LincolnBlogs
From the twisted mind of me!

Probably you have either listened to me or read my thoughts or both for several years now, but it occurred to me today that someone out there might be interested in seeing what actually drives the LincGeek.

I currently live in Pennsylvania, but I was born and raised in Upstate NY, with a brief stint in Washington state. New Yorkers and hillbillies are my people and I understand them. Washington is some of the most beautiful country I ever spent time in and I hope to at least visit out there again someday.

Well, first and foremost, computers and Linux are my personal crack. I started on a life long obsession with computers back in 1983 with my first Vic=20 (Thank you William Shatner). I learned to program in BASIC and from there it was all over until I met Linux in the 90s, then that added into the mix.

I like the fastest computers I can get my hands on. I like Apple computers (more for their quality and aesthetics than OS – they do tend to run Linux very well). I love my Kindle, my Android phone and my Asus TF300T Linux Mint is probably the nicest version of Linux I have ever run and I use that almost exclusively as my desktop OS of choice. I am RedHat certified and use RHEL and CentOS for the vast majority of my enterprise and personal server needs, because, IMHO, it’s better than the rest.

I am a music lover. I dig 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, Big Band, Jazz, Funk, Disco, Bluegrass and Classical music. I was a hardcore low brass musician and vocalist in my school years, even making it into “Who’s Who In Music” in my senior year in high school, and those are some of my most cherished and fondest memories. Rap is *NOT* music, by the way.

I have been married once, to my college sweetheart, for almost 20 years now and have an adult (she thinks so at least) daughter, currently in college. I am a Conservative Libertarian, politically, and a proud Christian.

Although I am now diabetic and stick mostly to various forms of Chicken and veggies, I LOVE good food. my favorites are good Irish cooking like my Grandma used to make. Corned Beef and Cabbage. And she made a monster macaroni and cheese too. I would literally hurt someone for some of that again. I strongly believe that vegetables are what food eats.

I like my coffee with (nonfat) milk and sweet-n-low. Buy it from Wawa because Starbucks coffee is overpriced and bitter yuppie coffie IMHO. I like an occasional good cigar (Acid Blondie) and enjoy them most when I can smoke them and hang out with my friends. (Edit, I am a confirmed Vaper now – RY4 absolutely ROCKS!)

I am not a drinker. If and when I do imbibe, I do so with Scotch or Whiskey as I believe beer must be what urine tastes like.

As you can probably surmise, I am highly opinionated, and as I have a monster sized guilty conscience and I am not at all politically correct, so if you ask my opinion, you are liable to actually get it.

I still think the occasional fart joke is funny. I hate unproductive meetings and long phone conversations. I try very hard to be honest, forthright, fair and maintain integrity.

I am a pet guy and love small furry mammals of all kinds. I have and have had cats, dogs, rabbits, mice, rats, ferrets and even a smattering of budgies and small lizards.

And now you know all about me!

I have been asked to review the “Linux Shell Scripting Cookbook” by Packt Publishing. It’s supposed to be coming in a couple days, so here’s your teaser to stay tuned! Packt Pub vs. Curmudgeonly SyaAdmin, a dead tree death match, only here at lincgeek.org/blog.

You know, there are just some things you do not need first thing on a Monday morning. This was one of them…

I came and and started reviewing my reports and was looking at an access report, which is basically a “last | grep $TheDateIWant” from over the weekend. I keep a pretty tight ship and want to know who is accessing what servers and when (and sometimes why). What I saw was monstrously suspicious! I saw MYSELF logged in to 3 different servers 3 times each around 5am on Sunday morning – while I was sleeping.

This is the kind of thing to throw you into an immediate panic first thing on a Monday morning, but I decided to give myself 10 minutes to investigate before completely freaking out.

The first thing I noticed was that the access/login times looked suspiciously like the same times I ran my daily reports on the machines, however, the previous week I had changed the user that runs those reports and this was still saying it was me. I double, triple and quadruple checked and searched all the report programs to make absolutely sure there was no indication that they were still using my personal account (which was probably bad practice to begin with btw). Then I scoured all the cron logs to see what was actually running at those times, and oddly enough, it was just those reports.

I looked through the command line history on those machines and checked again the “last | head” to see who was logging on those machines. Nothing out of place BUT with the “last| head” I was NOT listed as being on the machine on that date! So I ran the entire report command again “last | grep $TheDateIWant” and there I was again, listed right under the logins of the report user.

