Happy New Year! Late I know, but better late then never. At least when its just a kind word or a happy thought.

I am beginning to hate window managers. This is a long rant, so get a beverage and read on! After this, I think I need a strong whiskey.

Let me set the scene up. There are 3 computers in this play. Two at home, and one at work. At home is a laptop, an older and slower model, but works great for me, and a newish desktop. At work is a newer machine with dual displays. They were all running various Fedoras, home was a F14 and F15, while work was an F14. All were running gnome, or in the case of the laptop with F15, that gnome that makes things look like a iPad or tablet.

Had a doozy of a problem today. A nagios & web server started to act up yesterday and was complaining about no room on /var. No problem, I can just delete some old log files. I do, only to find things still wont work correctly. The problem? inodes. I was out of them on /var. Weird.. I reboot the server into single user mode and start investigating. /var/spool/snmptrap had over 250,000 files in it. It seems this box did not only nagios, but also snmp trapping (along with snmptt and sec) only no one is paying any attention to this anymore.

I worked a little today on the Arduino network monitor. I have been taking liberally from other peoples designs, but changing them to make more sense to fit what I need. I am now using the code from http://www.instructables.com/id/Arduino-stoplight-web-server/ and adding the solid state relays from http://www.sparkfun.com/products/10684 to run the lights. I still have to figure out the serial port code, but hopefully I can work on that a little more this weekend.

Its almost a shame to turn it off. This server has been up and running since the day I moved it from ClearBlue in Tysons VA to Level 3 around the corner. It was a custom tftp server, which gave configs to SIP phones. I am pretty sure it hasn't done much of anything other then exist for the last year, and that might be for even longer. It was a server that for about 2 years I was arguing to turn off and then finally gave up, knowing eventually someone would want that rack space, and then I would get to retire it.

I was asked to make a mailing list for the family. Its amazing how things have gone from concepts like mailing lists to forums and then to social network sites in the last few years. Finding a mailing list provider proved fairly difficult. Excluding the fact that I wasn't completely comfortable with the information on this list being archived by some 3rd party, finding a mailing list host (free) was just plain hard. Most of them seemed to want to do commercial email notifications, and a simple list of 9 family members talking back and forth.

My server room is a mess. What used to be a long skinny room with 12 cabinets of equipment that slowly was being turned down, is now a 3 cabinet square room. Of course the equipment turn down didn't happen as fast as the physical change. The 3 remaining cabinets are very packed, and I have 2 disk arrays sitting on the floor. I have a Sun E240 with the cover off because when I moved it, it would not boot back up. I had to remove 2 gigs of memory just to have the system power back up. There are numerous cables of poor quality in the room as well. None of this makes me feel very comfortable.

I knew it was only a matter of time before someone figured out how to hack this stuff. I saw this commercial a while ago and my first thought was "thats hackable". And sure enough, it is. Some things, I think, should never be 'on the net'. Your car, is one of them. Nuclear power plants are another.

Oddly for the second time this year I have been told I do not understand DNS. It is true I am no expert, and routinely screw up, as anyone that has ever worked with me will attest. However in both of these cases I was not wrong, and the concept was a simple one. In the first case, an interviewer at Google told me I was a fool and didn't understand DNS hierarchy. That might be true but I do know how dig +trace works and I can read the output. The second time was just today when a coworker told me I don't understand the difference between a TTL and an Expire value in a bind header.

First Post!

I have almost never gotten to say that. I usually run a few behind the curve. I am usually an early adopter of things but I am almost never in that first post group. However, this is my blog, my site, and I can first post all I want!