Monthly Archives: August 2005

Google Talk

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Ok everyone is on about it and it was only anncounced today, but I’m on Google Talk, the new Instant Messaging service from Google. You can add me – adamsweet@gmail.com please only do so if we have spoken before.

You can use Google Talk on Windows with the Google Talk client, Mac with iChat or Gaim or Linux with Gaim.

Currently, voice is only available with the Google Talk client, but working is ongoing to add SIP support to Gaim which would mean that the rest of the world would be able to join in as Google Talk is built on the Jabber protocol.

It remains to be seen what Google Talk will offer that MSN Messnger, Yahoo Messenger and AIM don’t but I personally welcome the features that have been available elsewhere using proprietary software on my Linux machine using open source software. I hate using MSN Messenger.

In a related thought – why on Earth are people still using Windows?

Digging My Way Out

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The catastrophes at work seem to be edging out of the way 🙂

I have a new backup machine, a grip on the server monitoring, text messages when something dies (though strangely nothing has since), a hand on the DNS system, a plan to make things recoverable within minutes and a replacement for the flakiest server in the world.

At last I can move on to doing things the way I want them instead of fire fighting all the time. It’s been a hairy few weeks and I’ve learned a lot. In fact when I review what I’ve done in the last few days, I’ve learned so much since I started work here.

Top of my personal list of priorities now are learning to sed, awk and shell script properly. I could do with a firmer hold on DNS too. I’d like to learn PyGTK also, but thats a little further away, the others are more of an immediate need. On a work note, I need to work out how to record bandwidth usage on a per machine basis. SNMP has been mentioned, but it looks *hard* and I’m not convinced it’s do-able that way. Suggestions?

See you at the SysAdmin of the Year awards 😉 Not that I’d win even if such a thing existed…

V Festival 2005

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Ok, no updates for a while as I’ve been ill for the last few days of last week and I was at V Festival all weekend. This post is especially aimed at Rachel who asked me to write a new blog post because she’s addicted. Woohooooo hi Rach 🙂

Wow, V was great. So much happened this weekend, I’ll cut to the chase. The Kaiser Chiefs were fucking incredible and by most accounts stole the entire festival. Absolutely fantastic. I Predict a Riot was, well, a riot. The Ordinary Boys were also outstanding in my mind. As was pointed out, they do sound like most of my favourite bands (The Clash, The Ruts, The Specials and so on. I also hear hints of The Smiths and Shed Seven and… and…), they were excellent.

Also top memories were Goldie Lookin’ Chain, the whole crowd cracked up when they sang, “I wanna fuck yer sister. And yer best friend” before concluding “It’s not me you wanna worry about, it’s my brother, he’s fucking yer mother.”

I watched The La’s play, maybe 15 years since they were last seen together and they were… boring. It’s easy to forget that no matter how much ‘There She Goes’ plays on the heartstrings as an enduring, blissful teenage memory, they still only had one good song. I remember reading (after their demise) about how The La’s had been labelled as the new Beatles and the saviours of the British music scene, only for the recording of their debut album to be blighted by the sacking of various drummers, arguing, accusations of heroin abuse by Lee Mavers and problems with producers and so on. Most fingers pointed to Mavers’ being a talented but unworkably awkward arsehole. And well that seemed to be true of this weekend. While most people who know about The La’s probably would have liked Mavers to open his mouth to acknowledge the crowd, he saved his vocal chords for singing and shouting at the drummer. They didn’t know which songs were next and the sound was unbalanced though thats not their fault. I just thought that the set sort of meandered and even There She Goes sounded awkward.

The Doves, Good Charlotte and The Bravery were all great and Jet rocked hard even though I went to get some food while they were on.

Aside from all the music, there was great fun with the people I went with. Lindsay, Becky, Liz, Gemma, Pat, Simon, Kel(l?), Nikki and Rob. We had a great time, the first day is the official day of drinking. Lindsay had to be held up from around 5:30 onwards and I was so drunk and falling asleep by 10pm or so that we headed off to bed and so I missed Ian Brown, The Prodigy and The Scissor Sisters. Gemma told Lindsay it was about 5 in the morning in a bid to get her to go to sleep though we sat around doing impressions of the opening lines of Shameless while publicly urinating, some of us more shamelessly than others…

Needless to say we spent the following day shouting, “Sca-urh” and “Theh know ‘ow ter throw a paaaaar-eh” at each other and cracking up.

