Diary of a Network Geek

wOOt!
We have moved into our new office! Yea! Actually, we moved in yesterday, but I’m just getting to write about it today. It is so, so nice to finally have an actual office. No more Storage Room B!! I’ve been saying that it’s “no big deal”, but it really is. I ordered business cards yesterday, finally, because I also got an actual extension! I feel like a real-live genuine employee now. I guess I’ll start bringing things into the office for my desk now. And, I’ll finally be able to have actual office supplies. Oh, the joy! The rapture of it all!
We’ve hidden our “lab” area behind a bookcase when you walk in the door, which my boss’ boss liked. Our desks are at right angles to each other, but that lets us not have our backs to the door. I don’t mind having my back to my coworker, but I don’t like having my back to the door. I’m just funny like that. It’s really a nice setup. I may have to get a full-spectrum light for my desk, though, to simulate sunlight. And a plant. Yep, I need to bring in a plant. Hey, if enough of you deadbeats who read this blog clicked on ads, I could buy cool stuff for my desk, too! Or, check out the official Diary of a Network Geek Store. Or, better yet, you could hit my ThinkGeek Wishlist… Nah, all you guys are as poor as I am! Oh, for the 90’s again….

Ooo, I lost that “ugly” five pounds I gained while travelling, too. Maybe it was all the extra exercise moving or something, but I’m back down to my “fighting weight” of 175. Sweet.

Looking for a unique china pattern?
Well, there’s a place called Tabletops, Etc. that will find it for you. I know, it’s sort of an unusual thing for me to put on my blog, but… Well, I keep getting these e-mails from them when they find stuff from the Maruta Indian Tree china pattern. They’re coming from an account that I shutdown months ago, but my main account is the default spill-over from the dead accounts, so I keep getting them. I guess I thought if I posted something about it, it would be like voodoo and make the e-mails go away.
Or, I can just flag them as spam. That would work, too.

Well, apparently, I am in touch with the bleeding edge of the IT industry.
Just Saturday I was talking about anonymous browsing, and then yesterday, I got an update from a news feed with an article about just that! This article on InformIT is certainly more detailed that I was and warns you about the potential hazards of being too smug when browsing anonymously. It also goes into a bunch of different options for concealing your identity and doing so at varying levels of security, not to mention the fact that it goes into hiding yourself on the Internet for more than just browsing. (Yes, young’uns, the Internet is much, much more than just the World Wide Web, in spite of what AOL and Microsoft have told you.)
So, though I may be handing dangerous people more sharp objects to play with, I reccomend going and reading the article. For one thing, if you needed me to point these resources out, you probably aren’t really dangerous to me anyway. For another, if you are familiar with the basic techniques, you already know most of what’s in the article. But, no matter your Internet security background, it’s worth reading the article for the review, if nothing else.

Advice from your Uncle Jim:
"May you live all the days of your life."
   --Jonathan Swift

I’ve been extra introspective lately.
I don’t know, maybe it’s the therapy, but I’ve been thinking a lot about my life lately. I guess I didn’t do that as much at the end of the year, because there was so much going on that I didn’t want to have to look at just then. I’ve really done okay, over the years, with my career. It hasn’t always gone the way I’d like, of course, but, still, it’s been okay. I remember telling my Father at one point that I didn’t want to just bounce from job to job, but that I wanted to take control of my career and steer it in a particular direction. He kind of got upset with me, like I’d insulted him or something. It struck me as odd, at the time, because I’d always felt that he’d done a pretty good job of steering his own career, which is what motivated the comment. I think he thought I was saying the opposite.
Anyway, I’ve been going over my history with my therapist, so that meant a lot of talk about jobs. In many ways, as a man, my job has defined me over the years. But, as I went through the different places and the certifications, it didn’t seem like I’d been steering much at all! I just threw myself upon fate and lucked out! I mean, winning the scholarship to pay for my Certified Novell Engineer training was very lucky. Sure, I did the work to maintain it, and even get Linux+ certified, too, but mostly it was luck.
But, one thing I am very proud of is that my Father got me one interview. That’s it, just one. Everything else that’s happened in my career is either due to luck, or my own ability. Sort of bootstrap-levitation. My therapist commented on it and said, “So, you’re really a self-made man, aren’t you?” And, I had to admit with no small amount of pride, that, yes, I am. So, I may not have as much career direction as I’d like, but I have a good job that I enjoy working for a company that I feel good about for a change. In the over all scheme of things, that’s better than a lot of guys ever manage. So, I guess I’m doing okay after all.

