Diary of a Network Geek

As a terminally single person, I think we should throw off the bonds of servitude to an empty, consumer holiday and rename St. Valentine’s Day.

You see, not only is this a day that greeting card companies crafted into a reason to waste money on cards, flowers and candy for someone who should love you without all that junk, but it was also a very important day in Chicago history. Today is the day when, in 1929, Al “Scarface” Capone gathered together seven of his closest friends and gunned them down. Yep, the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. Old Al was clever, too. Not only did he get seven of his arch rival’s men together, but he dressed his hired guns up as police officers so that if they were spotted any witnesses would assume everything was under control because the police were already there! Yes, sir, that Al sure was an innovator.
So, as you shell out your hard-earned cash for disposable junk that will most likely go to waste, or waist, as the case may be, remember how they used to celebrate St. Valentine’s Day in the old days. For those of us who have been single more often than we’ve been involved on this “happy” holiday, it sort of feels about the same, doesn’t it?

Something else to keep in mind this year as you wallow in artificial romance, the saint for whom this day is named was a martyr. What does that mean to you and me? Well, it means that Saint Valentine was beaten almost to death and then beheaded on this day. Later he went on to perform miracles and all that to become a saint, but, today is the day we celebrate the fact that a hired mob worked him over pretty well with clubs and then chopped his head right off. Sort of sounds like how love feels for some of us about this time of year, doesn’t it?

Hey, all joking and dark humor aside, I hope everyone has a nice day today, whether they have someone to share it with or not.

Well, we’ve just started the new year and I already have medical adventures to report for the year.

First, this past Friday my cardiologist finally reviewed my ultrasound and relayed through an assistant that my blood clots seem to have finally disappeared. So, not only do I no longer have to worry about a heart or lung embolism, not to mention a stroke, but I have come off the blood thinners. Yea! I can actually feel the difference already.

Secondly, I have the first of four scans coming up next month. Specifically, Thursday, March 13th, I’m scheduled for a CAT scan. And, I have three more after that this year, so there will be plenty of radioactive material to drink. Not to mention the barium enemas!

And, finally, in non-medical news, but just as sad…
I’m on the verge of becoming a celibate monk. No, really. Match.com was nice and all, but there were too many easy ways to rule myself out before even approaching someone. And, sadly, the reverse was true, too. I can’t seem to meet single women who aren’t off limits, for one reason or another, at church. Married women show up all the damn time, but single? Not so much.
So, unless, gentle readers, you have been hiding all your single, female, not-crazy friends, dating seems like a bleak wasteland to me. No, more like a bleak post-Apocalyptic, Australian landscape filled with ravenous hordes of zombies. Well, perhaps not quite that bad, but damn close.
Ah, well, there’s always eHarmony!

Trying to get back to basics.

So, as many of my long-time readers know, I used to write. Well, I used to write fiction. Oh, okay, I used to write a lot more fiction. But, I get distracted easily. Apparently, so do a lot of writers. It’s very easy for me to get obsessed with formats and customizing displays and so on. More so when I’m having trouble with plots. Or endings. Or, most often, beginnings.

So, when I saw an article on 43 Folders about Scrivener and other simple writing tools for OS X. Sadly, everything he talked about was for Mac only, but he linked to a Slate article on the same subject titled In search of the distraction-free computer desktop, which had a few more options.
Now, I’ve read more books and articles about writing and the writing trade than I care to admit, so I’ve seen a lot of information about different writer’s writing environments and choices. Steven Brust, who writes top-notch fantasy, uses Emacs and macros to export that to Word format to send to publishers. I tend to use OpenOffice Writer, because I can use it on any platform I might find myself and my backup laptop is running Linux. But, the articles talked about several options that I haven’t looked into yet.

One that seemed very popular is called Scrivener, but, sadly, it’s only available for OS X. Another was called WriteRoom and it has a “clone” for Windows called DarkRoom. I liked the look of DarkRoom because it was, well, simple and clean and I’ve just about convinced myself that’s what I need. A simple, clean interface with minimal distraction so that I can get to the business of writing. Finally, there was a Windows-only program called RoughDraft that one of the commenters suggested. It, too, has a clean, simple interface, though it looks more like a old-fashioned Windows file-manager than anything else. And, neither of those options truly addresses the fact that I really want to be able to write on my Linux laptop in a pinch with the same tools and configuration.
So, in the end, I’ll probably just stick with OpenOffice. Perhaps I can find a way to customize and simplify the interface on Writer to my liking. Surely, someone, somewhere, has done this and has a convenient HowTo. If not, maybe I’ll do that myself and write it up.

Then, of course, I’ll have to find another excuse not to write…

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

Apparently, the Hello, Kitty Army is a little better armed than I suspected.
They now have an AR-15, Hello Kitty model.

