Diary of a Network Geek

The trials and tribulations of a Certified Novell Engineer who's been stranded in Houston, Texas.

4/4/2008

Code Monkey

Filed under: Fun,Geek Work,Red Herrings — Posted by the Network Geek during the Hour of the Tiger which is terribly early in the morning or 5:12 am for you boring, normal people.
The moon is a Third Quarter Moon

I’m more of a server monkey myself, but, still…

Okay, so this has been around for a bit, but I just got it the other day. A friend sent it to brighten my week, which was getting rather tedious. (Incidentally, in searching for links to the actual song in MP3 format, I discovered that this happens to be the theme song for Code Monkeys, the 8-bit cartoon on G4.)

Code Monkey
by Jonathan Coulton

Code Monkey get up, get coffee
Code Monkey go to job
Code Monkey have boring meeting
With boring manager Rob

Rob say Code Monkey very diligent
But his output stink
His code not functional or elegant
What do Code Monkey think?

Code Monkey think maybe manager want to write goddamn login page himself
Code Monkey not say it out loud
Code Monkey not crazy, just proud

Code Monkey like Fritos
Code Monkey like Tab and Mountain Dew
Code Monkey very simple man
Big, warm, fuzzy, secret heart
Code Monkey like you
Code Monkey like you

Code Monkey hang around at front desk
Tell you sweater look nice
Code Monkey offer buy you soda
Bring you cup, bring you ice

You say no thank you for the soda, cuz
Soda make you fat
Anyway you busy with the telephone
No time for chat

Code Monkey have long walk back to cubicle
He sit down pretend to work
Code Monkey not thinking so straight
Code Monkey not feeling so great

Code Monkey like Fritos
Code Monkey like Tab and Mountain Dew
Code Monkey very simple man
Big, warm, fuzzy, secret heart
Code Monkey like you
Code Monkey like you… a lot

Code Monkey have every reason
To get out this place
Code Monkey just keep on working
See a soft pretty face

Much rather wake up eat a coffee cake
Take bath, take nap
This job fulfilling in creative way
Such a load of crap

Code Monkey think some day he have everything, even pretty girl like you
Code Monkey just waiting for now
Code Monkey say someday, somehow…

Code Monkey like Fritos
Code Monkey like Tab and Mountain Dew
Code Monkey very simple man
Big, warm, fuzzy, secret heart
Code Monkey like you
Code Monkey like you

So, anyway, go enjoy Code Monkey, but be sure to visit the artist’s site, too.

4/3/2008

IT Looking Up!

Filed under: Deep Thoughts,Geek Work,News and Current Events — Posted by the Network Geek during the Hour of the Tiger which is terribly early in the morning or 5:49 am for you boring, normal people.
The moon is a Third Quarter Moon

At least, if you’re in Australia.

Actually, things are looking pretty good in Houston, too, though I can’t vouch for the rest of the country. Things in Australia, though, seem to be especially good. I subscribe to a lot of news feeds via e-mail and I got one update from Australian IT that had two articles about how good things are for IT workers there right now.

First, there was Competition Gives Entrants Quick Ticket, about how there are so many IT jobs in Australia right now that they’ve got students getting out of school early to get really good jobs with less training than ever.
Then, there was an article titled Going Global In Search of Scarce Skills, about how there are so many open jobs in IT, and so few qualified workers, that they’re bringing in foreign workers to fill those spots. So, if you’re in IT and ever fancied working abroad, this might be your chance!

So, hey, there’s never been a better time to be in IT!

3/28/2008

Free Resources

Filed under: Criticism, Marginalia, and Notes,Fun,Fun Work,Geek Work,Red Herrings — Posted by the Network Geek during the Hour of the Tiger which is terribly early in the morning or 5:37 am for you boring, normal people.
The moon is a Third Quarter Moon

I love free.

One of the things people don’t talk about when you’re going through an extended medical illness is how to pay for what’s not covered afterward. I’m working through that, and doing my best to work toward being debt free. And, in thinking about that, it brought to mind all the free things I can get on the web. The software I run this blog, and others, with is free, for instance. A little searching around can turn up all kinds of free things.

While doing a little search, I found three lists of free resources over at Lorelle on WordPress.
Designing a Rainbow – free resources for color and design.
Blogging Tips – Hundreds of free resources for finding content for your blog.
and HTML, CSS, PHP, and More free cheatsheets

All three are lists of great resources for your website or blog. If you can’t find something useful in at least one of them, you’re not trying!

