Stuff at work

I got my rackmounts!! Okay, they're really Signal's, but still. I got to hook them up, install stuff on them, and now I'm configuring them. Ohhh.. feel the power. (Okay, they're not ALL that powerful, only 2.8 x86-64 Xeons with 1G ram and 40G raid1 drives, and there's 3 of them, 2 to replace old servers, but still.) We (that being Signal) is slowly moving towards a more professional network and server setup. We have a real switch at the core now (24-port gigabit switch, that), most of the computers are 2 GHz or better (only one now is below my specs, and that'll be fixed in the new fiscal year at work starting Friday). We're migrating our Exchange (ugh) server to one of the rackmounts, and then two linux boxes (our production and development web servers, to be precise) to the rackmount. And we're ordering a SATA-raid 1 hot swappable bay for our linux file server so that we can move all of our file serving (and not just the "downloads and installers" folder) onto the linux box. Then we'll just be using windows for the bits of our web app that run in ASP/IIS (devel and production), our MS SQL servers (devel and production) and our exchange box. Our linux mold grows. :) (of course, it would help if I had pre-downloaded the x86-64 RPMs for SuSE 9.3, instead I have to wait a day or so for them to download because I only had the i586/i686 folders.)

Visited States Map

create your own visited states map
or check out these Google Hacks.

Greylisting

If you run a mailserver: If you're not greylisting yet, you should be. Man, what a difference in spam it makes! We implemented a greylisting addin for postfix, tumgreyspf (sorry, no link, you can Google it), and suddenly we have almost no spam. We were definitely getting more and more spam, I would get ~30 a day, and now I'm getting 1 or 2 a day. Eventually, the spam programs will start to mark domains that appear to be greylisting as doing so, and try again in 5 minutes, but it's an arms race, and for now this really helps.

Life Update

Okay, a few things: one - it's raining again. And this time, not too hard, so I can Blog In The Rain. It's my equivalent of singing in the rain. Okay, you knew I was weird.

Second - I spoke with Rabbi Booth over at Bnei Havurah. So, seems like I should be able to move forward - he gave me a list of books to read and to make another appointment for next month (or at least, that's how I interpreted it!). I'll be attending shabbat services there pretty much from now on (although of course I will occasionally still visit Micah as well as Shabbat Unplugged over at Emanuel). But it's kinda nice to be working towards conversion again. I was ecstatic for a good couple of days afterwards (only now winding down).

Third - ramen is GOOD. I really only like chicken, but still. Okay... I'm now helping to take care of the rose bush - I think I'll survive, we'll see. The cat does NOT appreciate my blogging outside where she can hear me but I can't pet her...

Last - I have to clean the house (which it could use anyways) as grandma's feeling well enough to come over and see the new place (she's the only one who hasn't seen it at all in the family, and half the family hasn't seen it moved-in anyways). So I get to do that, maybe tomorrow night. Tonight I want to relax and eat my dinner. Okay, enough chattering for now.

Oh, one last thing: we got $5K at work to buy our rack mount servers. Yay! We're slowly moving towards a more professional, more serious, network and server configuration. It's only 3 servers (originally the budget called for a fourth server, a dual-3G proc behemoth, but that got cut from the budget, and the $5K won't stretch that far). And things at work are going well, with the PHP migration and all, so I'm happy on that front.

More solaris 10

Okay, more Solaris 10. If you liked apt-get, or aptitude (from Debian), or liked rpm, urpmi, etc.. (from RPM-based distros like Fedora or SuSE), then go to BlastWave, which makes pkg-get for solaris. Oh. Wow. Nice, it's alot like apt-get, and it makes using the CLI on solaris a lot easier..

Zones are nice, but READ THE MAN PAGE for zonecfg. It will tell you how to change a file system so that it's read only, and change the networking, and all. Don't bang your head against the wall trying to do it without reading the man page!

More later. Oh, and OpenSolaris is now out. I may have to poke my nose into there.

Blogging in the rain

I was going to blog in the rain. But it got a little close with the lightning. Anyways, now I get to watch my wife play Mario Kart. Maybe I'll go back out if it passes enough. Get to plant a rose bush tomorrow. Nothing much else to report.

solaris 10 (part 1 of what's sure to be a multi-part thing)

Solaris 10. Oy. Okay, a couple of things:

1. smcwebserver is useless because Sun did not ship any modules for it with Solaris 10. A look through bigadmin will find the article where this is posted. Anyways, smc at least IS usable, but only if you hunt for the toolbox file. Execute this: cd /; find . | grep tbx and you will find a few toolbox files - the one you want is the smc.tbx file - it appears to include the others, and gets you the basic smc experience;

2. X. Where is X? If you loaded Solaris 10 and did not get a GUI when you rebooted, the install program might have decided that your video card isn't good enough. So, from a console, do this: cd /usr/X11R6/bin; ./xorgconfig. When that's done, run gdm. At some point, set gdm to start automatically (I forget where that is, I suspect in smc somewhere).

My travails with solaris 10 continue...

Debian 3.1 and CDROM problems

If you are loading Debian 3.1, and you are having a problem where it's not loading from the CD, try to "Cancel", "Locate CD", and then try again. Sarge has this problem where it doesn't always set the $stage variable. You can validate this by hitting Alt-F4 (log screen) and it'll show that it can't find /cdrom/dists//Release (not, the double slash there, it SHOULD have sarge inside of them). That means that it's not sure what releases are on your CD. Having it re-locate and scan the CD fixes this. Oh, and make sure you're not in a shell in the /cdrom directory when you do this (like I did), as it umount's the folder and then scans, and if you're in it, it can't unmount it, and so it doesn't re-scan it..

Some bad poetry I just made

It binds, and frees
Swirling around in the head
It questions all answers
And answers all questions

It feeds the hunger
and yet causes hunger for more
It is called a Tree of Life
May I build a treehouse?

(if you know me, please don't mention this to me, I'll have to be rather embarrased about it)