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GRAFFITI -- December 27, 2004 thru January 02, 2005>> Link to the Current Week <<Last Week << Mon Tues Wed Thu Fri Sat Sun >> Next Week Welcome to Orb Graffiti, a place for me to write daily about life and computers. Contrary to popular belief, the two are not interchangeable. About eMail - I publish email sometimes. If you send me an email and you want privacy or anonymity, please say so clearly at the beginning of your message. |
 
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December 27, 2004
0803 - Good morning. Not much new to say, I got a late start this morning, slept in past 0630 as I was dragged back into sleep by the effects of holiday feasting and a three day weekend. In other news, Asteroid 2004 MN4, which I wrote about yesterday now has odds of 1 in 37 of impacting Earth in 2029. That's an 18% increase in probability over yesterday's odds of 1 in 45, although it's still less than a 3% chance, if you prefer that sort of number. What's funny (odd) is that each article I read about this beastie says that further measurements should refine our understanding of the object's orbit sufficiently to say that the probability of impact is zero. Then each day, more measurements are taken, and the odds of impact go up. So, when do we see this on the evening news?
It wasn't a weekend filled with good news around the world. Tsunamis in the Indian Ocean kill over 20,000, while the (relatively) lucky thousands of people here in the US were merely stranded by storms and airline computer failures, with a few weather-related deaths. All things taken into consideration, I'm a fortunate guy, at least for the moment, and don't think I don't give thanks for that fact. Not the least of my fortune today was a commute that hardly deserved the name... I don't think my speed dropped below 60 at any point on the freeway segments of my drive. Now I'd best get to work. Have a great day!
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December 28, 2004
0629 - Good morning. Not least in my mind is the news that Hot Fudge Sundae doesn't fall on Friday the 13, in April of 2029. Asteroid 2004 MN4 has been removed from the running as a candidate to provide a big old Howdy! from the Universe to Humanity. Midday the odds were still running 1 to 37, but when I checked again this evening, they've downgraded it to background noise, 1 in 56K or so. Still, it would have made a hell of a surf party, right?
The year is winding down, and this is the time when I like to look back and see where I've been, so that I can make decent plans for the road ahead. The first quarter held some eventful times for The Eastern Clan of Bilbrey. In January, Sally was still with us. We had that sweet old girl for just 28 months before she moved on to greener pastures, but we cherished our time with her. We were also just getting started with little Lucy Mae, the Cocker Spaniel that we picked up out of rescue to keep Sally company. She did that, and I think Sally had more interest in life through a spot of healthy competition than she might otherwise have had.
Marcia and I had been in our house for two months, long enough to really be settled in. Unlike some folks we know, we're huge fans of not living in (and out of) boxes. We were completely unpacked and settled in by Christmas of 2003, and were really starting to enjoy having our own space to do with as we wished. Downstairs I put together Marcia's craft space and started thinking about how to make the kid's area in the basement into a home workshop. At the end of January, we finally broke down and picked up a new living room set.
Also in January I read Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver (which I liked), and got a bunch of kit from EndPCNoise.com to make all the machines that surround me much quieter. Now the loudest machine is either the laptop when it's running (because of the pitch of the fans), or the main workstation with the ATI 9800 XT on it - the video card's the loudest single component I have. While I was having all that fun, Marcia had yet another surgery, and recovered beautifully, mind you. The month wrapped up with a nice little snowstorm.
February brought me Sun's Java Desktop, which I found singularly unimpressive, and O'Reilly's Linux Server Hacks, which rocks. Firefox was rebranded for the final time, and Microsoft was patch-o-rama that month. For Marcia's birthday in mid-month, we went out the the theater to see our friend Linda Rose Payne in a Valentine's Day production of Love is in the Air. I bought music at Magnatune, got started on my workshop, and got the earliest seedlings going in my basement greenhouse (now that was a dead failure not to be repeated). At the very end of the month, I tilled my garden. This coming year's going to be different - raised beds all.
March brought in our first flowers at the new house. Early in the month, I started wearing reading glasses, too. By March of the coming year, I'm likely to have been to an optometrist. I guess it's better to do these things right, eh? In the middle of the month, Sally started feeling really poorly, and we had her in and out of the vets, on antibiotics and trying to keep up her spirits and our own. But she made her own decision and stopped taking food. On March 20 we went to the vets a last time, and sent her on to fields where all the bunnies are slow, and all the dogs are young again. The month wrapped up with PyCon and more flowers in the yard.