3/21/2008

Linux Home Server HowTo

Filed under: Fun,Fun Work,Geek Work,GUI Center,Linux,The Network Geek at Home — Posted by the Network Geek during the Hour of the Tiger which is terribly early in the morning or 5:41 am for you boring, normal people.
The moon is a Third Quarter Moon

So, you want to build your own Linux server for home?

Okay, you’ve seen me write about it and many of you think it’s too geeky to do on your own, but I swear to you, it’s not. In fact, here is a list of easy howto sites:

Who needs Windows Home Server with Linux around?
Linux Home Server HowTo at LinuxQuestions.org
Build It: Linux Home Server
The Australian Linux HowTo

And maybe, just maybe, when I finally get around to doing this on my home network, I’ll write up some documentation on how to do it. Or, at least, how I did it.

3/6/2008

Default Passwords

Filed under: Fun Work,Geek Work,The Dark Side — Posted by the Network Geek during the Hour of the Hare which is terribly early in the morning or 6:25 am for you boring, normal people.
The moon is a Third Quarter Moon

Why you should always change default passwords…

I don’t always agree with the bloggers over at TechRepublic when they insist that they have the five or ten most important links on a subject, but, every once in a while, they get one that’s really good. I can’t say much about most of the links in Chad Perrin’s post, Five must-have security resources, but his link to the RedOracle Default Password list is great! They have default passwords for just about everything there and, while that might not mean much to all my readers, if you have to do an emergency reconfiguration on something and take it back to the manufacturer default, having that password can really simplify your life.

Also, since these are so well documented, it’s a good illustration of why the first thing you should do after configuring, or reconfiguring, something is to change the default password.

2/27/2008

Review: Building a Monitoring Infrastructure with Nagios

Filed under: Fun Work,Geek Work,Linux,Review,Things to Read — Posted by the Network Geek during the Hour of the Tiger which is terribly early in the morning or 5:47 am for you boring, normal people.
The moon is a Third Quarter Moon

Well, since I bought it, I think I should review it.

So, I’ve been wrestling with the typically mediocre documentation which surrounds most OpenSource projects and, in an effort to ramp up my efforts, I bought Building a Monitoring Infrastructure with Nagios by David Josephsen. Now, keep in mind that I don’t normally read entire computer books very much any more, but rather read just the few chapters that seem most relevant to my current project and keep the book for future reference. Also, I was in a hurry when I bought this book and didn’t have time to look at it very closely before purchase.

Now, all that being said, this book wasn’t all that helpful to me. It probably would have been a great help if I’d gotten it right when I was starting to install Nagios, though. Sadly, I puzzled out most of what I needed to know about the system the hard way, via on-line help files, how-tos, and trial and error.
With a table of contents broken up into eight chapters, titled; Best Practices, Theory of Operations, Installing Nagios, Configuring Nagios, Bootstrapping the Configs, Watching, Visualization, and Nagios Even Broker Interface, you can see that this book is about installing the base system and monitoring the most basic of services. I got the book hoping to monitor an SQL database and, if possible, the completion status of backups. Sadly, that’s not covered in this book. I did manage to find more information on-line regarding the SQL database monitoring, but not about watching backups.

So, mostly, this book didn’t get done what I was after. However, since there are things wrong with my installation, I may save the configuration files, wipe the server and start over, following the principles laid out in this book. For instance, I can’t seem to get scheduled down-time set via the web interface on my installation, which should be possible by default. And, the visualization on my monitoring server leaves something to be desired, so, if I start over, I’ll reference the chapter on Visualization. Certainly, it would be nice to start from a clean slate and do it right, but I may not have time to do that. We’ll see.

In short, Building a Monitoring Infrastructure with Nagios was a bit of a disappointment for me, but not because it wasn’t a good book. Rather, by the time I bought this book, I was a little past implementing most of the strategies discussed. Again, though, if I end up starting over, which I may, I’ll definitely read more of this book to get it done the right way.

2/7/2008

Review: Nagios

Filed under: Career Archive,Fun Work,Geek Work,Linux,MicroSoft,Novell,Ooo, shiny...,Review — Posted by the Network Geek during the Hour of the Tiger which is terribly early in the morning or 5:27 am for you boring, normal people.
The moon is a Third Quarter Moon

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.

1/30/2008

Linux Imaging – Update

Filed under: Criticism, Marginalia, and Notes,Fun Work,Geek Work,Linux,MicroSoft — Posted by the Network Geek during the Hour of the Tiger which is terribly early in the morning or 5:20 am for you boring, normal people.
The moon is a Third Quarter Moon

So, I figured it was about time for another hardcore geek post.

