greyduck.net

Looking For Quacks In The Pavement

  • Please. Hire me!

    To Whom It May Concern:

    Perhaps your company or similar organization requires someone of considerable skill with computer technology. I humbly submit that if your needs are either strongly in the area of workgroup server administration, email administration, end-user desktop support, webserver administration or just plain “anything with a keyboard and mouse attached,” and you’re located in the City of Roses or thereabouts, I’m the guy you’re looking for.

    I spent nine solid years learning what it takes to keep servers and workstations running for an office of a couple hundred souls, as well as how to keep those souls in tune with their computers. I also consider myself quite wise to the needs of business, and tend to take the long and wide view of the process of change.

    Here I present just a few of many highlights from my previous work engagement as a one-man IT department for most of a decade:

    • Planned, tested and implemented company-wide in-house audio streaming system that has seen steady use for several years with very little downtime or maintenance.
    • Converted wholesale three entire email systems, one after another as we acquired other companies, to the corporate WAN-based email operation.
    • Served as hostmaster for the company’s banner website, rapidly providing an urgently needed solution followed by many years of solid performance and availability.
    • Implemented security, process and documentation changes bringing systems up to Sarbanes/Oxley compliance.
    • Developed web-based documentation and information dissemination system in cooperation with the General Managers’ staff.
    • Successfully rolled out web browser software changes that led to a near-total elimination of adware, spyware and other malicious bits of code from end-user desktops over the course of a mere few months.
    • Created numerous small quality-of-life features that, while not taking an inordinate amount of time to develop, scratched the itches of several high-profile groups within the company.
    • Provided valuable specialized knowledge (such as in the areas of web development and Linux operating system arcana) to branches outside the local operation as well as to the corporate office itself.

    My specific product experience is with a mixture of Novell’s Netware server and GroupWise email products, several flavors of Linux including Debian, RedHat/Fedora and Ubuntu, Symantec’s Corporate Edition anti-virus products, Windows 2000 Server, the Apache webserver platform including MySQL and PHP, and providing Windows desktop support over the usual variety of versions from 95 through XP. When you get right down to it, there’s very little I can’t learn in a reasonably short time, and I have a knack for “making it work” when things are going strange.

    If you think I might be a good fit for your organization, or if you just want to find out if I’m really as good as I like to think I am, please take a moment to pen a quick email addressed to “greyduck” at “gmail.com” and I’ll answer any questions or place any call or meet any time you like. (I apologize for the lack of clickable or copy-and-paste-able address, but one can’t be too careful about junk email these days, can one?)

    To you, prospective employer, and to all of my readers, I offer thanks for your time and indulgence, and I bid you a good day.

  • Weekend Bits O’ Random

    Here are some tidbits of life, geekery and what-not:

    • I may, in fact, have been able to salvage the images from the old gallery after all. (First I thought I had them, then I figured I’d lost them, now I think I have them again. We’ll see…)
    • On top of being unemployed, rent is going up. Whee. As a side note, I have about a month of money left. Also, whee.
    • The kids came over today, and we took the opportunity to introduce Kylanath to Settlers of Catan. She had herself a fine, fine streak of Beginner’s Luck Skill and won herself the game. Go figure. (Mind you, the kids both were one point away from winning when the end came. Go, kids!)
    • It’s possible that the firewall trick I used to potentially prevent brute-force login attacks on this webserver is responsible for the server’s periodic unavailability this past week. I’m going to try another technique and see what happens.
    • The job opportunity I really had my hopes up for seems to have dried up completely. That’s a damned shame, really, ’cause I wanted that job badly, and not just because, you know, I’m freaking out about finances. Grr.
    • I’m hanging in there. Barely sometimes, though.

    I could really, really stand for something good to happen. You know, just for the variety.

  • Dining Distractions

    To kick off the reconstructon of my gallery, I would like to share with you a couple of silly images I snapped this afternoon with my Treo 650’s “camera.” (I use the term loosely; it’s only slightly better than the 600’s.) For starters, I got quite a laugh out of this fortune cookie fortune, especially when paired with its packaging.