I haven't time to do the whole year in one sitting, so I'll spread it out over four days, wrapping up on the last day of the year. That seems appropriate, eh? And yes, I still do miss Sally. A lot.
Time for work and I'm hoping the commute is as good today as it was yesterday... I can dream! Have a great day!
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December 29, 2004
0641 - Good morning. First of all, let me say thanks for all the wonderful feedback I've gotten from just the first segment of my review series (see yesterday's post). It can't be like dying, because it's my life that's flashing before your eyes, and only a year's worth, at that. On the occasion of one of Death's many meetings with Rincewind on Discworld, the slightly failed Wizzard asked [and I paraphrase, because I'm too lazy to walk downstairs and look up the precise quote], "What about my life flashing before my eyes? Isn't that supposed to happen first?" Death replied, "It did. It's called living." I've always liked that part ... well, that and the bit about the copper suit of armor. And Gaspode. And... oh, you go read them.
As April 2004 opened, we still had some of March's cold strong winds. In addition, Marcia's sister Karen and her husband Ron were out to visit with us. We went to Arlington on the first Sunday, and Marcia toured around with them for the rest of the week. I also narrowly avoided a bad car wreck, merely whacking the curb with my rims to the tune of several hundred dollars worth of undercarriage damage. Xandros Linux 2.0 entered from stage left and got a bunch of play from me. That lead eventually to Bob trying it, writing, "If I were Microsoft, I'd be very, very worried." and switching. That lead to Jerry trying it and ... not throwing up. At least he gave them a very favourable take in the column. You take your wins where you can get them. Xandros is now at 3.0 and it rocks.
Long before April ended, I'd taken leave of my senses, grabbed all the gardening tools, ripped out all the nasty front hedge-like shrubs and put in new bushes, flowers, and a fresh batch of red bark mulch. The buds on the trees started flowering, and my year of being the answer to Life, the Universe and Everything (42) passed quietly into oblivion.
Moving on into May, I picked up a little project to build and document an email server. Writing the stuff down so that someone else can do a thing is MUCH harder than doing it right. For me, that's because doing it right always seems to involve doing it one way, then stepwise fixing things until I make the durned thing work. But some of those steps are up wrong paths, and I found myself having difficulty getting the steps down in the right order. This thing, done in my copious spare time, took literally months. Finally, in the process of trying to find the answer to one question, I found a tutorial better than the one I was writing. Greg and I migrated all of our services and customers from a failing Rocket box to a happy new Zidane box, both at EV1 Servers. Gardening took up most of my free daylight hours, and that remained true throughout the spring and summer.
June bloomed in many ways. The garden was coming up wonderfully, Lucy proved she could nap with the best of them, and the Thompsons came up to visit us. Sister-in-law Sue, down in Brazil, had a ruptured something that was mis-treated, necessitating several followup surgeries and nearly dying a couple of times. We're extraordinarily grateful to still have her with us - she's doing great these days. Ronald Reagan died, and DC ground to a halt for a few days. As the month wound down, geeks and the EFF went to battle against one of Orin Hatch's hare-brained schemes... do you remember the INDUCE Act? It failed this last session, but stay vigilant.
Will the third day be a charm, too? Two half hour morning commutes in a row this week, I'd love to make it a foursome. We'll see, but I'd better get to it. I've a Debian SMB server to finish building, and I'm also going to whip up a Debian workstation for one of our QA engineers who's been fighting with FC3 and losing. Ciao!
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December 30, 2004
0636 - Howdy. Yesterday's magic included getting realtime virus scanning hooked into that Samba server I was building, courtesy of Samba-vscan. Items to note: Samba-vscan REALLY likes being built in the same source tree that's actually installed. By the time I was done, I'd installed and built the Debian Samba source package to provide the necessary context to build samba-vscan. Secondly, there are three distinct sets of install directions in the INSTALL file, and I must have read them six or four times in the process of trying to figure out where I was going wrong ... missing the point every time. My best advice here: Print it out and highlight the parts that correspond to your running Samba version. Then work just from those. Finally, the discuss list yields results - I had good feedback from two people, including Rainer Link, who's the project maintainer, within twenty minutes of posting my question. Yay, them! Of course, I posted a "good" question, full of details about the things I'd tried, versions of the pertinent software and build details, snippits of log files and config files that helped them help me. But when I was done, I tried to write an EICAR test file to the server, it snagged it and pushed it off into a quarantine. On a Windows box, I *think* it will messenger me with appropriate details. More testing today. Now on with the flashbacks....
