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2004/09/06
 04:01:50

Well, if you want to reach something at Bethel, basically the answer is too bad. Stuff is *really* broken right now. I've worked in the past 24 hours though, and can't do much more without the network team - I'm going to bed. I wonder how early I'll get a call in the morning...

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2004/09/03
 00:29:31

My guess is that car was stolen, given that it was in neutral, the button on the gear shift was broken, the doors were unlocked, and it had an open ignition. Security was putting a boot on it as I left, but it was gone the next morning too. Cops probably came and got it. The dent in my car was gone by the next morning when I went to work, so at least I don't have to deal with it.

I think this is the calmest school startup we've had since I've been at Bethel. Seriously, none of my stuff has really broken. The biggest issue we've seen is some switches flaking out, and Doug and Brent and I fixed that at least in the short term with not much work (we just effectively rebooted the network). Things started looping and confusing each other since buffers filled up and things started looping. That's fixed now though, at least on the network. There's still the maximum packet size at north village, but that's just helping them get their exercise since they have to either know what they're doing or go to the main campus. Other than that, I managed to eliminate one email list server so far - only two more to go. I also wrote a bounce handler to deal with bouncing emails for a lot of things, so none of the bounces for lists get to me now. The Help Desk probably will notice that they're not getting bounces for Incidents anymore soon too.

Last night was movie night with Butterfly Effect. Way too many of you didn't show up. Claim bad scheduling or whatever, but I didn't pick the day. And Doug even showed up. It was definitely a good movie. It was guys against girls on which ending was better (we watched both). Doug and Ross and I liked the director's cut, while Meghan and Steph and Lindsey liked the theatrical version. I wonder if that's trend holds (Hint: notice the "Add Comment" link below)? The movie was definitely different than what I was expecting. It's not a scary movie at all, but it is designed to shock and surprise you (like everything flashes and you feel an impact shock). It's an interesting one to think about the ideas involved in it.

Today was interesting. Lunch involved going Ross and I going to my place to eat leftover pizza from movie night watch Mr. Rogers. There need to be more shows like that on TV. Then before I leave work today Curt Koehn stops by and we chat for quite a while. He says hi to all you Bethel people I work with since I'll probably forget to tell you in person. Then I finish off the night by fixing email lists as someone is trying to use them, followed by watching Episode 1 of Season 2 of Alias. I'd say it's a good day.

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2004/08/29
 23:33:20

Thursday was interesting. We set up "Where's George", a webcam for the Bethel community to see the location of George. This was possible due to his standing outside greeting the freshmen and their parents as they moved in. It was pretty funny, although we did end up with a no-more-webcams-without-permission decree... Oh well, we were allowed to keep it up for the day, and it was fun while it lasted. Lunch was interesting, as a bunch of us just needed to get off campus, and had a fun time trying to get back on. We ended up eating lunch while sitting in the car listening to tunes in a long line of cars...

Work for the Thursday and Friday ended up mostly being list stuff. Setting up lots of lists, evaluating selection criteria for others, and migrating things to the new server. I managed to get most of the ones off one of the servers, and should hopefully be able to decommission that this next week after I hear back on some things. Saturday I was on call for the afternoon, and since I had to wake up and be available anyways, I figured I should put the time to use and did more lists stuff. There is definitely a more noticable latency doing X forwarding to Bethel now than during the summer though.

Saturday night a bunch of people came over and we watched Kill Bill: Vol. 1 followed by Kill Bill: Vol. 2. Good movies, although I had some issues with part of the ending on Vol. 2. I also discovered my walls have an interesting reasonance I'm gonna have to deal with. Sunday was Salem which was crowded due to a bunch of freshmen from Bethel being there for a service project. After that did a little grocery shopping so I can eat food at home for a while again. Then started watching The Man Who Wasn't There. That's an interesting movie. Billy Bob is an interesting actor. Don't see many black and white movies from this century either. Then the family went out to dinner for my brother's birthday at Green Mill, which was good. Then I finished the previously mentioned movie, and now am just sitting around. Realizing tomorrow is back to work. And hopefully not having to deal with a lot of stuff...

