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Looking For Quacks In The Pavement

Author: Karel Kerezman

  • Not one of my better days.

    I was dreading Monday all night last night, for various reasons… one of which actually did come to pass. But I’m not here to talk about the personal stuff… not today anyway.

    My workday was deceptively mild for a Monday, until midafternoon. Then I got a call from one of the salesdudes who fancies himself something of a computer expert. He took his usual pleasure in informing me that the email server seemed to have “taken a crap,” in his pithy phrasing. Unfortunately he was right, but it was kinda weird: The server itself was ticking along as fine as you please, no indication given whatsoever that anything was even the slightest bit out of the ordinary. But since nobody could connect to it, a rebooting was in order nonetheless. Even afterward I couldn’t determine what had gone wrong.

    But that wasn’t the worst of things, not by half. The last of the three “events” of my day landed just a few minutes before five o’clock… the main fileserver fell over.

    Yes, that’s a technical term. Go look it up if you must.

    I spent three solid hours of intense frustration fighting to get that machine back online. The alternative was to wipe the machine clear and start over… with no backup of the valuable metadata that actually makes my network run. You know, little things like user accounts, passwords, groups, print queues, application objects, permissions. Who needs all that nonsense, right? *cough*

    Historically speaking, I’ve experienced great results by searching Novell’s support site when I have problems with one of their products. Not this time, though. While I learned to work around some of the symptoms, I couldn’t find a cure. Until, of course, I turned back to good old Google. In the past, Google searches usually found me a bunch of Usenet posts along the lines of, “What are you doing here, moron? Go to Novell’s support site!” This time, I found the one vital piece of information needed to bring everything back online with one changed setting.

    See, unbeknownst to me an important SLP setting was at its default of 2 when it should have been changed to 4.

    It was that simple. The scary part is that nobody seems to know what the “2” and “4” settings do. It just works that way.

    I know my job involves what most folks think of as arcane gibberish, but please! I like to actually understand the settings I’m changing! Is that so wrong? Is it?

    Oh well. I came home, went shopping for lunch stuffs and also snagged some comfort food to make my night go better. Tomorrow had better damned well be a better day that this was. Bleah.

  • GXP II

    One of those little side projects I’ve been working on in my spare moments for, oh, the last three months is a replacement for the server formerly known as Mihoshi. She’d been in service longer than four years, actually, originally built to be the chat server for KNRK. She took on other duties in time, and with the demise (twice over the course of three years) of the chat room her primary function became that of a file transfer depot and Cacti host.

    Problem is, she was getting old and slow. Big (physically, not in terms of capacity) old slow hard drives and a puny old processor were impeding her ability to take on new tasks, and I have a slew of new functions I want to use that box for. So I started prepping Mihoshi’s replacement, known as GXP. (For the record, ever since we lost the ability to use kgon.com for in-building subdomains Mihoshi has been known to the outside world as GXP… but that was just an emergency stopgap name change.)

    And because I’m an insane dork who can’t just do things the easy way, I built the new machine around a Linux distribution I’d never seriously tried before: Debian.

    I will say this: The apt-get system is the cat’s pajamas. Hell, half of why I tried Debian is because of how much I’ve recently enjoyed using apt-rpm on my Fedora installs. I was able to apt-get everything I needed to make GXP happy, including Cacti itself. Now that’s impressive. For the first time I haven’t felt the need to hand-roll Apache, PHP, MySQL or any of the library dependencies just to satisfy my obscure requirements. Damned nifty, that.

    Yesterday it came down to crunch time. Corporate wanted a special new project, and I was the logical guy to implement it… but the machine I wanted to implement it on wasn’t ready yet. So I made it ready and flipped the switch. Oddly enough, almost everything transferred with complete ease. I didn’t drop any data, lose any configurations or piss off anybody who uses that machine for vital business purposes. (This doesn’t count Cacti, which I’d been wanting to reimplement from scratch anyway. And yes, it is working better on the new box.)

    I even got to learn how to implement and administer phpBB, which is most assuredly quite the nifty message board system. It has some minor quirks, but generally it’s quite straightforward from the administrative side. Very nice.

    Not all eleven-hour workdays are bad, see?

  • A bit of Easter humor.

    Hey, it beats religious humor any day… thanks to Leslie for posting this little gem:

    “dye job”

  • Useless, just like advertised!

    My results from the self-proclaimed “most useless quiz ever”:

    No, I don’t know what it’s supposed to mean either. Pretty damned useless, huh?

    (ps – I did this because she did it first.)

  • Lots of packets, no LGMs.

    Among the features I haven’t yet restored to this website is the SETI@Home status indicator. On a whim I decided to check up on my progress…

    Results Received: 5247
    Total CPU Time: 6.910 years
    SETI@home user for: 4.869 years

    Your rank: (based on current workunits received)
    Your rank out of 4952071 total users is: 43476th place.
    The number of users who have this rank: 7
    You have completed more work units than 99.122% of our users.

    Whoah. I’m in the 99th percentile, baby.

    So, who else out there is doing SETI@Home still, and how many results have you cranked out? While we’re at it… who’s interested in joining a new group? (The Torps have sort of had their day… most of us still in it are just there on account of inertia. And it’s not like Zaph is putting out another version of Cthugha any time soon. Le sigh.)

    (Even if I am #2 out of almost 40 Torps members in total results processed, and am within a couple hundred of taking the lead. Ahem.)

    Yep. Just another indicator of my sheer unsufferable geekiness. Y’all can deal, I’m sure.

  • Maybe this IS the other shoe dropping.

    Six o’clock came way, way too early this morning, but I did make it to work in time for the department heads’ meeting (our first since January). I got out of that in time for what amounted to a long brunch date with Lil’. But that’s not all! See, turns out she and my partner-in-brainwave had been cooking up a nefarious plot. And by “nefarious” I mean “really, really cute and sweet.”

    The backstory on this is that I’m under strict orders to attend the masquerade ball taking place at Sakura-Con this year. My problem is that my wardrobe… needs help, for lack of a better way of putting it. The ladies conspired to give me a bit of help with that, and so I was absconded with to the mall for a quick bit of dress-shirt buying. I now have two new shirts, one in a nice dark-ish green and the other in what Lil’ insists is a “jewel” blue. (Hey, it’s a nice shirt; I don’t really care what color she calls it.)

    Yay!

    Work failed to be overly annoying, and afterward I swung by the apartment to hang out with the kids. Sadly, they were so overjoyed at the computer game I brought that I hardly got a word out of them most of the time I was there. The trip to the store for dinner fixings made up for that, thankfully.

    And now I’m home, feeling like today was most definitely one of the better days. What a nice change of pace, eh?

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