July featured my large garden at its best, before the rains of late summer killed it dead due to root rot in the shallow clay-bound plot. I also started posting in a blog format over on Orblog, using Wordpress. Lucy learned how to be a belly scratch slut (thumb links to shot at right), and the garden put out tomatoes and cucumbers faster than I knew how to give them away or make salsa. At the end of the month, my brother's daughter Danielle came out to visit with us for a week. I went about with them one day and she had a good time running all over with Marcia, who'd taken the week off to play tourist.
Doom 3 jumped out at me on August 3. I'd not been waiting, not as such, but managed a Day 0 purchase, and had a great deal of fun playing this moody, scary first person shooter. Just a couple of days later, we headed down to Richmond, Virginia to meet, and bring home with us the latest addition to our family: Molly. A black labrador retriever female, she's about five and was abandoned at a spay/neuter clinic. We got her from the local Lab Rescue folks. Then that weekend I rototilled the rotting garden into the ground. That was an eventful week, for sure.
I stayed very busy through the rest of the month. Marcia took off for a combo business/family visit trip to Brazil that lasted 12 days. I used that time to work... and to work at home converting her office from left to right:
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Doom didn't stand a chance. I spackled and sanded, primed, painted and faux finished. I snaked electrical wires, replaced outlets, and put in track lighting. I built base cabinets, desk surfaces and hutches. I laquered the desk top black (four coats) and assembled the whole thing the night before Marcia got home. I'm NEVER doing a whole room remodel on a tight schedule again.
By comparison, September was a real let-down. I played some Myst and some Doom 3. I fell down the steps here at home, whacking my back and right arm/shoulder pretty well in the process. I mourned the loss of a coworker's wife. I explicitly gave up my standing at Studio B, as I just can't see how to get a decent advance for a book without working myself to the bone. By the time I got to where writing could support me, I'd be bloody sick of what it had done to the tattered shards of life that writing plus working would have left me. Oh, well. The main stream media (MSM) started the big media push towards Election 2004, playing second fiddle counterpoint to the terror and fear tactics that ended up winning the day for Jesusland. MSM still doesn't know what hit it. Marcia and I capped off the month with a trip to the theatre, watching Linda Rose Payne's Nigel in The Seagull up at Howard College Community Theater. Oh, and I wrote the letter formally resigning my position with The NERDS Group on the last day of the month.
Okay, you can stop holding your breath. One more day and I'll be done with the maudlin tour for another year. It's been pretty dead around work, not that I have trouble staying busy. I'll be trying for my fourth day in a row of great (that is, very little) traffic on my drive in. Yeah, the day is just as long, but when the drive takes over an hour, it takes a lot out of me before I ever get to start. These half-hour drives are a breeze by comparison. And the weather's ... odd. I mean, 50's, perhaps 60's by tomorrow. Certainly not winter by any stretch of the imagination. Gotta roll ... have a great day!
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December 31, 2004
0854 - Good morning. Welcome to the last day of the year. At left, you can see the effect of trying to copy an EICAR test file into the Samba file store, as protected by Samba-vscan providing a VFS layer interface to the ClamAV clamd daemon running on the Samba server. Now you'll note that this is from a machine (VMware to the rescue) that has no AV installation on it natively, otherwise I'd have never gotten the EICAR files onto the desktop to do the testing. Samba is handling PDC duties and offering a bevy of user and/or group restricted shares and all of that's working fine. I just have one hanging problem: making the permissions/ownership issues work right for roaming profiles. I may just let that one go, as it's not particularly pertinent to our operation. I'll keep after that in my spare time, so's to have a working config and setup in my toolbox for next time.
Marcia's off to work, today being the last day of the fiscal year and there's still contracts to be reviewed in hopes of getting signatures on them before midnight California time tonight. Now, without further ado, let's wrap up my year-flashing-before-your-eyes event. At least we survived it together...
