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My Cascadia IT Conference 2012 Schedule!

rthomson — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 04:53:42 +0000

As I have announced on various venues, I am attending the Cascadia IT Conference 2012 held in Seattle, WA on March 23 and 24.

I’ve decided on the following track for myself:

23 Morning – Time Management for System Administrators (Tom Limoncelli)
23 Afternoon – The Limoncelli Test (Tom Limoncelli)
24 Morning – Keynote (Stoneware) and Ganeti (Tom Limoncelli)
24 Afternoon – Automating System Administration with CfEngine 3 (Aleksey Tsalolikhin) and Data Like Water (Paul Sanford)

In deciding on my schedule, my priorities were The Limoncelli Test and Automating System Administration with CfEngine 3, I built everything else around that. These were priorities as I am currently pursuing significant interest in cfengine and I believe I will be able to take something useful back to work from The Limoncelli Test right away. In retrospect, perhaps I could have selected Customer Service (Don Crawley) over Time Management for System Administrators as I have read the book but alas never applied it fully (only selectively). Either appears highly useful and engaging.

As primarily a Linux sysadmin, I was rather interested in Root Cause Analysis (Stuart Kendrick), Sysadmin Basics: Power editing with vi (Aleksey Tsalolikhin), Central Logging (Leon Towns-von Stauber), Advanced Topics in Puppet (Garrett Honeycutt) and IPv6 (Owen Delong) but one just can’t attend everything and I made the hard choices. Ganeti just happened to fit in well.

While not immediately eye-catching, perhaps Power Shell Fundamentals (Steven Murawski) would have been a good choice as I will soon be dealing with more Windows. Yet another thing I know I’m bad at but isn’t immediately important is my resume. Perhaps Technical Resume Writing (Nadine Miller) would have been a good idea? And though I’m not a networking guy, I could stand to use wireshark more effectively thus Deep Packet Inspection using Wireshark Using Open Source Tools to Troubleshoot your Network (Mike Pennacchi). While not directly applicable to my job, How to make Wireless Work in a Conference Setting (David Lang) does sound intellectually interesting. Physics!

I look forward to meeting and engaging with my fellow LOPSA members, hopefully over some amazing PNW beer! I’m not usually the first to strike up conversations with unfamiliar faces but this is such a grand opportunity to make an effort and be rewarded.

Bring it on!

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Swag: The Pens Never Work

rthomson — Tue, 05 Jul 2011 20:41:30 +0000

My experience is a little limited in this regard, but I’ve received three notable fairly nice looking, heavy and comfortable swag pens in my life as a sysadmin: IBM, Microsoft and Atempo.

So why is it that none of these pens actually work as a pen? The Microsoft and Atempo pens have what appear to be normal, decent quality cartridges and the IBM pen has a super average cartridge but none of them are able to place a solid a line of ink on a clean piece a paper.

The IBM pen also sports a stylus, LED flashlight and laser pointer and all of those functions work properly… so why can’t the pen function also work? Because it’s a swag pen, that’s why.

“The pens never work.” -rthomson

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Microsoft Nomenclature

rthomson — Tue, 05 Jul 2011 05:25:12 +0000

My friend just linked me to an amazing example of Microsoft nomenclature that he came across while diagnosing a boot problem on his Windows 7 PC. The phrase “WTF?” comes to mind.

From http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314470:

System Volume
The system volume refers to the disk volume that contains the hardware-specific files that are needed to start Windows, such as Ntldr, Boot.ini, and Ntdetect.com.

On computers that are running the Intel x86 line of CPU processors and later versions, the system volume must be a primary volume that is marked as active. This requirement can be fulfilled on any drive on the computer that the system BIOS searches when the operating system starts.

The system volume can be the same volume as the boot volume. However, this configuration is not required.

and

Boot volume
The boot volume refers to the disk volume that contains the Windows operating system files and the supporting files. By default, the Windows operating system files are in the WINDOWS folder, and the supporting files are in the WINDOWS\System32 folder.