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2004/08/25
 23:41:09

Saturday was decent. I didn't feel much better, but it was Meghan's going away party so I was outside a decent part of the day, which might have helped. After the party I fixed my dad's computer a bit, and that was it. Sunday was church at Salem, and I took a nap. I don't remember much else.

Monday was the first day of the fun known as training and welcome week. Basically since then I've been busy with work stuff constantly. Tuesday I started off the day with making some progress on the list server. I finished off the day doing a mass migration of email lists to the new server and rushing to get temp LDAP entries in place so we could go live since another system was broken. A bit over 4000 email lists in a day, that works. We'll find bugs in production I guess - so far all the new server restrictions seem to be working as planned though. Then Wednesday I finished up a script to add, modify, and delete LDAP aliases automatically, which should save hastle. That was also new student pizza and movie night which was fun with Ice Age. Although a bunch of us sat on our computers during it. And Mike Vedders leaves too many programs up and running while playing movies on the projector... That was followed by setting up my sister's computer (Macs have some cool features to help fix PCs), and meeting all her roommates and getting attacked by Austin in the process. 4 people at the movie ended up in her room, it was sorta weird.

Then I got this email forwarded to me. It was spam. No big deal, it's happened before, someone gets a list of Bethel people, the email servers don't like them anymore. The pattern in this one looks really odd though. Start poking a bit more, and see a distinct thing meaning the list came from one of two places. Look on one and someone obviously trying to get around the filters to harvest addresses. A marketing company, different from the spamming company. The emails are coming in at a rate slow enough that it's obvious they're trying to avoid detection. What a pain. Harvest from web (over 2 days, also likely to lessen chance of detection), demunge, and sell. At least the emails admitted they're an advertisement. How low can you go though - even targeted to the organization name...

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2004/08/19
 00:27:27

Work has been a little better with the boss back, but the work keeps piling on and he's still catching up and I'm still learning new an interesting ways to confuse the email server, so... I'm trying to get out at around 8 these days. Yea the days are long, but the hours at the end are when stuff seems to actually get done. I've started to get a lot of things automated, now I just have to get people to realise that's the case. I get halfway through looking at a request for access to something and wondering why it doesn't work since stuff is there and realize that they didn't bother checking and just requested it because it used to be that way. Oh well, such is life. I probably sent it in a long email too.

Speaking of long email, today I got drafts of some documents for training. I feel bad since I sent a really long list of stuff to change (like 15K plain text - for comparison my average "long" email people say is too long has been around 5-6K). Apparently I'm like the first person to look at it though out of a decent handful, so hopefully that'll be the most they have to deal with.

Last night some Jeff and Sarah decided to drop by my office since they were on campus anyways and it was good to see them. Although Jeff and I seemed to get on a lot of geeky tangents. It was pointed out to me that I didn't have any music playing and that knowing me it's not due to a lack of cables available. They were right and it actually turns out that I had everything I needed in my office, so the powerbook now has one more cable connecting it while on the desk. Now I just need to remember to turn the volume on the powerbook to almost off before connecting it to the amp so I remain friends with my 2nd floor coworkers...

One week and about 9 hours until projects need to be ready to go. Can we make it? And how many of you didn't realize that's when Welcome Week starts and we get swamped? At least we still sorta get a half day idea from student workers moving in the day before - should be interesting.

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2004/08/16
 23:54:11

Back to work again. Didn't get as much list stuff done as I wanted, mainly because I couldn't find the scripts I can probably basically copy to finish up what we want to do. I did a little more load testing though and figured out some combinations may be possible. We may have to test on a few live mailings that aren't time-critical. Otherwise the day was broken up by just random stuff. Unfortunately more than I'd like I'm hitting the places where I need to ask people about things, having done most of the changes that can be pulled off without problems or working with other people. The problems from that are that everyone else is busy now that I need to ask them, and stuff needs to be explained, so stuff takes longer.

