very unstable for one particular business unit which is proving rather ugly. Fingers being pointed in various directions (even a laughable suggestion that our Domain Controllers were proving the bottleneck due to the some applications making LDAP calls). Interesting though, the amount of information you can pull out of Windows2000 ntds object from withing perfmon.
Spent the last couple of days and the weekend doing my chemistry assignment which is almost over now, thank goodness.
And have had a lot of fun playing with mrtg. I am now graphing apache, seti and an awful lot of squid counters. Simply amazing the amount of information you can get from snmpd and with perl, any log file you can parse can be graphed - for some reason, that appeals to me.
And in site news, I pushed up my first screenshot in a year - and what a change from my old setup. I am now running Debian unstable on that desktop with Kde 3.1 - mainly due to the change in focus in Gnome2 to a “simpler’ model didn’t suit me. KDE is very very nice and, to be honest, I find myself more productive in it than Gnome2. I still love gkrellm though as is quite obvious from the screenshot.
And a very nice application for taking screenshots - scrot from Tom Gilbert aka LinuxBrit (you can find it at his site). Lots of other good things at that site - it was what first got me into procmail, bash stuff and other interesting things.
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