I woke up freezing at 7:30am and again feeling fuzzy at around 9:30am but was ok after a bacon baguette and a cup of greasy tea (wtf?). Oasis were the last band of the night and it was lighters in the air and arms around each other singing as loud as can be. I’m not much of a fan of the last few albums, but they they were cool, though I would have liked the rhythm guitar louder in the mix to get the wall of guitars sound they are known for.

I grabbed some food, said goodbye to everyone and headed to the car as I had to be at work in the morning. I was maybe half a mile from the exit and there must have been 1000 cars ahead of me, none of them moved in half an hour. So, desperately tired I elected to pull out of the queue and sleep in the car until it had cleared as I needed sleep and didn’t want to be awake until half 2 in the morning when I had to be up for work at 7. I slept until around 3, got home at half past, got to bed at 4 and woke up at half 7 and went to work absolutely shattered, but at least I got as much sleep as I could. Next year I will either sleep over the extra night or book the Monday off work.

It was an incredible weekend.

Regrets?

With the mobile phone networks struggling I couldn’t arrange to meet Dan or Rachel. I still haven’t learned not to drink all day on Saturday and then be too drunk to do anything by Saturday night, even though my hangovers at V clear quicker than any other time, anywhere else.

It appears that tickets for next year are already available at this year’s prices for a limited time only.

It Was Me

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Yeah, that’s me on the latest episode of LUG Radio, season 2 episode 23.

Aq was away and so they asked me to fill in for the night. Nice one 🙂 I have to say I was a little apprehensive about listening to it, I thought I would come across as a bumbling idiot with a stupid accent, deep voice and without a useful thing to say. While I don’t come across too much different to that, it’s better than I expected. I didn’t feel nervous at the recording but the first time I opened my mouth to say anything, I choked on what I was trying to say, but I think I settled in reasonably quickly.

I would like to think that I might get the chance again and hopefully will have something more useful to say as on this occasion I had around 6 hours between being asked and sitting there recording, for 5 of those hours I was at work.

We interview Greg Mancusi-Ungaro, head of Linux marketing at Novell about Open SuSE and Joe Shaw about Beagle. We also discuss whether podcasting can live up to it’s hype, do a retrospective of the season and then play out with some of the seasons best moment over the top of a recording of Jono and I jamming the LUG Radio theme tune (me on bass, Jono on drums).

Anyway, the last episode of the current series of LUG Radio is out there and I’m on it. Go get it here.

On a Crash Course

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Ok I got back to work after What The Hack and I am now the senior sysadmin as my boss has now left. I’m a reasonable sysadmin but I’m still learning the ropes with regard to what I have actually taken over, so guess what happens.

First morning back and I’m in need of a gentle day browsing the net, writing email and reading my planets of choice, the main monitoring machine, running Nagios, goes down. Hard disk completely fucked, isn’t even recognised by the BIOS. Is it backed up? Is it my arse. So I spend the rest of the week flying blind and not knowing when things go down while I try to get my machine back up. This is not as easy as it sounds, I don’t know Nagios so it’s a crash course. I’m nearly there now, I just have to finish getting gnokii to send me sms messages, separating the config out into different files and adding the rest of the machines and services to the monitoring. The only problem is that we had a script and a database that created our DNS config files which was also not backed up as far as I can tell and like Nagios, it went down with the disk, so next time I have to add a new domain I’m going to have to go on a BIND crach course. Arse.

I begin to devise my own very comprehensive backup and mirroring scheme. All of our clients data is safe as houses of course, but I fear for the configuration of the infrastructure machines that I have inherited and I don’t want to have to rewrite it from scratch. I don’t want my BIND crash course to be a live crash course. Paranoia is a good trait in a sysadmin. Lesson 1: legislate for absolute catastrophe.

