Diary of a Network Geek

I have a strange relationship with the written word.

Okay, for anyone who’s been to my house and seen the sheer volume of books and magazines that “decorate” the walls, tables, chairs and floors, well, let’s just say that this is a bit of an understatement.  I have thrown out one book, that I can remember, ever.  Just one.  And, that was a Tony Robbins book!  It takes something monumental for me to sort through my pile of “keeper” magazines to find things that I realistically want to keep and read or save for long-term reference and get rid of the rest.  Truly, I revere the written, and more specifically the printed, word.  Oddly, I haven’t been reading that much lately, even though I still can’t get rid of old books, even my ex-wife’s books which hold no interest for me.

Ironically, that strange reverence for books and story, in particular, makes it hard for me to write.  At least, to write something other than my blog.  The blog is easy, because there aren’t any rules, to speak of, and any story is incidental.  Okay, I’ll grant that my writing for the blog wasn’t always very good.  I mean, eight years ago, I was pretty stiff and stilted and, well, mostly, boring.  Maybe I ranted a little more than I do now but I don’t think too many people were particularly motivated by my screeds.
Writing an actual story, real or fictional, is a whole different thing, though.  My goal with the blog was, originally, far, far different from what it’s become.  Honestly, I originally just wanted to have a way to regularly use all the right industry buzz words to maximize my search engine optimization.  But, along the way, something happened and my blog changed along with my writing.  But, it’s easy because I don’t think of all the things I should be doing.  I just sit down and write whatever crazy thing comes to mind.  In my mind, it just doesn’t matter much, so the writing flows out naturally, and, most days, almost effortlessly.  So, why can’t I do that with my fiction?

Well, the bottom line is, I don’t know.  Somehow, I get all caught up with how I used to write fiction, so effortlessly and still at a semi-professional level.  But, that was fifteen years ago.  Really, it’s been almost fifteen years since I wrote often enough to be at anything close to that level.  Foolishly, I want to be able to pick right up where I left off fifteen years ago, before my main career really got started and before I got married and divorced and before…  Yes, before the cancer.  All those things changed me, changed how I see the world, my life, my writing.  Somehow, it made everything more important and left less room for mediocrity.  And, somehow, it made everything I wrote less…  Less beautiful, less brilliant, less true.  The blank page, the empty screen, has become my enemy, a battlefield for the purity of my soul.  I know, a bit melodramatic, but still true.  At least, true enough to make my fiction taste less like marzipan fantasy dipped in chocolate fudge and more like ashes with a side of bitter, unrealized dreams.
So, how to change that…  I don’t know.  I honestly don’t know.  Why do you think I bought a camera?

Stay tuned.  Later this week, a review of Tropic Thunder and those music sites and stuff I’ve been promising.  Oh, and in a week or so, I’ll have a guest post on another blog.  More on that as it unfolds.

The Houston Chronicle has an update on the law I mentioned the on Tuesday.

The Austin office of the Houston Chronicle did some more digging about the new law that would seem to require PC Techs in Texas to also become Private Investigators. According to the bill’s author, state Rep. Joe Driver, R-Garland, we’re all misinterpreting his new law. He claims that the law means “…anyone who retrieves data from a computer, analyzes it and makes a report to a third party must obtain a private investigator’s license.” To me, it’s almost the same thing.

As I read it, the law would require anyone performing computer security duties in *any* setting in Texas to get a PI License. That means that a corporate computer security officer, who’s job may include computer forensics, would be required to also be a PI.
Frankly, I’m torn between thinking that maybe this is a good thing and maybe it’s excessive. On the one hand, for someone who does independent security work, that background check and finger printing might be a good idea! On the other hand, it might make it impossible for someone in a small company to *legally* do their job.

I’ll give an example…
A small company may have a one or two person IT department who cover everything, like, for instance, me. If there’s a break-in to one of their systems, they would then have to be a licensed PI to investigate that, or they’d have to spend a similar amount of money on a consultant who was. In this case, I’d bet the law just would get ignored.

But, for the independent operator, who might not have any other controls or credentials which a consumer or consulting client can use as a measure of relative security, it might actually be a good thing. Again, I doubt that criminal background checks are being done on all independent computer security consultants right now and maybe they should be.

In any case, like many laws of this nature, they seem like a good idea on paper, but often have much further reach than their author intended.

So, now I need a Private Investigator’s license to work on PCs?

Yeah, according to articles at ExtremeTech and CW33, a recently passed law in Texas requires that ALL shops which include PC repair technicians have a PI license. Just so you know, a PI License isn’t for an individual, but, rather a business and all the employees would work under that umbrella license. Still, it would mean that at least one person go through the process of licensing, which has the following requirements:

• three years of investigative experience or a bachelors degree in criminal justice for investigations company license
• two consecutive years of legally acceptable experience in the guard company business
• successful completion of a two-hundred-question examination testing ability of the manager applicant to operate the guard company under the provisions of the statute regulating them
• criminal background check
• submitting fingerprints to have on file with the FBI
• ~$500 in registration fees, subscription fees, application fees, and fingerprint fees, payable yearly

(All that is from an article at Citronix Computer Techs. )

Now, it’s important to understand, too, that this is a brand new law, sponsored by a Private Investigation professional organization who are afraid of their profession becoming obsolete. Thankfully, there are also techs who have professional organizations, one of which is challenging the law, at least, according to KVUE.com.