Anyone catching this yet?

What I had stumbled upon were a few machines that are used so infrequently that the wtmp file, which is what the “last” command uses for data, had over 1 year of entries. My search of “last | grep ‘Oct 31′” was returning not only this year, but my own logins from last year as well.

WHEW!

Moral of the story? Mondays stink – Just stay home!

Oh yeah, I have been busy, but I promised myself I would post some stuff as soon as I got a chance. One of the things I wanted to mention was my recent purchase of a straight razor. I bought this shave set from Amazon a few weeks ago and have finally learned how to shave with it without slitting my throat. Really, though, the reason I bought this was I have freakishly sensitive skin and get horrible razor burn just walking past the razor display in a store. The only decent shave I ever had was when I went to a barber and he shaved me with a straight razor. Combine that with Allan bragging about his wickedly cool badger hair shave brush and I was all of the sudden buying a straight razor.

Once I received the razor, I hit youtube for a couple straight razor shaving tutorials (hey I am not stupid), I put in a brand new blade and I was off to the proverbial races. Although I did nick myself a couple times (the worst was on the second shave) this really is not at all difficult and you get fantastic shaves. I highly advocate at least trying this, you will like it, and I can see no easier and inexpensive way to start than with the set I bought. Check it out!

Ahh, it’s been far too long since I have had anything to say here. I have to say that I have been *legitimately* busy this time. As many of you know, we have come to a close on the first season of The LinuxLink TechShow. That’s 365 (about) 2 hour long episodes over the course of the last 6 years. We are due to start our next 365 at the Ohio Linux Fest in a month. This leaves an enormous amount of prep work and a fair bit of reorganization to keep things exciting and help us start out with a bang.

One of the *surprises* in store brings me to my current topic at hand, my web workers toolkit.

People all have differing opinions about what you really need to do decent web work. As an old commandline jockey, I thought I would share my own.

1) Vim.
Quite possibly the best text editor in the world, I use vim for darn near everything. As a system administrator, it’s indispensable (for scripting) and I find it similarly necessary for web work. Vim has a fantastic (imho) syntax highlighting system which does quite well for html and php highlighting. The only caveat is to make sure to set “set background=dark” in your .vimrc file, unless, of course, you are one of those wierdos who uses a light background in your terminal.

2) tidy or the w3c validator.
I DEFY you to write good code without one of these. There is NOTHING as nice as standards compliant code and without a good validator, you will have nothing like standards compliant code. The reason I listed both of these is that tidy is a program you can use locally to check your code and the w3c validator will check any pages that are accessible via the web.

3) Many different browsers.
Unfortunately, all browsers are not made equal. You can be sure that all mozilla based browsers like Firefox, etc., will display things very similarly, and maybe even throw Google Chrome into that mix, but you may really want to check your code with Safari and IE to be sure things still look the way you had intended, and let’s not forget about a text browser like lynx or w3m to make sure your pages are readable and navigable that way too.

4) Lastly, for me, some good reference material.
One can hardly be expected to remember everything and having some reference material handy for those odd css commands and perhaps php/perl/python/someotherprogramminglanguage could really save you some time and frustration. Never underestimate keeping your old code around for example and never ever underestimate the power of the power of the Google Search!

In a nutshell, that’s generally what keeps me cranking out websites and webpages. What kinds of things do you use? What am I missing out on? Send a long a comment and let us all know what works for you! ( Unless, of course, you use emacs )

How many is too many? Is this excessive or have I just been watching too many episodes of Hoarders?

• Top – Dell Inspiron 15 – My “desktop” machine.
• Far left – Macbook 5,2 – Use when I am relaxing in bed with my feet propped up. Pisses me off that I cannot get Linux shoehorned on this properly yet.
• 2nd left – Acer Aspire One – netbook I use for TLLTS work.
• Bottom middle – Acer Aspire 3680 – my main livingroom machine – always tethered to the power cord because I have had it so long the battery only lasts 11 seconds.
• 2nd right – HP Mini 110 – new netbook and daily carry.
• Far right – Thinkpad X31 – dev/test/slush box.

And, of course, these are not *all* my computers. I also have a couple ESXi boxes which run a few virtual servers and an old G3 (upgraded to G4) Blue and White that mostly is a nightstand.

So, what computers do you all have kicking around?