So, while I’m getting there with that, one of my tape backup drives dies and none of the spares work. So I’m waiting for the new drive to arrive before I start my Amanda crash course.

I was expecting the new drive today, but there was an error with the retailer’s stock levels and they don’t have the number we ordered and didn’t ship it. So maybe tomorrow.

Anyway, I’ve stepped ahead of myself a little here. That was sometime this afternoon. Last night I was helping my friend Dan move some stuff out of his old house as he has to clear the place before the landlord goes in. As gnokii isn’t texting me yet, I was unaware until this morning that one of our servers went down and wouldn’t come back up. When I found out this morning, I tried to do what I could but there was no way in remotely so, as is my responsibility, I raced into work early to sort it out. Disk errors. Lots of ’em. I fixed them but there were some complicated replication services on other machines that were dependent on this machine being available, so this problem made a mess of quite a few things. My boss managed to sort that mess out and we then spent the rest of the day building a replacement machine to take the weight of the one that went down. Hmmm crash course in installing a binary kernel module on the only supported Linux version with a huge list of kernel boot parameters on an unwilling RAID system. Took all day to get right, including trying out all of the available options that meant avoiding the binary only kernel module. Why these people don’t open source their driver I don’t know. It would mean someone could maintain the driver and bring it up to date with current mainline kernels and maybe get in the kernel proper. It would also add a sales point to their device that it is supported by the Linux kernel proper and free them in some sense of developer responsibility.

Anyway, I have to spend tomorrow installing all of the necessary, moving over the necessary from the other machine and then replacing the unnecessary, which will be a 5am start on Thursday morning :s

Just a hint to the readers: this is not indicative of the stability or quality of my employers servers, of the quality of service my company provides or the ability of the former or current sysadmins. You just don’t hear sysadmins whining out loud like this that often 😉

That was What The Hack

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Got back from What the Hack late last Sunday in time to visit my girlfriend, whose birthday it was and who was gracious enough to not dump me for going away over her birthday.

Man, what a time. To be honest I didn’t do anything or see anything. We got wasted every night. Jono, Aq, Bill, Matt, Garp and Graham who were my travelling companions and myself spent the 4 days or so sitting around hacking on a few things in the non-security sense. Jono played with gstreamer 0.9, while I tried not to die of a hangover.

Aq, Jono and Bill also spent a good amount of time laughing at the chinny raccoon and gimping up suitable mockups of all manner of chin related articles, culminating in the Little Book of Chin (link sadly dead). For anyone who hasn’t got a clue what this is all about, it is embedded in British schoolboy humour and is to do with the fact that when someone is lying you say they have a Jimmy Hill chin (Jimmy Hill is an English ex-footballer with an infamously large chin who became renowned as a pundit for talking crap). Therefore you might start stroking your chin is you are implying someone is bullshitting. Furthermore you might say that you, “Chinny reckon” in so much as you reckon (not) with added chin, hence you chinny reckon. Jono and Aq employ this mightily on LUG Radio.

Anyway, in true Planet Gnome style, here is the 5 things I learned at WTH:

  1. Geeks can’t dance for shit. I’ve never seen anything so funny, it’s like an American high-school movie with all of the ‘cool’ kids taken out and all the dorks taking their chance to shine. Awful.
  2. Having a gay, Germanic looking geek head bull-like towards you, stop dead in front of you and stare at you for 5 seconds longer than is comfortable with their head at a coquettish angle, is scary enough to make you clench so tight that your bumhole turns into an impenetrable wall of steel.
  3. Night-time musical entertainment sure wasn’t any higher than an after thought on the agenda, if the quality of the output was anything to go by.
  4. Eindhoven is a quiet, unpopulated city, where there are very few people walking about. We concluded this to be because everyone was at work and not hanging around like jobless, dole scrounging wasters like in England.
  5. There are a lot of dull, braying, over-confident arseholes making a fuss of themselves in front of everyone, unaware of the fact that they are short, fat, squat looking and lacking in any kind of social skills. Sadly most of these people were British.

And there you have it. That was What the Hack.