13.12.2003
Posted in Uncategorized at 15:45 by nlawren
Work, that’s what I will blame for the lack of an update of two months. Blasted work has been stupidly busy and has been eatin up anything I would call free time (even so-called free time at work).
So what is new:
- Potentially, I may be able to be released from my current job in Windows2000 AD and move to another team doing Linux this time
Very very much looking forward to this but it depends on a rather large number of things, none of which inspire much confidence.
- Spent a fair amount of time using the excellent groklaw to follow the latest in the IBM/SCO train wreck. A wreck for SCO that is, and it is certainly seeming much more likely these days. Particularly since the 2 requests to Compel that IBM presented were both accepted by the Judge (even with Kevin McBride rambling on).
- After all these years, discovered the joys of wiki - have been using phpwiki to do a lot of documentation on my home gateway. A lovely, simple tool.
- Another thing I have recently discovered in my travels is the joy of bash scripting. Spending most of my time doing Windows AD admin, everything ends up looking like a perl script Probably even when it shouldn’t
However, the Linux Documentation Projects excellent “Advanced Bash Scripting Guide” is re-introducing me into the simpler world of bash scripts (but potentially a lot quicker to write).
- The Safari online Library (or whatever you wish to call it) from O’Reilly is proving invaluable. I’m using the 10book library and currently have a number of wonderful books that I am spending spare time reading and getting into my thick skull. The latest two are very impressive - Linux Server Hacks and Active Directory Cookbook. Highly recommended (both safari and those two).
- Re-read the Neal Asher, Janny Wurts and Richard Morgan books again. Both Neal and Richard are excellent British hard sci-fi writers and all of these books are well worth it (2 from Richard and the 3 from Neal) - I’ve re-read each of these 2-3 times each this year. Janny Wurts rarely fails to keep me coming back and “To Ride Hells Chasm” is a deep, detailed fantasy novel that I’ve just finished again for the fourth time (while waiting for the next of her “Wars of Light and Shadows” to be released).
- My Zaurus continues to be very useful - what with Opera for a web browser and the good e-book readers, it is a handy way of having a lot of data with you at all times (using a 256meg memory card of course). And a seperate CF card for music means listening pleasure at the same time. Very happy that I got the Zaurus rather than a Pocket PC.
Now to return to re-writing my bash init files - just for light entertainment on a lazy Saturday afternoon (not oncall this weekend…)
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05.10.2003
Posted in Uncategorized at 11:01 by nlawren
Why as the years roll on, the yearly cold and flu fun and games seem to get worse? This years has not been a lot of fun for most people and it has seemed to hang around for a very long time (ie still coughing and spluttering after a month seems average). I had thought I had almost survived the winter without anything - silly, silly me.
So three weeks ago on Sunday, I woke up feeling crap (no sniffing, no cough) but just headache and run down. Ended up having to take most of the week off from work ( although I ended up working a lot from home on various bits and pieces). I thought it was over then and went back to work the next week. That passed ok until (again) the Sunday when my throat started to burn. End result - cough/splutter/cold all week. Only ended up at work on Wednesday and Friday. Feel better now but have a nasty chesty cough 
It was an interesting week at work for all the wrong reasons. We have a couple of managed platforms that I look after (there are also a whole lot of others) and in particular, one of these is Windows2000 sp0 or sp1. Hello, I hear you say, no patches, no updates?
Exactly - and someone(s) has machines on the work WAN with the bloody blaster worm - end result - we lost one entire site when it stopped RPC on the three DCs and everyother infrastructure server in that site. Don’t know what it did to workstations - luckily I don’t have to care about them. The funny part (well, not so funny) is once we rebooted them, kicked some other domain controllers in other sites and made sure replication was happening again, the business still won’t let us patch the machines - something about “too high risk” and “not tested”
Considering they have never let us apply the patches/service packs and have never attempted to test, I have no sympathy for them. We have explained that if whatever machine(s) decided to scan that set of subnets again, they will lose the site again and they still won’t agree, stuff them. They can live with the consquences.
In other more interesting news, I’m currently monitoring 30+ domain controllers with my little linux server at work (amazing how usefule a p3/450 with 128meg ram/6gig hdd is when you don’t run windows on it) and am adding more servers as I install snmp on them (damn shame it wasn’t part of the base build). People love pretty graphs and stats and it is interesting to see how many like what can be produced.