Funny, I’ve always thought about getting a PI license and now I may be forced to do so! On the other hand, the $4000+ fines and possible jail-time are a great excuse for why I can’t help people at work with their private PCs!

Yes, it’s true the higher cost of sending things overseas makes our economy stronger.

Well, in what I have to admit is a nice turn of events, ABC has an article telling us how the high oil prices are actually generating manufacturing jobs here, at home, in the good, old United States of America. Yea! So, what I’ve been saying for quite some time is finally being recognized by industry at large: it’s cheaper to “outsource” to small towns in Middle America than it is to send the work overseas. Okay, maybe it wasn’t quite as true when I was saying it back in 2003, but it sure seems to be now.

You know, it’s not that I mind being right, even when I’m right so far ahead of the curve, but I sure wish people in positions of power would start listening to guys who have been in the trenches. Most of us really do know more than you’d expect about this stuff. Honest.

Advice from your Uncle Jim:
"We are what we think. All that arises is with our thoughts. With our thoughts we make our world."
   --Buddha

Wow, talk about the School of Hard Knocks!

Apparently, there’s a trend in MBA programs to use ex-cons as speakers to educate the MBA hopefuls on ethics and legal behavior. Now, I can see how it would get the point across, and I’m all for letting someone who’s paid their debt to society make a living, but is this really the best idea? I mean, shouldn’t we teach ethics and proper, legal business behavior through positive examples not negative ones? As the article suggests some people think, it’s almost like rewarding criminal behavior.

I did like, however, the mention of the ex-con who embezzled million dollars from the security company who hired him. He’s awaiting sentencing now. I think they should sentence him to life, in a cubicle.

I know everyone’s communication strategies differ based on personal experience, but when someone walks into my office and says “Two hole punch”, do they really think that’s enough information?

Luckily, I’m cool under pressure because several of my potential responses to that are not safe for work, but, instead of using those, I calmly asked “Um, yes, what about a two hole punch?”
“Do you have one?”
“Ah, no.”
Then, without further ado, she was gone in flash of blond and a puff of lilac.

I hate having my office open up into the copier/fax room.

Not sure if this is “good” advice or not, but I’ve certainly found it to be true.

The other night I was flipping through channels and, as I buzzed past either Sundance or IFC, I saw one of the two oldest Marsalis brothers doling out some advice that was given to him by an older Jazz musician. I came in after the interview had started, so I don’t know if it was Wynton or Branford, nor do I know who gave him the advice, but it was significant enough to make me think.

He said, basically, don’t have anything to fall back on.
When someone starts on a path of professional creativity, whether it be musical or otherwise, we’re told that we need to do something else, too, so that we “have something to fall back on”. But, here’s the thing. If you have something to fall back on, then you do, and never truly give everything to that creative endeavor. I know that’s been true for me. I used to write all the time, but, then I got involved in my career and started spending more and more time on that. It’s not a bad thing, as I do fairly well, but the IT stuff is what I do, not the writing. I never really succeeded at writing because, well, I never had to succeed at writing. I had something to fall back on.

So, whatever it is that you want to do, do that. It’s the only way.

Advice from your Uncle Jim:
"The real art of conversation is not only to say the right thing in the right place but to leave unsaid the wrong thing at the tempting moment."
   --Lady Dorothy Nevill

Attention Headhunters! I don’t want a new job!

Seriously? Thanks for making the overtures to me, but I really don’t want to change jobs.
First of all, these folks supported me when I was going through my cancer treatments when a lot of other companies would have been trying to get rid of me, if they could. And, I don’t mean that they were just supportive, but they kept me on the payroll, not disability, and let me come in and work when I could. How many places would do that?

Secondly, Seatrax is in the Oil and Gas industry, which is, frankly, booming right now. Granted, those $100/barrel oil prices really make things like gas expensive, but they also keep companies in our industry working. Right now, we’re doing very well. We have a lot of work and, based on what I’ve seen, it looks like we’re going to have work for quite a long time. So, if we’re about to go into a recession, which every seems to think we are, I’d rather work for a company with a proven track record who likes the work I do and has future business already.

Thirdly, I like working for a company that actually makes something and contributes to the GNP in a real way. In fact, I think Seatrax is the last, big, crane manufacturer in the United States. Frankly, I’m not sure I could name another post crane manufacturing company, period. And, yes, there is something cool about being associated with a company that make really, big, huge machines that go on the largest off-shore platforms in the world. I’m not sure what it is, but seeing one of those giant machines, in pieces, strapped down to a series of flatbed trucks cruising down the highway toward the shipyard to get installed makes me swell up with pride. There aren’t many companies in the U.S., who are owned buy U.S. backers, that actually produce things any more. At least, that’s how it seems to me. And, I think it’s great to be a part of a team that does.

So, in spite of some really great offers, I like the job I’m at and I’m just going to stay put.
Thanks, though.

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.

Um, pretty self-explanatory, actually.

Yeah, so um, I think the post title says it all. I took some old documentation and removed the incriminating information (ie. the original company name) and saved it as a template, of sorts. Naturally, this is a starting point and will need to be customized for your company. In particular, look at the e-mail policy closely. This company specifically did not back up e-mail files so that later someone couldn’t subpoena those old files in a legal action. And, yes, that policy was made because it happened once, but, no, I don’t know if that stood up to any legal testing.

Anyway, here are the files, zipped for your convenience: IT Policy Templates

Enjoy!