Nothing really exciting to report on day 3. I'm pretty sure I got this licked. I did discover that our Cisco VPN tunnel for clients was borked with the last maintenance on the network, so I lost my backdoor to be able to work from home via Linux :(.

Day 4 I found a reliable way to crash the Evolution "exchange backend". I get mails from Mailman mailing lists as they come in, rather than a daily digest. Clicking on one with the preview pane on will break the "exchange backend" causing me to have to restart the client. This happens after browsing around in "non-list" mails.

Also on day 4 I found myself needing a proprietary piece of client software to access a file server that I manage. I was slightly discouraged until I realized it was written in Java. I then discovered that they don't provide the source, but they do provide the jar files, and an RPM. I then used alien to convert the rpm to a deb, and I was well on my way to managing that file server.

I'm loving this!

Yesterday was my second day running Linux exclusively at the office. Everything is going smooth, I just wish that Evolution was a bit more stable.

Jumped a couple hurdles yesterday as well. I finally figured out the Global Catalog server so I can have our Global Address List via Evolution. I also tweaked OO.org so it would perform better. Follow instructions found here to speed it up!

So far today, no issues.

I’ve decided to run Linux via Wubi on my work Laptop for one week to try and work out any bugs/issues that might come about. So far I’ve had great success! I’m also building a case to present to our management requesting that whoever wants, should be allowed to run Linux. We won’t request software support from Internal IT, only hardware. Give us hardware, we do the rest. We would be in charge of our own desktop support. We’re smart guys here that have many years of Linux experience, I’m sure we can handle it :). I have a page setup on our internal wiki documenting my progress and counter-arguments for reasons they might say no. Wish me luck!

Here is my progress thus far in no order:

• Got evolution working with exchange.
• Need to get GAL server name for address book.
• Ssh agent forwarding from desktop.
• Pidgin works fine with our local Jabber server.
• OO.org seems to be handling normal office tasks, but it feels so clunky, will research a way to speed up.
• Allowing laptop to sleep with Wubi == BAD.
• Unclean shutdown from Windows will cause issues rebooting into wubi as windows seems to have a “lock” on the filesystem. Boot into windows, shutdown clean to remedy.
• Got print access via CUPS. Konica-Minolta provides the PPD’s for linux & mac!

So, I've noticed lately that one of my more popular blog entries has taken on some spam. I'll work on cleaning that up and implementing countermeasures.

In the mean time... I'm alive! Been working my tail off in preparation for Valentines day at work. It's the busiest time of the year for us. Just got back from VA where another sysadmin and I installed 50 new servers. It went well! Wrote some python to convert my inventory list from csv to our flat file format.

I've also been engineering a new syslogging system for our shop. It's a combination of a shell script that does archiving and checksum accounting, Splunk, and syslog-ng. Good times.

I've also had the (dis)pleasure of building RPM's lately....Not my favorite past-time. I really _really_ wish I could convince our team that the massive undertaking involved in converting from CentOS to debian would be worth it :). Not that I don't like CentOS, but I do love me some Debian.

That's all for now!

More like beaten, stomped on, abused.. It's cool though, because I love it..

Since Monday, a small team of us (read: me, another sysadmin, and one network guy) embarked on a journey to move roughly 100 servers from one cage to another in our data center. That includes prepping the servers, racks, networking gear, cabling , etc. It's been a hell of an undertaking, yet surprisingly smooth all at the same time. Moving the hardware is simple, it's the reconfiguring of the interfaces and routing that has proved to kick our asses silly.

Yeah, so I haven't written in a while so I thought I'd update the world as to why.

I woke up late, again, checked my son for a rash, poured a cup of coffee and drank a bottle of water. After my relaxation time was over I went to cleaning myself up for work. By this time I realized it was 7:45 and now I was _really_ going to be late. Why was I so late this morning? Because the Indians lost. What does that have anything to do with it? Well...I tried to forget the loss by consuming over the recommended dosage of liquor and beer(in that order) :/

Fast forward and I'm walking into the office. Open my email, seemingly thousands of errors over the weekend. Fixed some filesystems on a few servers, cut the verbosity of some logging down a notch, and discover that it wasn't a DNS problem after all, infact $user had a host file entry.
This was all before 9.

Moving right along, look for this photo at cleveland.com this coming Friday!
From the right: Me, Bob(hiding), Craig, Cory, Mike, Kathy, Martin.

And one last note.. Keep an eye out for adsense ads in the "leftovers" section of my side menu.. I think it might help drive some traffic and make a buck.

This year my company held the first of hopefully many, Hackday. We're given 24 hours to design, plan, and implement our own idea of a product or service related to a business unit within the company. When the time was done, we were given three minutes to give a short presentation of what we did, how, and why.

It was great fun and I could not have been more pleased with what my fellow employees came up with! My partner and I were able to get a proof-of-concept up and ready within the specific time frame..with little or no sleep..

In addition to getting a night of geeking out and slinging code, we played Guitar Hero on the big screen, got 3 square meals, and were given T-Shirts. Below is a picture of the t-shirt design. Later!

So I was on call this weekend, and at 4:00 AM this morning, my phone starts blowing up. So I jump up in a fit of sysadmin rage to see what the hell was going on, only to check my emails and notice that the DBA's and another Sysadmin were performing a DB upgrade. What a waste, I could have been sleeping.

Oh well, I silenced my phone and went back to bed for an hour.

Screen doesn't want to cooperate for me today on my sandbox:

Sorry, could not find a PTY.

[screen is terminating]

Why did that have to happen on the day I honed my sweet new .screenrc?!

Oh yeah, I forgot...It's Monday.

Sysadmins hate Mondays in particular because all the crap that the developers forgot to mention the previous week, and the crap you put off because you were so busy comes barreling down on you like a metric ton of bricks. It's okay though, we get through with teeth grinding and massive amounts of caffeine. Some of us have cigarettes to "help" some of us have xanex; pick your poison.

I think I'm going to research the average life span of a sysadmin. I'd predict it being significantly shorter than most. I'd also be curious to see what the leading cause of death is for a sysadmin as well.

Don't misunderstand! I love my job. In fact, I get some kind of sick pleasure from it. I swear I was a Sub in another life and Windows NT Server 4.0 was my Dom.