I’ve been using the Linux-based imaging solution that I detailed here and here for quite a few weeks now. Mostly, it’s been going very well.
Okay, once I figured out it was better to start with a small drive partition as my base system, from which I created the standard image, the process got easier. The thing is, it’s always easier to start with a small partition and then use tools built into the Knoppix live cd to grow the partition larger than to try and shoe-horn a big disk partition onto a small disk. And, by “easier”, I mean it’s the only way to do it. I spent quite a bit of time trying to make it work the other way, but I never did. On the other hand, starting with an image based on a 30 gigabyte or less partition then expanding it to fit a 150 gigabyte hard drive has worked just fine.
Incidentally, I used a bootable gparted cd to make that change.

Also, I had a small problem with a particular Intel motherboard chipset. Specifically, it was the Intel 965 chipset, and the problem may effect other motherboards. In short, the problem was that Knoppix didn’t see the SATA drive to mount it. If Knoppix can’t see the drive, it can’t image it or take an image from it. Luckily, there is a work around. If you’re using my method to image WindowsXP machines running the Intel 965 chipset, ensure the BIOS is set to AHCI. To do that, get into your system’s BIOS and go to Advanced > Drive configuration > Configure SATA as AHCI. Then, when booting into Knoppix, hit F2 and use the following command-line to boot:
knoppix 2 all-generic-ide pci=nommconf
This will start Knoppix in text-only mode, so you can run everything from there instead of opening up a terminal session.
After you put the image on the fresh machine, you need to ensure the BIOS is NO LONGER set to AHCI. To do that, get back into your system’s BIOS and go to Advanced > Drive configuration > Configure SATA as IDE. After reconfiguring the BIOS, you can boot into the new Windows XP clone and proceed as I’ve already described in the other posts.

Oh, one last thing on this…
I kind of cheated on reimaging machines in text mode with that Intel 965 chipset.  Because the tools I used to resize NTFS disk partitions were all GUI based and XWindows was having a problem running on those Intel 965 boards, I installed one machine from scratch and just grabbed the larger partition table and master boot record.  Then, when I made the new machines, I just used the larger partition and MBR images to get everything out of the disk.  I still used the smaller data disk partition images, but I used NTFSResize to expand the NTFS partition to fill the disk.  Worked like a charm.

Anyway, I apologize to my non-geek readers, but, hey, I am a professional network geek and I love this stuff.  I think I strutted around for a full five minutes after figuring out that set of little tricks the same afternoon.  Of course, it wasn’t long before some other stupid thing brought me right back to reality, but that couple of minutes where I was the king of the world, network geek genius extraordinaire, made it all worthwhile.

1/29/2008

Does Crime Pay?

Filed under: Advice from your Uncle Jim,Deep Thoughts,Geek Work,News and Current Events,Red Herrings — Posted by the Network Geek during the Hour of the Tiger which is terribly early in the morning or 5:06 am for you boring, normal people.
The moon is a Third Quarter Moon

No.

At least, not according to Bruce Schneier:

Q: All ethics aside, do you think you could make more money obtaining sensitive information about high net worth individuals and using blackmail/extortion to get money from them, instead of writing books, founding companies, etc.?

A: Basically, you’re asking if crime pays. Most of the time, it doesn’t, and the problem is the different risk characteristics. If I make a computer security mistake — in a book, for a consulting client, at BT — it’s a mistake. It might be expensive, but I learn from it and move on. As a criminal, a mistake likely means jail time — time I can’t spend earning my criminal living. For this reason, it’s hard to improve as a criminal. And this is why there are more criminal masterminds in the movies than in real life.

That has to be the best summarization of why I’m not a criminal that I’ve ever read. And, that’s not all he had to say. You can read the rest of the article at the New York Times “Freakonomics” blog.


Advice from your Uncle Jim:
"'One of these days' is none of these days."
   --English Proverb

1/14/2008

NSA Security Guides

Filed under: Fun Work,Geek Work,The Dark Side — Posted by the Network Geek during the Hour of the Tiger which is terribly early in the morning or 5:45 am for you boring, normal people.
The moon is a Third Quarter Moon

Free government guidelines.

When it comes to computer security, the National Security Agency is the shiznit. Or, at least they were. I think they’ve sort of fallen behind a bit, as government agencies tend to do.

In any case, they have a whole website of government-level guidelines on computer security that you can download for free. So, even if they’re not the cutting edge any more, they’re still good guides and free.

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