Ah, we're opening October's book with a bit of carry-forward from the prior month. I mentioned resigning from my old position, and that's because manna from the heavens in the form of a job opening posting at a really good company hit one of the mailing lists that I follow. I didn't say anything about it, because these things usuallly come to nothing, so why get other people's panties in a bunch. But something did come of it, and I got a good offer to be the Senior Systems Administrator for NFR Security, Inc. They've got really, really bright people on staff, including a number of core OpenBSD developers [present day: it is a fun gig, I'm learning things (good for me) and providing excellent SA services (good for them).] Sounded like a win to me, so I went for it. The next night, I managed to twist Lucy's hips the wrong way and the little shit bit me in the lip. I took five stitches and gave the dog a new name: Facebiter. An inauspicious ending to September.
So the first half of October was all about getting information about client sites, people and processes out of my head and into Larry's. In other news, Tom Syroid let his domain expire. [Hey, dude, get in touch with me when you can!] I put my most recent mirror of his Insights tree up at this URL: syroid_insights.orbdesigns.com. Jim Weimer and I went for a day hike up by Frederick, doing a shade under 10 miles of the Appalachian Trail. Newsmakers included Burt Rutan and his team at Scaled Composites winning the X Prize as they flew Space Ship One over 62 miles altitude and into space twice, well within the span of 14 days required by the competition. Marcia and I went to the Sugarloaf Craft Festival to do some holiday shopping, and Marcia's friend from Brazil, Marly, flew in for a week's visit.
I finished up with The NERDS Group as a full-time employee on October 15, although I stayed on the books as a 1099 contractor in case there's dire need at a client site. That's already come in handy for them a couple of times. Then I took a week off, organizing myself and putzing around the home office a bit in preparation for my start at NFR. Said putzing included picking up some new hardware and bringing a new box online, documented here. Between that wallet outflow and having to have the furnace repaired, it was an expensive week. Then the NFR gig commenced on October 25th. Each morning that first week I was awake by 0400, and thinking about work. Fortunately, I settled down pretty quick. Oh, and you can see above right one of the uses to which I put the great picture of Molly yawning. It looks much more threatening than she is.
November dawned with an election. The right guy must have won - the will of the heartland was followed. I don't agree, but then I'm a disagreeable sort. But a propeller-head beanie disagreeable sort, as I had an article published in the November issue of LinuxGazette.net. John (Fourth Reich) Ashcroft resigned, a bright spot in an otherwise dreary news month. And we got away for our annual Thanksgiving pilgrimage to the heart of tobacco country, visiting with Bob and Barbara Thompson, and their BC's Duncan and Malcolm.
Now we're galloping along to the finish line. December gave me a broken window to cope with, courtesy of a flying object in a windstorm. Then we pulled down the boxes from the garage attic and decorated the house for Christmas while the dogs helped by getting underfoot and finding out what ornaments tasted like. Marcia and I saw Linda Rose Payne in A Broadway Christmas Carol at the Roundhouse Theatre in Silver Spring. I managed to mostly transition back to morning posting here in the Grafitti space and I wrote letters of complaint to my bank and some other vendors, complaining of their advertising practices. To follow that up, no, I've not heard back in any case. How unsurprising! I was able to get VMware 4.5 running under Xandros 3.0, which they said couldn't be done. At the NFR company holiday bowling party, I was a part of the winning team, and so scored a Best Buy gift card. Mid-month saw the first drabs of snow, with about half an inch of accumulation here, mostly gone by the end of the next day. As Christmas came and went, Greg and I got some new RAM installed in Zidane, and Asteroid 2004 MN4 became a short term wonder, as it's chances of hitting Earth in 2029 got down to 1 in 37 before more observations made that impossible as the orbital trajectory was refined. And that brings us up to the moment, my year in review is done.
What's my take-away from all this? Dogs are good friends to have. A loving spouse is a joy. A house of our own is a source of pride, contentment, and endless chores, gardens ditto. Linux Rocks. Politics suck, Microsoft security ditto. Overall, it's been a good year, not one in which I'd make different large choices if I had it to do over again.