The boot volume can be the same volume as the system volume. However, this configuration is not required.

There is only one system volume. However, there is one boot volume for each operating system in a multiboot system.

So… the “system volume” is the volume that contains the boot files and the “boot volume” is the volume that contains the system files. It might have been opposite day when this was named. Yikes.

Thanks for the laugh, Microsoft.

1 Year of WordPress

rthomson — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 06:23:52 +0000

It’s coming up on one year since migrating techslaves.org from the failed community driven SMF/TinyPortal site to the unoriginal WordPress powered sysadmin focused blog you see today. The jury is out on whether this incarnation is failed as well but the parameters for failure are more loosely defined for a random blog than for a community. Without a community, there is no community. For this iteration of techslaves.org to be the same kind of failure the community version was, I would have to be getting negative page views.

As far as WordPress is concerned, it’s much better for the new found purposes of techslaves.org than TinyPortal. Not that TP (hehe, TP) is bad or anything. It’s just not as slick for blog/article publication. WordPress allows me to spend less time formatting articles than TinyPortal did. That, I damn well enjoy. I also spend less time futzing about with the CSS in WordPress because this free theme (Clean Home) is clean and simple: my favourite web design elements. Another significant benefit of WordPress is SEO. I’m not an SEO expert, but the number of views from search engines is definitely up.

The downside to this one way expression is that I barely receive feedback. What I do here isn’t of importance or enough interest to anyone whom actually finds the place, so they probably aren’t going to leave comments. I’m no Tom Limoncelli, Matt Simmons, sysadmin1138 or storagebod and thusly, I don’t share their common trait of regular readers. All that adds up to what feels like me lecturing, yelling, asking questions and ranting into a giant empty space. Sure, it feels good but it’s also strangely egotistical and self serving. Hey, maybe that’s how it’s supposed to feel to be a geek with a blog. Heh.

During the year, I produced about 41 original posts. That’s less than 3.5 per month. And some of the posts are just random things, not even substantial. Output definitely too low, but hell, that’s the story of every web presence I’ve ever had.

Happy WordPress anniversary, techslaves.org! It’s been a fun year.

Quote

rthomson — Wed, 16 Feb 2011 21:44:04 +0000

“Today’s ‘best effort’ is tomorrow’s broken critical service.” – sysadmin1138

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A Tiny Milestone For techslaves.org!

rthomson — Sun, 31 Oct 2010 23:22:51 +0000

techslaves.org hit a tiny milestone today: Over 3000 page views in one month (October)!

That’s pretty darn insignificant in the grand scheme of things, but it’s a milestone for techslaves.org none-the-less. Of course, the vast majority of traffic is related to the iSight Disabler AppleScript but I’m still happy to see that traffic to techslaves.org is increasing in a fairly consistent fashion since the site’s format change and move to WordPress.

Also not surprising is that techslaves.org seems to get more views the more I post. There were 8 posts in october (the most since moving to WordPress in March) and also the most views. Seems like I should keep posting regularly to increase the number of eyeballs on techslaves.org.

Although 3000 page views in one month is nothing, it still makes me happy. Thanks for making me happy readers and iSight Disabler downloaders!

I’m in z-push Limbo

rthomson — Sat, 16 Oct 2010 06:32:04 +0000

Sparked by the purchase of a new phone with Internet connectivity and native support for push email (ableit with ActiveSync), I decided to see what I could do about pushifying the IMAP server at work.

We run Dovecot 1.1 with a MySQL backend and Postfix for MTA duties. Everything requires both TLS and SSL for authentication and everything requires authentication except for sending mail from the local subnet. It works pretty well. I never touch the thing anymore, it just runs. However, it doesn’t support push email and it certainly doesn’t support ActiveSync. So I went looking for something that could do push email to my spankin’ new phone.

I was surprisingly happy to discover z-push, an open source, standalone ActiveSync implementation in PHP. Well hot damn!

