Diary of a Network Geek

This is sort of the long way around, but…
Well, I have a dream. I dream of a single, giant PERL script that does a complete server inventory, no matter what version of operating system it’s running. Why? Look at my resume. Notice how many times I’ve changed jobs? Every time I hit a new gig, I look at their server documentation, if they have any, and ask how old it is. 80% of the time, no one knows how old it is. The rest of the time, it’s so old and out of date as to be totally irrelevant. Of course, no matter the state of their documentation, it always falls to me to create it or update it. Hence my quest for a single, glorious PERL script that checks everything that matters on an individual server and drops it into a report, or at least a text file that I can make into a report.
The biggest stumbling block to my vision of this splendiferous chunk of code has almost always been the first one: figuring out which operating system the target is running. Well, not any more. No, my faithful readers, including my ex-wife and her new meal-ticket, now I give you Step One in Uncle Jim’s Master Plan for Network Domination.
PERL OS Version checker

Well, at least yesterday wasn’t a total waste.

Yes, that’s right.
Papa John’s Pizza is offering a free Blackberry with your on-line pizza order. According to the ad, if you “Just add any Papa John’s side item and two 20-oz. beverages to your online order” they’ll give you a free (after rebate) Blackberry. Some restrictions apply, like signing a two year contract, but, honestly, the contract doesn’t look too bad for what you get:

Consumers will commit to a new 2 year voice and data service agreement for $74.98 per month which will consist of an email data plan at $34.99 per month plus a voice plan for $39.99 which includes 450 anytime minutes, plus 5000 night and weekend minutes and mobile to mobile unlimited calling. Customer will pay $150.00 and will receive a $150.00 Mail-In Rebate with the device. Offer may vary by market and is contingent upon service provider credit. See order page for complete details. Not valid for upgrades. Offer good only in the USA and may not be available in all markets. Early Termination fee applies. Activation fee and applicable taxes extra.

Anyway, it struck me as interesting enough to pop another Friday message at you. Enjoy!

Hmm, this could be fun…
Lately, IBM has been really supportive of Linux. In fact, they have a whole section on their site dedicated to cool things you can accomplish with Linux. The latest of these is an article about how to use Linux to set up a wireless ISP. They suggest setting this up for a neighborhood or office, but I’m sure there are applications far beyond that. They take you through the basics, but, after skimming the article, I sure wouldn’t reccomend this for the Linux neophyte. The article does cover, in brief, all the aspects of this project, including hardware choices, but it focuses on a series of bash scripts written by the author to help you manage your WISP. That’s all well and good, but, of course, limited in scope.
So, why not add all that functionality to a backpack and make yourself a walking “hotspot”. Yeah, that’s not a joke. A guy actually took a backpack with solar panels built into it, added some wireless hardware, and made himself into a roving hotspot.

Now, that’s entertainment! And perfect for a fun, freaky Friday link.

Well, it’s clever, I’ll give them that!
Spammimic is a web-based application for doing some really low-level e-mail encryption. In fact, they even tell you right off that they use old, weak encryption. So, why am I mentioning them on my website? Simple. It’s a clever idea. In their explanation of what Spammimic does and how it works, they tell us that, basically, the idea behind hiding e-mail in spam is that spam has become so ubiquitous that it’s virtually invisible. So, in essence, they’re hiding in plain sight. The perfect social engineering hack on an enourmas scale. Very clever, I think, though I wouldn’t want to use it on anything concerning national security, if you catch my drift.
This site has been around for quite some time, actually, but I somehow neglected to write about
them. Well, I have now. Go have fun!

Hmm, I’m wondering who has the real advantage here…
Well, if you read Slashdot, you’ve already seen this story about a Linux guy using wine to update a WGA game successfully. Apparently, he’d been running this game on wine quite well for a while, but it needed some kind of update. So, he used the update feature from within the game, while on Linux running the wine Windows emulator, and he was prompted for his Windows Genuine Advantage code. He put it in and the Microsoft website proceeded to tell him he was running “Genuine Windows” and update his game. So, what was that advantage again?

Oh, and it looks like I’ll be on the road tomorrow, just for the day. Off to Bellechasse, Louisiana to install a couple of desktops. Three, actually, in one day and transfer data and settings on two. It’s going to be a long, long day. At least the boss will be flying me, so I won’t have to hassle with airports! (Don’t worry Diary of a Network Geek junkies! I’ll post something before I leave.)

No, I’m not kidding.
The other day I was thinking to myself, “How can I kill a couple of minutes at the end of the day while still looking like I’m doing something productive at work?” Well, used to be that I’d reach for one of those handy trade magazines that always seem to find their way to my desk, but I don’t have any. Apparently, I’ve changed jobs once too often and too quickly for those freebie subscriptions to keep up! Well, there’s a quick rememdy for that: Information Technology Magazine Subscriptions at TradePub.com.
Yep, there’s something there for everyone in the computer industry, no matter what you do or at what level you do it. And, all for free.

C’mon, it’s Friday! You know you want to kill the last couple minutes of the day filling out subscription forms, so just click the link!