Today I'll make into gift card day. I've got that Best Buy card, and one from Sears, along with a bit of tooling to return for credit. So once I breakfast and shower, I'll head over that way. Happy New Year, blessings upon all of you and your families. I've enjoyed writing here this year, for me and for you, and look forward to more in the years to come. See you next year...
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January 1, 2005
1029 - Good morning. Bob, Roland, Greg and I had a conversation via email yesterday about the expiration of support for NT4 from Microsoft (effective yesterday), and what that meant for SMB owners. You'd think that most sites migrated to at least Windows 2000 Server a while back, and in large part, you're right. But that's only in absolute numbers: According to Netcraft (link here)1.4% of web-facing host names are still running Windows NT4/98. Netcraft uses the phrase "only 1.4%" where I might choose to say "Oh. My. God."
Now that's on external servers, where clearly the risks are highest. What are the chances that internal servers are yet a much higher percentage of core services boxes. I think even I'd be surprised. I ran into three sites in the last year personally that were still on NT4, and explicitly expressed no desire for change, even with the then impending EOL for their OS. Bob asked us which Linux some of the SMB owners would choose to replace their decrepit operating system with. Roland suggested FreeBSD as better, easier to install, and to maintain. In return correspondence (you'll see a copy of this on Bob's page for today (link here), I respectfully declined to agree with that judgement, except in strictest OS fitness terms.
I have some further thoughts clarifying some of what I wrote back to Bob...
Let's not even look at Windows Advanced Server 2003 and it's kin to start with - if a replacement isn't at least as easy to use as NT4, it's not going to be migrated to by companies that don't already have internal skills in the platform. So an SMB owner who managed to keep his OS afloat these last 8 years and is now faced with full end of life for his NT4 platform and feels forced to switch isn't going to go to FreeBSD or Debian unless he's already got experience with one of those platforms, in which case he probably would have switched a while back, neh? What we're left with now is people who didn't even want to change away from NT4, and are now looking with dread at the need to make any change at all. They're not CLI competent, and they've got a business to run and a server that needs to support that business, without an on-going IT staff.
That person has three choices today, in my opinion. First, and most likely, do nothing. They've gotten by this long and stayed ahead of the game. This business won't upgrade until the hardware dies and they can't find the original disks to install NT4 on new hardware. Next up is upgrading to Newer Windows Server. I'll have to tell you, Windows AS 2003 SMB is pretty damned simple to setup. It doesn't cost as much as the full-ride server, but it's limited to 75 seats and a single-server domain for $600, and comes with 5 CALs. Oh, yeah. Client Access Licenses, the Microsoft money tree. $489 per 5 pack, not much in the way of discounts for increased quantities. So for 25 seats, you're paying about $2,500 for the server OS, and (independently) for the right to access it over the network. Hmmm, Linux, huh?
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3.0 AS isn't too shabby a product. There's GUI access to all the important bits, I think that includes setting up stuff like Samba properly. AS without support built in costs $349 and there's no CAL requirements. If you want the supported version, then the cost goes up to $799. As an SMB owner, I might go for the second option in year one, to have a hand to hold when I needed it, then following year subscriptions could be at the basic level. That buys me upgrades and such. Some are going to do this.
A few others might lean towards Novell/SuSE, but that's it. There are no other real players in the ballgame today. Ask again what the right choice is if Xandros chooses to get into the server side of the shooting match.
Oh, yeah. Happy New Year. Grin! Have a great year!
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January 2, 2005
1332 - Good afternoon. Feeling washed out-ish, as we're both fighting a head cold that one of us brought home from a cow-orker. We've slept lots, done the weekly shopping, and now it's chores time. Let's see how much I can get done before I run out of steam. Then I might be back here. Ciao!
1935 - Good evening. A brief update: Christmas gear is boxed and stored for another year. A bit of vacuuming, some laundry, and some housecleaning around this site accounts for the balance of my day. Now to relax before getting back into the full work schedule tomorrow.
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Visit the rest of the DAYNOTES GANG, a collection of bright minds and sharp wits. Really, I don't know why they tolerate me <grin>. My personal inspiration for these pages is Dr. Jerry Pournelle. I am also indebted to Bob Thompson and Tom Syroid for their patience, guidance and feedback. Of course, I am sustained by and beholden to my lovely wife, Marcia. You can find her online too, at http://www.dutchgirl.net/. Thanks for dropping by.
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