It has certainly been a while since I last posted, so I thought I would find something either interesting or funny to get things going here again. This happens to be funny (I think). I came across this tidbit of information I wrote at work some time ago and thought I would share.

Retired Server Names
Much like sports jersey numbers, some server names are never to be used again… Mostly because they appear to be secretly cursed.

Trinity
I am not sure if there is some sort of bad mojo associated with naming a server with some kind of Godly connotation, but this VMWare GSX server would crash violently almost once an hour at its peak. As far as I know, nobody ever found out what the problem was, and after the name was changed it started working admirably.

Kashmir (pronounced “Cash-mere”)
This was an old RHEL 3.9 or AS 2.1 server that would crash almost as fast as you could start it back up again. We called this server “Crashmere”. The reason I am not sure of the OS level is it was hard to keep it running long enough to check. In it’s defense, I believe it had bad HDD’s before it was finally decommissioned, however, we were too paranoid to try reusing the hardware whether or not we attempted to fix it first.

Odessa
Odessa was, for the most part, our entire early implementation of an Identity Management System. It was based on an out of date and buggy Opensource LDAP and some poorly written custom code from some interns. Consequently it quickly became widely used and relied upon, and never updated as a result. Literally, this was the *beast* the infrastructure team worked to keep fed and happy. Eventually, we moved to a different IDM environment and Odessa was retired, the name never to be used again because we never want to see another single machine gain that much power over anyone again. Odessa is surely the precursor to Skynet.

Guarulhos
This is obvious – Just try and say the name. This is the reason one member of our team is never EVER allowed to pick server names again. We spent over a month trying to pronounce this in conversation until we finally gave up and changed the name outright.

Those are all the good ones I have right now but I am eager to hear any that any of you may have to contribute. Perhaps we could start some master list somewhere and save ourselves and others the tragedy of stumbling upon the reuse of one of these cursed names.

Similarities Between Santa and Sysadmins

1. Santa is bearded, corpulent, and dresses funny.

2. When you ask Santa for something, the odds of receiving what you wanted are infinitesimal.

3. Santa seldom answers your mail.

4. When you ask Santa where he gets all the stuff he’s got, he says, “Elves make it for me.”

5. Santa doesn’t care about your deadlines.

6. Your parents ascribed supernatural powers to Santa, but did all the work themselves.

7. Nobody knows who Santa has to answer to for his actions.

8. Santa laughs entirely too much.

9. Santa thinks nothing of breaking into your $HOME.

10. Only a lunatic says bad things about Santa in his presence.

A few days ago my storage facility emailed me and asked me to take a quick customer survey. I obliged.

Dear Lincoln, Is there anything else that you would like to tell us about your experience with Extra Space Storage?

My understanding is that you folks just took over the storage space I have been using for some time now so I am not entirely sure most of my problems are related to your company. What I can say for sure is when I initially signed up there, the clerk was really a jerk to us and obviously had no idea what he was doing. He made several snide comments and it took me 4 phone calls to get our access code. I would have left then, but this was the closest facility to me that didn’t charge exorbitant prices. You have since fixed the price point and are charging me as much as possible. The last time I visited my non-climate controlled unit, I found all my possessions covered in leaves and cobwebs and other miscellaneous flora, as if there has been some squirrel or rat or other critter in there. I didn’t bother even reporting it since I had such a horrible experience with the worker I ran into when I first signed up. At this point, the moment I can find a cheaper facility I am gone to take my chances there. At almost $50 a month for a 5×5 non-climate controlled unit with a crappy door and some mongoose living in it unattended I feel as if I am truly getting ripped off every time the bill comes due. And someone needs to fix the exit keypad that you literally have to hold up while you punch the digits. Apparently someone ran it over and the resourceful staff there have it professionally fixed with an old bungee cord.

For quite sometime, as a little morale booster, we have been having Hawaiian Shirt Fridays at work. It’s fun and I, personally like Hawaiian shirts. The gaudier the better.

Well, recently, it has been decided that in lieu of the warmer weather, perhaps we should temporarily switch to Ugly Sweater Fridays instead. What you see included in this post is my first attempt. I asked my wife the day before to run to the thrift store and get me the ugliest sweater she could find.

She really deserves the credit here, although I did wear it proudly. I was *easily* given the title for the most hideous sweater. We’ll have to see what happens next week, but I believe this will be hard to beat unless someone finds one of those light-up Rudolph holiday sweaters.

Let’s see the pics of YOUR ugly sweaters!