Eric Stewart: Running Off At The Mouth

We have an on call rotation at $JOB where, for a week, a given engineer is responsible for responding to after hours phone calls as well as tickets and ACL requests. During a recent turn of mine with the football, I got an ACL request that didn’t make sense, and after working it through with the DB Admin that made the request, I figured I’d write this. It’s sad that it’s probably mostly networking people that read the blog, because they already understand everything this will explain. It’s the DBAs, Developers, and other IT support personnel that could benefit from what I go over here.

We ran into a “time” situation at work, and I learned quite a bit about how NTPD works, and what exactly all the information in ntpq means. This has to do with the “Leap Second” that was instituted on June 30, 2015.

So we’ve had some computers die and were in need of something for a specific purpose: something to sync and backup our iOS devices with. Seeing as how we were originally using Windows for that, you’d think we’d have just gotten a cheap Dell or something. But, no. After some discussion, we got a refurbished iMac from Apple. Given that we were used to how Windows worked, this may have not been the best idea … even for someone who otherwise likes Macs, like me.

Ran into a little issue at work and decided to write up some things to keep in mind when you have multiple masters with slaves behind each individual master.

Just a quickie, probably subject to some editing later on, about how to use the “bind” option multiple times with a given service – mainly, to have a TFTP server operate from behind a virtual IP as the virtual IP (instead of becoming its real IP in the middle of the transfer).

Having obtained a new MacBook Pro from work, along with a copy of VMWare Fusion, I decided to seek out a copy of Windows 8 to see what people were complaining about. While it might seem a little sacrilegious to full screen Windows 8 on a Mac, I take this sacrifice for you to let you know what I think.

It’s not all bad.

But it’s still pretty bad.

More for myself than anything else, these are the notes I need when doing a fresh install of Xubuntu. I’ve moved my laptop to it at the time of writing this, and plan on moving all of my computers from stock Ubuntu to Xubuntu.

Just a quickie post outlining something I ran into; I installed/upgraded VMWare Tools and ended up having no Ethernet device. This is what I think would be a streamlined procedure to get things where they should be.

When I started, I had no real knowledge of kickstart files. Now I know a little, and I figured I could share with other CentOS/Red Hat admins how one might customize a kickstart file to create a LiveDVD ISO.

Subject to changes: Windows 7 is where I find myself spending most of my time: At home it’s my game machine, and at work … well, it makes a passable platform for my email and web browsers. So, that’s where my keyboard and mouse live. However, at both home and work I have an Ubuntu (Linux variant) system next to the Windows box, and occasionally I add my laptop (also running Ubuntu) to the mix. I use Synergy to control the Linux systems from the Windows system, and use SSH tunnels to secure the connection. Here’s how I do it.