Advice from your Uncle Jim:
"Contrary to popular belief, UNIX is user friendly. It just happens to be selective about who it makes friends with."
   --Dave Parnas

Gulp! I’m the Project Manager on that?
Er, uh, okay…. So, it turns out that almost everyone but me was thinking I was the project manager on the remote site standardization project. Which is something else again. Somehow, I got the idea that it was the remote site imaging project. Nope! Nothing like finding out you’re in charge of a big project that’s even bigger than you realized.
So, I guess I’ll be learning MS Project. And, reading a book or two on project management. Not to mention trying to sort out all the issues that have nothing to do with imaging, on which I have been oh, so focused these past six months or so. At least I finished that this morning. Well, except for not having base images done on machines we don’t have yet. That’s not too bad, though, since it would take a miracle to have images of machines that I don’t have in my physical possession. Can’t fault me for that, right? RIGHT?
Well, anyway, it’s business as unusual in my freaky-deaky career. I never know what’s coming around the corner next. I just try to hold on tight and enjoy the ride!

Well, I’m back to something I’m comfortable with at work.
Yep, I finally got most of my end of the workstation imaging project done last week. The basic images for the hardware and the Novell client are all squared away. At least, they are for all the hardware that we have in stock. I still need to get images of one of the older Dell PCs and the engineering laptop, but that’s easy enough now that I have a good idea what I need to do. The hardest part of all this, so far, has been figuring out what should go into the dang image! But, the resident expert on workstation images got me all fixed up in that area and the rest was actually pretty simple.
Now, though, I’ve been back to the Linux-based ZENWorks Imaging partition. We had an “issue” with the restore menu I did. Apparently, if you have an existing partition and only restore one partition of an image, it doesn’t completely wipe the existing partition. In other words, it just copies the files over the existing install. Not good enough for our purposes. So, I had to devise a method for deleting the existing C partition, recreating it and then, finally, restoring it from the local backup image. Not a problem, right? Wrong. I needed to have a universal menu that could tell what size the existing partition was and plug that into the script which recreated the partition. Not quite as easy as it sounds. Well, thanks to sed & awk, second edition, I found a relatively painless and reliable way to get it done. Basically, I run an “fdisk /dev/hda -l”, pull the relevant information from those results with grep and use “awk” to spit out the correct information to populate the variable. Actually, I have to do some mathmatical adjustments to that, too, but, in a nutshell, that’s what I did. If anyone is really interested and doesn’t want to shell out the money for Learning the bash shell, second edition and sed & awk, second edition, I can put the restore menu that I use up on the site. I have to admit, it’s a pretty sweet solution. Hmm, maybe I’ll submit it to Cool Solutions for another t-shirt….
Well, that’s what I’ve been up to at work. If youse guys want to know more, just pop something into the comments!