Now, why doesn’t GI Joe have one of these any more?

I don’t think I’ve mentioned this before.

Some time ago, I was having problems with traffic on my network. Something, somewhere was apparently causing some issues with bandwidth on our Internet connection. Or, at least, that’s what our ISP kept telling us. It was, I think, the excuse they were using to avoid dealing with an e-mail problem.
Regardless, I had to find a tool to monitor our network traffic. I ended up using Wireshark for that, but along the way, I discovered a number of OpenSource monitoring tools for various purposes. The one that impressed me the most was Nagios.

Nagios is, according to the opening paragraph on their website, “an Open Source host, service and network monitoring program.” While I never did configure anything to monitor the network, per se, I did configure this to watch both local servers and third-party web and mail servers.
First of all, it’s important to know that Nagios runs on Linux. So, to install the software, you first have to have an available Linux server on which to install it. I’m using an old workstation that I installed the latest version of Fedora, the free version of RedHat. Getting the initial install done wasn’t very hard at all. In fact, there were RPMs available, so all I had to do was use RedHat’s package manager to get the base install loaded on the machine.

After the initial software load, I mainly followed the Quick Install instructions that they link to on the first page. Then, since I was mainly monitoring Windows servers and workstations, I found the cleverly titled help page, “Monitoring Windows Machines“, and followed that. This page ran me through the basics of installing the NSClient++ on a Windows machine and configuring Nagios to connect to and monitor that client. One thing that I had to find out the hard way was that the entries for the monitored systems have to be duplicated for each host. In other words, there is no way to just list all the Windows systems you want to monitor. You have to created entries describing each host individually. That’s not a big deal, honestly, since you can open the configuration files in a text editor and just copy, paste and edit the required entries.
I did have a few false starts here, until I figured out the correct syntax and the fact that every host has to be part of a previously defined group. But, other than that little glitch, configuration was fairly simple.

It took a little more digging, but I later found instructions for passively monitoring services running on servers without a client. I now use my private installation of Nagios to monitor our company webserver, both POP3 and SMTP on our hosted e-mail server, as well as my two Windows 2003 servers. I can even check on the Microsoft SQL database, thanks to information I got from this post on the OSdir mailarchive. And, did I mention that all this software was free? Yeah, the documentation wasn’t the best and it took me a little while to figure out the install and config, but it was far easier than the other monitoring software I played with and I can let anyone who has the username and password check these stats from their own workstation via a web browser. How cool is that? Oh, and did I mention that this can be used to monitor Linux/Unix systems, Windows systems and even Netware systems? Nagios pretty well covers it all!
(Oh, and as a side note, if you’re messing around with the configuration and want to reset the statistics, just stop the service and delete /usr/local/nagios/var/status.dat, then restart the service. All your counts will zero and all the checks will start fresh.)
In short, if you’re looking for a low-cost but versatile monitoring system and aren’t afraid to read the documentation, I highly recommend investigating Nagios.

I have a moral dilemma to pose for my readers.

Now, before I get too far, yes, this is directly applicable to my life, but, no, I’m not going into details on that. I’ve generalized the scenario to protect the innocent, and me.

Okay, so, here’s the scenario…
Say you’ve given up on the on-line dating thing because it’s too easy to find reasons to eliminate people based on silly criteria, like height and what book they last read, right? And, naturally, all the people you know are married or at least involved with someone. Well, except for that one person. Now, let’s assume that you know for sure that they like you and would go out with you if you asked. But, there’s a catch. It would make things socially uncomfortable for you and others to actually date, no matter how things worked out. Maybe it’s because that person is a friend’s ex, or just someone that a good friend really, really doesn’t like, it doesn’t matter. What matters is that it would be hard for you to date them because of your social circumstances.
Now, do you tell your friends to “get over it” and go ahead and date them? Or, do you let your co-dependence with your friends keep you from pursuing your potential happiness? And, is it fair to that person you want to date to put them in that position? I mean, if they’re your friends, they’d cope, right? And, if the person you want to date really is into you, they’d be willing to take the heat, right? But, is that how it would really go down?

So, what do you think?

Advice from your Uncle Jim:
"Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute. That's relativity."
   --Albert Einstein

When I read that title on Australian IT News, I hope I’m not the only one who suddenly pictured a man in a business suit being chased through the jungle by big game hunters.

Actually, come to think of it, that wouldn’t make a bad video game. I bet it would sell to a lot of mailroom and IT guys!

A couple of months ago, Wired Magazine ran an article on How To Make Your Own Glowstick. What strikes me about this is that, since you’re making it yourself, you could pour it into any shaped, sealable container. So, you could pour it into, say, spheres or an empty honey bear.
It looks like so much fun, I might just try it myself.