Oh, how sweet is this!?
So, I was looking around the other day for a PERL script that would send me an SMTP mail notification from a Windows 2000 server at a remote location, so that I’d know what their IP address had been changed to after a reboot. (It’s a long story, but it involves a VNC server, a cable-router, and a bad power grid.) And, whenever I search for this kind of thing, I go to my backup/long-term memory archive, Google, and do a search. Guess what I found? A whole set of web pages at Microsoft dedicated to Windows-centric system admin and monitoring PERL scripts. Oh, I think I’m in heaven!
I’ve been looking for this kind of thing for ages and ages. I have no idea why I never found it until now, but, well, here it is! Now, I can develop that massive, PERL-based auditing system that I’ve always dreamed of having! YEA!

Today is System Administrators Appreciation Day.
Today is a day set aside to give thanks that either: a) someone else manages your servers, or b) you have servers to manage. It’s not an official holiday, yet, but, much like “Administrative Professionals” Day (aka Secretaries Day), it’s a day to think about the “little people” that make your job possible. This is the sixth annual System Administrators Appreciation Day and, to date, no one has done a damn thing for me. I’m so unloved.
Actually, that pretty well sums up my life in IT. I’m the glue that holds the network together and virtually no one knows, notices, or understands what I do. Well, at least I have this small and hollow comfort that someone, somewhere cares enough to setup a webpage dedicated to guys like me.
Thanks.

It’s Friday and your sysadmin has kept the network running long enough for you to read this, so you might as well click on the link and get him something nice for next year! (If your wallet is feeling up to it and you want to show me how much you appreciate my work, you can get me something from my ThinkGeek Wishlist. Hey, a guy can dream!)

That’s Novell’s SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 for the acronym impaired.
Well, I’m evaluating flavors of Linux to replace our antique Windows NT server, in my copious spare time, at work. Of course, my first choice was to go to Novell’s site and download the free demo of SLES 9. It took the better part of a day and night to download the ISOs and burn them, but, again, I did that in the background.
First of all, the install was quite simple and found even the junky, old hardware that I scrounged together for a test machine. Though, I have to admit that I found it rather annoying that I only used three of the six CDs I burned to do the install. And, I only used the third of those because I was installing a SAMBA server to minimize my client-side changes. (Yes, I know to block all SAMBA traffic out to the ‘net. Thanks for worrying about me though.) If I get the time, I’ll go back and try to figure out what was on those last three disks. I figure it was documenation and source-code, mainly, but that’s only a slightly educated guess.
Now, I’ve never actually used SUSE before, so it was a little new to me. Bascially, it’s standard Linux and X-Windows, but what’s installed by default and the assorted management programs are a little different than what I’ve gotten used to on RedHat. But, once I got the hang of YaST, it wasn’t a problem. In fact, reconfiguring the server via YaST was how I got the SAMBA server installed, configured and running. I should point out that I did this all without the benefit of reading any documenation and it still only took me about five minutes. Very easy to use, even for a relativel newbie.
Mostly, it’s what I’ve come to expect from the modern distributions of Linux. It was easy to install, simple to configure, and pretty to look at while doing both. Oh, and on the old PII with 512Meg of RAM, it ran really well. Nice and smooth. I was able to connect to the SAMBA server, map a drive and copy a file without any issues or having to set it up as a PDC or BDC (that’s Primary Domain Controller and Backup Domain Controller, again for the acronym impaired). I haven’t done any security testing against it, but it’s tucked safely behind our new firewall, so I’m not too worried.
The one thing I noticed that I really liked was the fact that you had to enter a password to reboot the machine. In RedHat, at least the RedHat AS 2.1 I used, anyone who had physical access to the server could simply click the reboot button and it would. With SLES 9, after clicking that button, I was prompted for a password. Only after I supplied the root password did the machine actually reboot. Nice feature, that.

So, over all, nothing spectacular, but a good, solid offering from the newest Novell group, SUSE.

“Give a thing a name and it will somehow come to be.”
Names matter. Network device names matter a lot and, since it looks like I’ll be redoing my home network, I’ve been thinking about names and naming conventions. I’ve worked with just about any and all naming conventions that you might imagine. Everything from the very practical LocationFunctionSequencenumber scheme (ie. HouAcct01, ChiMIS13, etc. ) to servers named for NASA spacecraft (ie. Challenger, Discovery, etc. ) I’ve seen stuff named for fantasy fiction characters and Greek mythology and Milton’s angels or devils. I even knew a guy who named his routers after dead musicians just so he could send out pings and see the response “Elvis is alive”. No joke. I personally have also used titles of positions in the Yakuza gang structure, as well as various authors and artists. I’ve even heard of guys using their favorite cartoon characters.
Personally, I like to have something with an underlying meaning to it. So, for instance, when I used the Yakuza schema, the main NDS server was “Kumicho”, which is the “boss of bosses”. And, on a whim, I named the printer Hokusai, after the famous artist. The guy who used angels named them based on what each angel had providence over, such as naming his “alerter” Gabriel, who blew his horn to sound the end of the world, if memory serves.
I’ve thought about using both Norse and Voodoo god names, since they’re somewhat unusual, but their “function” is well documented. I’ve also thought about using the various sefiroth of the Kabbalistic “Tree of Life”, for similar reasons. Greek mythology is far too passé to use and, for home, the LocationFunctionSequence method just isn’t fun enough.
So, anyone have any thoughts or suggestions?

(BTW, the quote is from George R. R. Martin in Dying of the Light which is one of the greatest “soft” science-fiction books I’ve ever read. It’s perfect after a breakup.)