Oh, Christ, is the only thing I can think to say!
While out looking for something else entrely, I found the strangest website and organization. They call themselves “Liberated Christians” and espouse a very liberal attitude, indeed. According to their website, they see no conflict between the practice of “swinging” or “polyamorism” and Christianity. (If you’re not familiar with these concepts, first off, congradulations! Second, it means having multiple sex partners concurrently.) I cannot imagine what church they’re associated with, unless they’ve created their own. Really, the very idea of this is totally against everything I’ve ever heard or read about the Judeo-Christian tradition. They challenge anyone to show them in the Bible where it says that monogmy is the correct form of marriage and claim that no one can. Personally, I’d refer them to the Book of Deuteronomy, specifically, Chapter 5, verse 18 and verse 21. They seem pretty clear on what not to do, which, by process of elimination, leaves something that suspiciously looks like monogomy.
Of course, I’m still not sure where divorce fits in, but there doesn’t seem to be a prohibition against it anywhere in the Bible that I know of, at least. And, frankly, one at a time seems a whole lot different than what these folks are espousing. Of course, since these rather unusual folks are based out of Phoenix, Arizona, it may be that the heat got to them. I don’t know, maybe there’s just something about living in Phoenix that does something to your thinking. Well, anyway, Phoenix is as good a place as any for them, I suppose. Freaky.

Strange addresses watch my web page.
Who on the other side of disneyOC3-gw.customer.alter.net would be interested in my web page? Does Disney run Novell? Is an imagineer looking for Linux tips? I just can’t imagine what the interest might be, myself. Though, it is cool that I seem to have a fan in South Africa. Never been there, but it always looks beautiful in the documentaries. Besides, that’s where Charlize Theron is from, right? So, that’s all good.
Again, though, who the devil at Winn-Dixie.com would be interested in little, ole’ me? Is this another Novell site? I have a feeling that there are a lot of big Novell shops that are rather “stealth”, if you take my meaning. Of course, I get hits from all kinds of state and local governments, too, but I expect that considering how highly entrenched Novell is in the government sector. Though, I have to admit that the hits I get from .MIL always make me wonder. Is the NSA actually monitoring my communications? Or, Army Intel? Or even, the CIA? In any case, I think it’s great that so many people in the Washington, D.C. area are interested in my website.
Contrast those sites with the all the anonymous browsing sites that hit my page, though. I find that very interesting, indeed. After all, if the United States military isn’t embarassed to be browsing my website and blog, who would be? It certainly can’t be anyone from big business, since, in part, that’s who I cater to here. Is there a closet Novell geek out there who’s afraid his boss might find out? Or, perhaps, she’s afraid that her husband might catch her at something? Oh, whoever you are, just come on out of the closet and say hello! What could be the harm? (Oh, if you’re interested in using any of those free anonymous browsing systems, you can find a decent grouping of them here. Thank you, anonymous fan, whoever you are, for giving me that bit of information!)
Naturally, I find it particularly interesting that a device labeled “virgo-gw.customer.alter.net” seems to like hitting my website. Gee, do I have a secret admirer who just happens to be a Virgo? Well, what the heck, it can’t be worse than any of the Capricorns I’ve known! Say, just what is compatible with a Sagitarius like me? Ah, well, it doesn’t really matter, I guess, since I don’t believe in that hokum. Still, it is fun to speculate, isn’t it?

Yea! Puppies!
Hey, you can get a free puppy kit from Pedigree! Okay, so I’ve been a little dog-obsessed lately, but free stuff is always good, so I thought I’d throw this out for you. I figure, if you had free puppy supplies to help you out, you might be more inclined to go to H.O.P.E. and adopt a dog. So, go click on the first link and order your Pedigree puppy kit, then go to H.O.P.E. and find a doggy to adopt.

Hey, it’s Friday, so click the links and have fun being socially aware.

I’m sure most of my loyal readers have already seen this, but…
Just in case you don’t read Slashdot as compulsively as I do, they recently ran a story, or link to a story on PCPitStop, about a guy who got $1000 for reading the End User License Agreement (EULA) for a little piece of software he installed. I have to confess, I hardly ever read the damn things myself, since they’re mainly boilerplate legal agreements, but maybe I should start! The folks who made this particular piece of software included instructions for claiming a $1000 “consideration” for actually reading their EULA. Pretty cool. And, almost worth reading those long, boring EULAs everyone has. Almost…