Wow This post made my day! 10 of the best 80's cartoon theme songs. Absolutly took me back to my youth!
http://unrealitymag.com/index.php/2008/12/08/the-10-best-80s-cartoon-theme-songs/
iPhone 2.2 Here i come.
I've decided this morning i'm going to upgrade to firmware 2.2 and jailbreak again. Wish me luck. Its always an adventure doing this sort of thing!
Also, have i mentioned that winter is here.. and its freaking cold outside? I just wanted to make sure everyone knows that.
Well… that was an interesting night!
Tonight was supposed to be a very simple hard drive copy to a server, virtualize a physical server, get a beer and go home... I figured, i'd be at home by 6 or 7pm... well... Technology has a way of really screwing with you. So here's a little story about my stupid night.
So 5:00pm goes around and i turn off the old desktop class machine that has been used as a server for the better part of 5 years. The plan is to take the hard drive will all the unamed organizations data off of it, put it on to our super fast secure awesome server, and then call it a night, if I had time i was going to get rid of the old physical hardware once and for all and put the server on our virtual server cluster, no brainer, i've done this kind of thing a million times before.
Here is where the first snag came, i got the hard drive, put it in our hard drive to firewire adaptor, and i couldn't get it to mount. Hell, i couldn't get it to spin... finally after some fiddling and adding the external power plug for the adaptor i got it going, i started the file copy, i thought i was done. I promptly went to play COD4 and blow some 12 year noobs up. I turned around to check on the status of the file copy, and i noticed the drive wasn't spinning. "Strange" I think to myself. I try remounting the drive over and over again, and it just won't go, this is already pissing me off. I put the drive on my Windows XP machine and it mounts after a long time, and i start the file copy again, and the drive stops spinning AGAIN. So by now i'm pissed. Its fairly obvious the drive isn't working properly, and this explains the slow performance the organization had been seeing on their old file server. So what do I do? Only what any sane IT professional would do with a semi dead hard drive, i put it in the freezer. Yes you read that right, i put it in the freezer. Its a religous thing, the hard drive in freezer trick. Some people say its hog-wash, other swear by it. In our office, its saved our butts a few time, so "I want to believe"
At this point Jay and I decide that while the hard drive is on ice, we will take a walk down to the parking lot and pick up our vehicles from the far corner of the lot and bring them closer, if anything to get outside and get fresh air and not be around stupid dead hard drives... and then we saw something that was just... strange... I think the picture will speak for its self. A box truck, inbetween the two levels of parking.
So after wondering WTF was going on the with the box truck we headed back in to check on our frozen hard drive. We hooked it up, and BAM it started working right off the bat, real fast and everything... and then about 5 minutes into the copy it failed again. At this point i was starting to loose faith that we would get this going. So, we froze it again. Tried it again, and it would go for a while, then fail. This is the point where desperation is starting to set in. I really want to get this server finished by start of business Tuesday. So i thought to myself, "What would happen if i ran the hard drive from INSIDE the freezer"
Yes, thats a power cable, and firewire cable going into the office fridgem which we've moved next to my desk. The sick part? IT WORKS. The hard drive is running, and actually copying data. Its still a bit slow, but the hard drive is still working. I just don't understand, but whatever. ITS WORKING!!
Yup, so that was my night, a hard drive, in a static bag, in the freezer.
So, have you ever had any luck with the hard drive in a freezer? Have you ever gone to this lengths? That was one heck of a night at the office.
Now, time for a blast from the past, an mixer board and outboard rack:
Managing multiple Debian linux servers
At CIAS here we manage around 20 linux machines, of which only a handful of them are in a cluster.
This means that conventional tools such as puppet and other cluster management software suits don't fit well into what we want to do.
So what am i to do? I have 20 machines to manage, secure, audit, monitor, update and any number of other tasks. Any good system administrator will have his hands knee deep in BASH and perl and <insert favorite scripting language here>. I personally happen to be a web guy. I live and breath in PHP and MySQL. My specialty over the years has been to create nice little one off web applications that parse data, manage it, and present in a useful manner to myself and my co workers. Lately i've start to go a step beyond that and create web services which my machines begin to interact with. I've created clever little command line apps that do specific tasks, and are usually generic enough that they work on all our machines. I've even created a deployment method for these apps! So now i update a single repository of our scripts and auto-magicly our servers have the latest scripts.
This system has really started to work well, and its been growing day by day.
So far i've created systems for the following solutions:
- A global iptables blacklist - add an ip to the list and all our machines block that IP
- A command to block an IP from any of our hosts, which then is put in the global list
- A script that audits SSH attacks and blocks those ips
- A web interface for all those blocked IP's (Add, Edit and Delete from the list)
- A web interface to show all available APT updates on a host, and the ability to approved updates and have them install automatically at a certain time.