It has been a bad few weeks for openssh such that i am going to have to move to manual re-compiles again on my gateway (currently have ssh blocked from the outside) because Debian sarge hasn’t updated in a bit (although both woody and sid have). Also need to look at spamassassin and upgrading to 2.6.0.
Interesting network security website/blog: http://taosecurity.blogspot.com/
And a nice looking backup program for win32 and linux - http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/index.html.
My find of the week has been phpwiki - talk about making things easy to document and update. I’m using it at home and am thinking of installing it on the webserver at work to allow doco and notes updates.
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13.09.2003
Posted in Uncategorized at 12:51 by nlawren
Time to another daily update (not)
This year seems to be flying by and time is continuously getting away from me. Easy to tell by the infrequency of my posts to this little weblog sorta thing.
However, a nice quiet day down the coast is a good time to get some things done and then do a little perl programming later.
Linkage of the day: Groklaw - a nice site detailing the latest antics of SCO. A good informative read.
Now to learn some more about pop and push and about how to properly use a hash of arrays….
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01.09.2003
Posted in Uncategorized at 13:29 by nlawren
Thanks to myrddin of myrddin.org, he worked out a method of pulling cpu stats from a win2k boxen using some awk goodness:
`snmpwalk -v1 -c public machine hrProcessorLoad | awk ‘{print $4}’ ; echo 0; echo 0`
I need to consolidate this sort of information onto a seperate page(s) I think.
Ah well, time to play later.
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Posted in Uncategorized at 12:35 by nlawren
Well, I was having a good last Tuesday until we had a slight power problem. I got home and found (luckily) that all my boxes had come back successfully - with the exception of some nasty error messages on my gateway about being unable to find a dhcp server.
I looked at the cable modem to note to my horror that only the power light was on Short end to the tale - after a fair few hours of stuffing around, I now have a dead cable modem. Being out of contract, getting a new one would hurt a lot and I had been meaning to move to ADSL for a fair while (inertia had been stopping me). This prompted the move and I signed up with Internode the same night.
Over the next few days, Internode did everything right and I managed to get a second hand Dlink dsl-300 modem cheap which was very pleasing. Got back from the south coast last night and found that my line was now provisioned. Being late I only had time for a quick play using the laptop but it worked :))
So I now have 266% more data to leech at a slower rate (but I don’t play games much any more so that isn’t a big issue) and life will return back to normal. Lots of configuration work required later today when I get back from work but such is life
Linux thing of the day to look up: apt-cache show ifenslave
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24.08.2003
Posted in Uncategorized at 19:53 by nlawren
Uhhh, last entry last month? Good grief, what a slack bugger I have been.
Well, this is being written on a Sunday evening after a wonderful trip down to Tasmania (the third time we have been down there).
I’ve written up the events and have some other comments to make about what has been happening in my life recently (just need to get them off my Zaurus).
To be updated tomorrow or later tonight.
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01.07.2003
Posted in Uncategorized at 20:07 by nlawren
Heh - Tuesday night and no changes to do - always a good thing.
Things of interest in the last few days:
- Trying to get Windows2000 domain controllers up through a firewall (even a swiss-cheese firewall like the one I was trying to get through) is not a lot of fun. Win2k is not a very quick beast at replicating in unusual situations and doesn’t really tell you very much (and a lot of what it tells you is misleading.
- Why did it take 4 hours to replicate a secondary DNS zone? When its companion DNS server took under a minute to reload the zone? Very strange. I mean to look at that some more tomorrow but I am just glad it works.
- I must have done something wrong when I upgraded to MT 2.64 because I didn’t get the new RSS 2.0 template and the old 0.91 template wasn’t removed. I’ve fixed that now.
I need to keep thinking about how to manage bookmarks - just using bookmarks.yahoo.com at the moment which is just about bearable.
And Service Pack4 is out for Windows 2000 - I have upgraded the work laptop and will upgrade the server when I reboot the machine tomorrow (also installing a DVD-burner I acquired).
Finishing reading Harry Potter over the weekend - it was a lot of fun. The next two books should be something to look forward to. Unfortunately I now have to look for something else to read
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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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