I initially installed the latest stable release, but then quickly tried the SVN trunk for any potential fixes that have yet to make it out to the stable release because I wasn’t having much success. After a few simple problems got resolved and I was updated to the SVN trunk things started to work… kind of. The initial sync takes forever! I didn’t have the patience to wait for all my mail to download because it appeared to be taking several minutes per email. The folder list loaded right up and my nearly empty inbox too but any folder with more than a few messages was taking forever to sync. Not to mention the apache server started to churn CPU pretty hard on the server. Also, it seemed the sync would only even start to work if I had “No Limit” selected on the iPhone for history of emails to sync. Maybe the large volume initial sync by using “No Limit” is just too taxing and that’s why it’s brutally slow but I kept getting “Cannot Get Mail – The connection to the server failed.” on my iPhone if I selected any option besides “No Limit”.

On top of that, push didn’t work!

I’ll keep plugging away at it next week, maybe post on the z-push forums to see if I can get this figured out. Cheers for now.

When using Syncrepl…

So I Bought a New Phone…

rthomson — Wed, 13 Oct 2010 01:51:13 +0000

…and you guessed it, it’s an iPhone 4.

My previous phone was old faithful: a Nokia 6020 that was, hilariously enough, my first cell phone. My Nokia took many beatings over it’s lifetime including two dips in the ocean and recovered from temporary problems as a result in very short order. It always just worked as a phone and nothing more. It’s battery lasted long enough that I would pretty much forget to charge it after a week or two and realize I have next to zero battery left at inopportune times because charging it was the furthest thing from my mind.

But now it’s out with the old and in with the new. Goodbye Nokia 6020, hello iPhone.

There are huge tradeoffs. Voice + data = more $$$ per month than just voice. But with that increased cost of ownership I get mobile Internet, something that a geek like me has wanted for a long time but had a really hard time justifying. The old phone would go way longer between charges but the iPhone does so much more on a charge. The list goes on and on.

Suffice to say, I’m happy for now but let’s wait for the excitement to die off and then I can really start to asses the cost/benefit ratio of this slick little black and steel rectangular box.

“Put it in H!”

rthomson — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 22:48:55 +0000

I can’t help but share my Simpson’s nerddom.

It’s from a recent trip to Europe (this was in Prague)… I had to take a picture when I saw it.

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iPod Touch Woes

rthomson — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 22:25:14 +0000

That’s right, my 1st generation iPod touch has been troublesome lately.

First, I took it snowboarding and it decides to get wet and short the battery somehow, killing it. Bad iPod! I told you not to get wet but you wouldn’t listen! At first I wasn’t sure if the battery really was dead or if the iPod itself had died. I quickly found out the battery was at fault when plugging it into my Macbook and seeing it come alive… too bad it was demanding that I restore it.

So, I tried to restore it. Turns out you can’t restore an iPod touch that doesn’t have a working battery. Part way through the restore, the iPod would die, presumably because it would disconnect from the USB power momentarily. Fine, I bought a new battery and soldered the three tiny little wires in and tried to restore it… and BAM! same problem! Ok, my fault, I didn’t let the battery charge enough. Once charged, I was able to perform the restore.

Now after waiting quite some time for the iPod backup to restore and my music to sync, I try plugging in my headphones to listen to some music. Nothing. The software volume slider is there and I can turn up the volume all the way but nothing. Some jiggling of the jack allows for one channel to come through all muddled. Open the iPod back up and I notice how I destroyed the ribbon cable going from the board to the jack during the battery replacement! Noooooooo.

I actually spent time trying to run four cables to jump the broken ribbon cable, but I didn’t heed my friend’s advice: There was no space for four wires in that tight case. Absolutely no way I could put the back on with those four “jumper” wires crudely soldered in. I also ended up shorting out at least two of the four leads, making my iPod think some kind of remote volume control was plugged in and preventing the display of the software volume controls! I decided to remove my failed attempt at fixing the headphone jack ribbon cable.

I’ve now ordered a replacement jack and I’m going to learn about the joys of soldering a ribbon cable to a tiny PCB. Wish me luck for when it arrives!