27.01.2004
Posted in Uncategorized at 12:25 by nlawren
And that is exactly what today is like. The good thing is that today being Tuesday means only 4 days until the weekend. The bad news is that I am tired and can’t really be bothered…oh well.
Things I have to do today:
- Learn how to use perl to pull out file properties (ie date and size) to be fed into a html report (useful for checking that virus signatures are up to date).
- Do some research on some strange events in a Win2k Domain controller log.
- Update my RH9 server.
Oh joy, and as I write this (trying out w.bloggar), another new win32 mass mailing worm - w32.novarg.a. Good grief, I’ve hardly even finished patching from last week. Although at least it has a vaguely amusing part with the potential to DoS www.sco.com (I do not in any way, shape or form condone that form of activity but it does indicate the possible level of resentment and anger against SCO). Mind you, thinking about it, it could also be an attempt to drum up sympathy (but I won’t go there).
So, I’d better go and hunt down the latest definitions and get them ready to go in my hand-written, script-driven virus update process (kicking off later tonight). Must try and work out how to kick it off earlier for the next version.
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26.01.2004
Posted in Uncategorized at 13:01 by nlawren
Last weekend was spent sleeping a lot trying to get over this bloody cough/flu thing. Then went back to work on Monday to find “emergency, emergency” what with this silly new worm. As part of a server support team rather than a desktop team, you would assume that this shouldn’t matter? And in these days, everything should be automatically updated (ie virus sigs)? And who would run a mail client on a server so it would get infected?
Wrong 
Politics kick in and before you know it, you are having to patch a legacy Win2K forest (actually two of them) which are used by about 70 users total. Out of interest, the number of servers actually outnumber the users Still, status reports, severity 1 problems (although no-one on this particular platform actually reported anything) and me being the silly bunny who still knows anything about this legacy setup got the job.
Still, it kept me busy all week - I now have the test environment completely patched with AV, doing daily updates and scans with the RIS servers doing weekly scans (no user data on them), so it wasn’t all wasted time and effort. Lots of batch files and use of windows scheduler. Luckily I monitor all of them via mrtg/snmp so a quick glance at the graphs every morning shows who did and didn’t behave.
I’ll do some work on some perl sripts over the week to pull the signature data out from all these servers and pump it to a html page (so I don’t have to go through this again). Actually looking forward to that, perl is lovely 
Found a nice AV demon to use on linux (actually myrddin did) so have that installed on my main gateway - clamav is very nice and updates as many times a day as you want. It fits nicely into the whole postfix/amavis/procmail/spamassassin thing that I have running.
Other interesting things I’ve learnt in the last few days - when you update from mysql 3.x -> 4.x, run the fix permissions script - if you don’t trying to make things like phpwiki work with mysql can be tricky (the lock tables permission gave me heart ache for a week).
Aside form that, three day weekends are excellent (got to love Australia Day) but back to work tomorrow.
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16.01.2004
Posted in Uncategorized at 15:37 by nlawren
Which is why I haven’t posted anything for the last several days. Headaches, coughing, general unhappiness isn’t very conducive to actually doing anything computer related. Worked from home for the last two days doing various changes syncing some hotfix releases between a Dev and Test environment (all very boring and time consuming). Went back to work today which was a mistake. Now feel very much like crap.
Some things I have been up to the last few days:
- Installed Kernel 2.6 on one of my machines. Seemed ok but am having some problems with my ps2 mouse and my kvm. This seems to be common but booting with psmouse_noext doesn’t seem to fix it. Annoying and needs more investigation.
- My server continues to limp along - two new drives are on the way, one of which will be living in a combo usb2/firewire external case. That should help the backup situation
- I continue to visit planet debian and planet gnome daily - good work by jdub to start planet gnome which then spread to debian
- SCO continue to bemuse and baffle - the “Father Christmas ate my homework” excuse isn’t likely to impress the judge and yet they continue to release press releases every time the share price looks ignored. Groklaw remains the site for SCO information with PJ doing a truly amazing job.
- I am starting to use subversion more and more as my main version control system. I still have some cvs controlled doco but that is gradually being moved over.
Aside from that, it is Friday afternoon, I’ve just taken more cold and flu tablets and I need some sleep.
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09.01.2004
Posted in Uncategorized at 11:02 by nlawren
Even over dialup, working from home is more than bearable. Terminal services (which is how I do 99.9% of my job aside from email and IM) makes for a nice working environment. Using ADSL would be even nicer (having a 1500/256 link would be good for that) but various things are causing that to be slow coming down the pipeline
Interesting distribution I stumbled on while doing the daily wander around the web - whiteboxlinux. It is a distro which intends to replace redhat rhel for the rest of us (ie those who can’t/don’t want to pay the costs associated with standard RHEL).
I also finally decided to subscribe to Linux Weekly News - considering I visit their site at least 6-7 times a week and have done for a number of years, I should at least put something back into all the work they have done.