    “An old friend will introduce you to new people and pleasures.” This, from a package labeled “Lucky Boy”? Oh, my.

    Later, after suffering what could most generously be described as “lackluster service” at Gustav’s, this is how I expressed my disappointment:

    The prime rib french dip was quite tasty, but that’s about the nicest thing I can say about our dining experience this evening. (Why did I have ketchup bowls available to use for the eyes? It’s hard to say, considering we both told Jacqueline, she of the overdone makeup, that we didn’t want any for our fries, thanks.)

    And, before anyone mentions it, yes I know there’s a way to turn the date stamp off. That is, I know that now. Future uploads from my phone… that is to say, pictures I take in the future which make it into my gallery will lack green numbering. (I have one or two pictures saved that will make great future posting fodder. Bwahaha.)

  • Don’t scare me like that!

    After an hour or so of gaming followed by most of an hour on the phone with a particular someone special, I decided to indulge in a pasttime I’ve all but given up in the last few years. Yes, I put on my headphones and listened to music for a while. Hey, the computer was on anyway, trying valiantly to download some anime for my later enjoyment.

    (Keep in mind, now, that a week ago we upgraded the memory in this webserver, and that it hadn’t had a crash for roughly a week before that, even, thanks in part to some configuration tweaks I made a week or so prior to the scheduled upgrade.)

    Imagine my chagrin when I decided to check my email one last time before bed (what? oh, like you don’t. go on, pull the other one.) only to stare in horror at the hourglass cursor as Thunderbird utterly failed to connect to my server. I switched to the console screen and tried a ping. No dice. I could ping, and visit, any number of other addresses… just not mine. I took the next logical step, of course. I called Infinity Internet‘s tech support number and left a detailed message. Once I completed the call, on a whim born out of what could be called a stubborn refusal to accept facts, I tried the ping again.

    You can probably guess what happened.

    Once I finished rolling my eyes in disgust, I placed another call to Infinity’s support line to let them know not to bother rebooting my server…

    As near as I can tell, something external to the server went dead for a little while. The evidence is this line in the /var/log/messages file:

    e100: eth0: e100_watchdog: link up, 10Mbps, half-duplex

    The gist is, that notation tells me that the network cable was unplugged or inactive in some fashion, then came back online, which spawned that “watchdog” message. (Now if only there were watchdog messages about the link being down, I could get a handle on how long we were offline. Argh.) And since that’s the only indication that anything at all went wrong, I’m going with the “someone tripped over a Cat5 cable” theory, until a better theory comes along.

    All’s well that ends well, though.

  • Email-related Fixes

    An update on my massive webserver-status post below: The daily random email alias generator is running again, for those of us who made use of it. (Oddly enough, that generator is the last remnant of code from Monaural Jerk to be used anywhere on our server.) Also, I found the problem with emailed comments showing up with empty “From” addresses. Turns out that it’s a problem related to the installation of Spam Karma 2, and I’ve tweaked the code in that plugin accordingly. (It tries, apparently, to make the “From” address something like “wordpress at domain” but it wasn’t working. I simply changed the parts of the code that created the “Reply-To” header and turned them into “From”.) Now any email spam filters (such as SpamAssassin) won’t be scoring “down” comment notifications because of a missing rather-important email header.

    Not bad for an hour’s work, eh? Speaking of work… I need to go continue looking for that.

  • Mmmm, the fresh scent of rock-bile!

    It’s amazing, the things you can learn by reading webcomics and, sometimes, taking part in their silly online polls. For instance, the Irregular Webomic poll about what one would select as the “most evocative non-food smell” actually turned out with my selected option on top of the standings. David Morgan-Mar, ever the sneaky educator of the masses, tipped his readers to the fact that the scent of the earth after rainfall has a name:

    Petrichor.

    Sometimes, being a word geek can be fun and rewarding!

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