freemode.net

Ten Commandments of System Administration    [ Humor ]

I. Thou shalt not break shit.
II. Thou shalt not break shit.
III. No, really, thou shalt not break shit.
IV. If thou dost break shit, thou shalt notify thy manager and fix the shit.
V. Thou shalt document thy shit.
VI. Thou shalt communicate with thy team about thy shit.
VII. Thou shalt make backups of thy shit.
VIII. Thou shalt test thy backups of thy shit.
IX. Thou shalt endeavor to keep thy workings of shit invisible to thy users.
X. Thou shalt always have a plan B when the shit hits the fan.

What OS are you?    [ Humor ]

BBspot has a cute quiz to match your personality with an operating system.   (I'm PalmOS).

I am a member of no organized political party.    [ Politics ]

I am a Democrat.   Since they can't even agree on what American foreign policy should be, methinks it's gonna be a long road to the White House for 'em.

[ Apologies to Will Rogers. ]

The storm of '03    [ News ]

It's Monday and there's over a foot of snow on our new deck, and drifts over two feet high between our front door and our cars.   The snow's finally stopped after getting over an inch per hour on Sunday, and most folks in our neighborhood are still shoveling themselves out.   Government officials around are saying that it'll take until Wednesday or Thursday to get the roads cleared and most services restored to normal order.

The federal government and Prince William County schools are closed tomorrow, so Jessica & I get to stay home on Tuesday.   Wheee!

Iraqi and North Korean missiles    [ Politics ]

Was listening to the reports about North Korea's missile program, the fact that they likely have 1-2 nuclear warheads, that the IAEA is escalating the Korean issue to the Security Council, and the rhetoric from Pyongyang that any economic sanctions will be viewed as an act of war - and then heard about the Iraqi-missiles-might-fly-further-than-93-miles story.

I may be crazy, but which one sounds like more of a threat?   The one who's hosting UN inspectors looking at its rediculously-short-range missiles which may or may not actually have non-conventional warheads, or the one who's kicked out UN inspectors, starting up its plutonium-producing reactors, and has missiles (not tested yet, but they have a history of testing them at touchy times) capable of actually reaching our country with a nuclear payload?

Visio stencils    [ Software ]

If you ever use Visio for any kind of productive work, you might find yourself searching for stencils.   Cisco and HP have stencils available for their gear, but Sun is notable for NOT having any available.   You can go to Altima Technologies' VisioStencils site to pay for good-quality stencils of Sun gear.   MVPS.org also has a good list of 3rd-party Visio stencils available for purchase or download.

Debian 2.2 under VMware    [ Software ]

In my continuing quest to install and play with as many different *nixes on as many different platforms as possible, I've been working on a Debian 2.2 install under VMWare Workstation 3.2 (running on Win2K for work-related reasons).   Debian's pretty straightforward, but this is probably the sixth or seventh Debian 2.X install I've done on x86 hardware, so it's all familiar at this point.

One sticky point - if you don't remember to load the 'pcnet32' module during the install, you'll have to do a:

# insmod pcnet32
# ifconfig eth0 [whatever-options-you-normally-throw-at-ifconfig]

to get it up and running after the install.   To bring these up automatically at boot, edit /etc/modules to include a line for 'pcnet32' and edit /etc/network/interfaces to include a line for eth0, perhaps similar to:

iface eth0 inet dhcp

That will also allow 'ifup' and 'ifdown' to work properly.

Command prompt here    [ Software ]

This is a tip I saw years ago, but I've never written it down.   So after about three minutes of googling, I found the Microsoft TechNet article on how to set up a "Command prompt here" option when you right-click on a folder.

Basically, you write a bit of code to interface with Windows Scripting Host:

Set objShell = CreateObject("WScript.Shell") objShell.RegWrite "HKCR\Folder\Shell\MenuText\Command\", "cmd.exe /k cd " & chr(34) & "%1" & chr(34) objShell.RegWrite "HKCR\Folder\Shell\MenuText\", "Command Prompt Here"

Save it as a .VBS file and run it, and it'll add the registry entries to invoke a command prompt in the right-click menu for directories.   Comes in handy for running CLI tools against specific files, like checking MD5 sums on ISOs that you've downloaded.   This should work on NT4, Win2K, WinXP and .NET server without a problem.

Staying up to date    [ Software ]

Anyone who administers a *nix box has done this task, but it can be hard to remember what particular steps you need to take on a given system to download & install patches, synch up the source code and rebuild the kernel + userland, or grab updated binary packages.   So I'll try to compile a list of basic outlines for updating different Unix-ish operating systems.

Moore's law hits my pocketbook    [ Geekiness ]

So it's been nearly a year since I last upgraded my home PC.   The 1.4Ghz Athlon is running on an EPoX 8KTA3+ mobo with two sticks of 256MB PC133 modules from Crucial and PNY and is supplemented by an eVGA 64MB NVidia GeForce2 MX card that got decent reviews and was comparatively cheap at the time.   The system works pretty well minus occasional overnight random reboots, but the latest and greatest games slow down a bit, and the Civ3 PTW TETurkhan Test of Time mod takes a looong time to get through turns.

It's time to start looking around and see what's on the market, and play the "how much can I get for how little?" game again.

Ad Astra Per Aspera    [ News ]

Was driving home from the Potomac Falls invitational this morning, and turned on WTOP to hear that the space shuttle Columbia appears to have broken up in re-entry over Dallas/Ft Worth TX.   NASA officials at Kennedy Space Center have declared a "Space Shuttle Contingency".

Slashdot has an article posted on this, as does CNN.

Ad astra per aspera.   May the lives of the men and women aboard STS-107 be honored, and may the space program of the United States continue onwards despite this tragedy.