- A web reporting tool that monitors all our servers disk usage and sends warning on full or near full disks
- A interface to a long term archive solution we are custom building
- A script and web interface which aggregates all of our logwatch reports, and then converts them to RSS
As more and more problems need solution i keep creating and distributing these systems. To what end?
In the future i would love to create a portal based system where I log in and i can manage and interact with all of my servers from one place. Much like an Altiris Notification server for my linux machines.
So here's my question to the great internet... Does anyone else do anything kinda like this? Is this a set of solution that I should think about packaging up and creating an open source project for? Does anyone care? Does anyone else have a better solution than the hacks i've been working on? I want to hear your feed back!!!
And now for something completely random:
Tunnel Vision
So...
I woke up this morning, and for reasons that i don't want to explain. I'm just in a bad mood. So... I decided on my drive into work that i'm going to channel this bad mood into productivity. So i've been sitting at my desk here, headphones on, hoodie up, iChat not on, no twitter, and not texting or any of my normal distractions. And lone behold, before lunch i pretty much finished a module that i've been meaning to finish for about a month. AHH BEHOLD THE POWER OF CONCENTRATION AND FOCUS
Go figure. The moral of the story? Get in a bad mood, and channel your frustration and bad mojo into something productive, which will most likely raise your spirits up, and get you out of your bad mood. Thus saving you from depressions or some other stupid emotional wreck.
I am usually a very positive perosn, i've leaned early on the lesson of only worrying about the things you can change or that you have some sort of influence on. The rest of them should just be facts and outside entities that you know about and have acknowledged. This is a philosophy that i usually preach to anyone who asks for my advice. It has worked very well for me. Sometimes it comes off as unemotional or that I just bottle everything up. But i really do believe that the human emotions can only deal with things that you either have done/or can do something to change the outcome. If you have no control, acknowledge the issue and MOVE ON.
Strangest thing happened last night on the way home.
So on the way home after the GMB banquet i came across a group of people on the side of the road and a guy flagging me down.
There was an accident has this guy says to me "I need you pull up and give me some light, i'm trying to work on this guys leg" So of course I do the only sensible thing and pull up, put on my high beams and give him the light. Sooner or later the fire department, ambulance and police showed up, took care of the driver of the motorcycle and his passenger. I think they both got away with a few broken bones, but nothing horrible. So i ended up getting stuck between all the emergency vehicles, so I had to way for them all to leave before i could head home. But overall it felt nice to do at least a little something good.
The guy who initially flagged me down thinks the driver was drunk, because i guess earlier on the motorcyle passed him doing like 70 on lake shore drive.
It made for an interesting night.
Trent Reznor is CLASSY!
So, I like alot of people have been getting tons of emails in my Inbox reminding me to get out and VOTE! Because honestly people, its what gives us as Americans a little bit of say in our country. So i got this really cool email today from Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails (probably cause i downloaded their Online Album). And I really like how his message was about one thing and one thing only. GET OUT AND VOTE. It wasn't about WHO to vote for, just to make sure you go out there and get your voice heard. Classy, very classy.
Next Tuesday we will elect the next President of the United States. The result
will have great consequences for the nation. This election offers a choice is
between two men with dramatically different visions of the future.
We have strong feelings about this choice. But we feel even more strongly
that all Americans, regardless of political preference, have a stake in the
outcome and should vote in this critical election.
This is likely to be a close election. Your vote matters. Please use it and
make a difference.
Sincerely,
Trent Reznor
I never knew it existed!
I never know this existed but under the scripts directory in phpMyAdmin there is a perl script call 'upgrade.pl'
This wonderful little script goes out and pings the phpMyAdmin site and gets the latest version of the software for you!
I put a script executing for my site wide install of phpMyAdmin in cron.weekly to help make sure we are UP TO DATE!
Very cool!
Art which moves me…
This picture really moved me.
www.newyorker.com/online/2008/09/29/slideshow_080929_platon
Windows XP SP3 on bootcamp
Well... microsoft's at it again.
If you don't do the registry key hack explained at: http://www.windowsreference.com/general/error-there-is-not-enough-disk-space-when-installing-sp3/
1. Click Start - Run - Type “regedit” and press enter.
2. Navigate to
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Setup]
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE
\Software
\Microsoft
\Windows
\CurrentVersion
\Setup
3. In the right pane, Right-click and select New - String value4. Name it as “BootDir” and set its value to “C:\”
You will get a dreaded "There is not enough disk space to install Service Pack 3"
Obviously, i'm not an idiot and i had more than 4MB of space that the error message told me i was missing.
I guess it needs a registry to tell it where.... C:\ is... i don't get it. Anyways, its fixed and SP3 is getting on my macbook right now