And, in other news, kernel 2.6 has made it into sid (debian unstable). So I will be rebooting shortly to try that out.
Suffering a bit from the “summer” flu going around at the moment - cough, splutter, whinge. Not a lot of fun really, and the reason why I am working from home. Not nice to subject everyone else to my continuous moans and coughs…
John from monkeyc.net continues on his posting storm - sometimes 2 or 3 times a day. Nice site design and some interesting commentary (far better than my own rather twisted TLA laden stuff 
).
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07.01.2004
Posted in Uncategorized at 18:05 by nlawren
Well supposedly anyway
Back to work this week and life has been busy. The normal combination of politics and stupidity making for an interesting life. One of the good things about what I do is that the technical aspects of it (currently at least) outweigh that sort of crap. Although I must admit some days I do have to remind myself of that fact.
Did some lovely perl scripting yesterday - very simple stuff, just reading in a list of files in a directory and scanning for some keywords. That is the sort of thing that perl excels at (after all “practical extraction and reporting language” does tend to imply that) and it was wonderful to actually sit down and do some scripting again.
I see Apple have released the mini-Ipod even though the price was not quite what was being predicted. Apparently it is as small as a business card but has a nice 4gig hard drive. The specs look very interesting and I must admit it is tempting to look at for car use rather than fitting an in-car mp3/cd player. I’ll have to wait to see what the reviews have to say (and for it to actually get to this country) before thinking about that. For the moment the Zaurus does a wonderful job (with a 512meg CF card).
TIme to start thinking about some computer changes around my place - there is a possibility that I may be able to move into a Linux job where I work and, of course, Redhat Enterprise Linux and Suse are the distributions of choice. I haven’t used Redhat seriously since I did my RHCE at the beginning of last year so I am out of practice a little. I do have a little personal Redhat9 box at work that is a web/mrtg/stats server but I haven’t really done any major sysadmin style work on that machine.
So one of my machines will be converted to a Fedora Core1 box for a month or so (the Fedora Core2 when that comes out) to get back into the hang of dealing with redhat style sysconfig and rpm fun again. That is the problem with debian (even running unstable), it spoils you for most things (ie upgrades etc). I’m just about to do a large apt-get upgrade on my laptop (tracking unstable) which is over 550meg :). Now that is what I call some major changes.
A useful site I found from arstechnica - fedoranews.org. Has some nice tutorials and other interesting articles which should be a nice introduction back into that world.
Now time to go and attend to some backups and file copying.
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03.01.2004
Posted in Uncategorized at 14:06 by nlawren
Been having a great deal of fun playing with web statistics analysis programs - trying three at the moment - analog, webalizer, and a new one awstats. This last one produces some really nice stats and a different viewpoint on some of the data that gets produced on a daily basis.
So I now produce 4 sets: analog, webalizer, webalizer run over /journal and awstats (which only goes back to August 2003 while I work out exactly how to get it to play ball). It isn’t that tricky but I am running it statically rather than as a cgi.
For the terminally bored, you can find some examples here. No fancy index page yet, just boring directory listings.
The weather remains great down here, perfect for lazing around the beach and swimming in the surf. Reading a techno-thriller (for want of a better description) called “Crush Depth”). Interesting idea of very small tactical nukes being used a lot in the near future in a very changed world (try around 2020). Made me shudder from an ecological viewpoint but it moves along at a great rate.
Nothing much else happening - starting to look at doing a LPIC level 1 certification (to add to my RHCE) after I complete my MCSE. You can never have too many certifications these days
Now to read planetgnome and see what is new in the gnome world today.
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01.01.2004
Posted in Uncategorized at 9:29 by nlawren
Midnight on 31/12 down the south coast is normally very noisy - people partying, running around until the wee small hours etc etc - except for this year. Very quiet indeed. Had some friends over and had excellent food, wine and company until we saw the new year in (so to speak).
A very nice looking day down here - the beach is already starting to call me The water temperature has been perfect down here and I’m looking forward to spending a fair amount of time in the surf again.
Had to go to work on Monday and Tuesday - but was able to see Return of the King late Monday afternoon - it was truly truly stunning. An amazing achievement, perfectly executed and brought to life. I sat spellbound for the whole time - if anything, it almost seemed a little short, rather than the length that some people have commented on. I need to see it again….
Did the 218 exam on Tuesday and passed Somehow got a score of 1025 which I don’t understand - I thought the maximum was 1000 but anyway, it really doesn’t matter. That gets me MCSA, only 1 more exam to MCSE.
Now its time to catch up on the world and see whats happening.
Some links of interest:
- Snort have a new version out - 2.1 which I have downloaded and intend installing in a bit.
- Snortalong is also up to a new version - very nice perl script that one and extremely useful for looking at snort logs.
- Version 1.8 of rawdog has been released - this is a rss aggregator that produces a html page and can be run from cron. I use it instead of the normal aggregators as I can access the data from anywhere (which suits my circumstances very well).
And now it is time to head down the beach.
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