Sometime within an hour or so of when I was gonna go home Nick and Doug came to visit. Nick and I ended up going up to North Village to troubleshoot problems reaching servers, while Doug poked from the core end and changed stuff for us. Unfortunately we discovered bad stuff, in the form of packet size limitations and limits hit due to 802.1q VLAN tags and changing MTU sizes. Then there were 802.1q trunking issues. I hadn't installed much in the way of packet analysis software on my machine, so we had fun reading TCP dump output. And then trying to figure out AP associations. We then wandered around and I could at least get an IP outside every building. I also could see almost every if not every access point from outside the buildings too (and a building or so away). Most with pretty good signal strength. I'm gonna start blaming people bringing in 2.4Ghz phones on the connection problems people have I think.

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2004/08/15
 01:23:32

The week is finally over. I'm quite happy about that. Not only were both Brent and Mike gone all week, but it's the time for students to start using our resources again and for faculty to come back and start complaining about things. And of course everything has to be done "now". Monday night started off with a movie night. brooke did a decent job of picking a movie, that movie being Dead Poets Society, even though it's not quite good enough for the number of times I've seen it. It was a good time though. Unfortunately most of the other nights of the week were just relaxing to keep my sanity.

The big project for the week was to get lists stuff up and running. The problem with that is that is mainly coding at this point, which means it doesn't work well when I'm covering for things. I installed Windows XP and some management tools on my powerbook, so I shouldn't have to VNC into the servers near as much anymore. SP2 breaks mmc if exchange stuff is installed though, which is a bad thing. We managed to chew through a ton of backup tapes too, and one of the tape drives really messed itself up and took a good amount of time to fix. I managed to forget about a lot of other tape swaps now that I think about it too. And you don't want to know what our restore window is now - just don't delete stuff accidentally. :)

There's also this whole Windows architecture thing to finish before school. So I rebuilt an old server up as our new Apps server. I figured out which Mac apps only run in classic mode and archived those, and the native OS X ones are in the process of being migrated. Stupid macs and slashes in file names, and stupid windows for not allowing slashes in file names. Neither is a good idea to encourage I say. I also started tweaking the domains, and disabling lm announcements on servers to which users shouldn't be directly browsing (they shouldn't be using browsing at all, but...). I think I may be able to completely control what shows up in the lists anyways, but we'll see on that. Also experimented with turning off netbios on some windows stuff. Apparently macs still use smb over netbios rather than smb though to connect (even though they say smb). They've only been doing it for a couple years, I don't see why they went for the old technology. Half my file servers aren't accessible from half the places on the network either. It's not my fault though, and I can't do anything about it, so I don't worry about it. People don't like when my reaction though - "Yea, they can't get to that. It'll probably be like that for a few days. Have them try again next week." Overall that part is good though. We could start school without any big problems right away I think. Other than apparently someone followed some really old instructions and mathematica 5 doesn't work in some places. 2 years was more than enough time to transition that one...

The lists stuff. I didn't do more course testing or anything, but I think that's stable. I still need to do automated membership for courses. I did write and install a new module after I got home last night that does sending location verification. Basically a message has to come from on campus (including webmail) or be sent with authenticated smtp or the list servers will bounce the message for most lists. It also bounces mail flagged as spam. Those two should make a lot of list managers happy. The management tools for list moderators are greatly improved as well. For when users send a message to a list in multiple ways (such as to multiple addresses) it also detects and bounces all but the first one with a note about watching the recipients when replying to all. There are other cool things in there too, but they're my secrets. The wonders of procmail and perl and what can be achieved. I still need to get automatically populated lists up and running. I think I may try and do that Monday. I think that means Monday is get-stuff-done day, which means I may not check Incidents at all. If you work for the Help Desk sorry, they'll have to wait until the next day. It probably isn't a big deal. Like that "had to be done within 2 days" restore a month ago that they just noticed the restore wasn't what they needed.

Saturday was more work stuff. I went in and actually got some stuff done (thus the plan for continuing it on Monday, but I can't break stuff then). I changed the lab logon notice to prevent people clicking close right away. It does go away, and you can put stuff over it. Hopefully people will actually take note of it now. Most of my other stuff hasn't broken anything yet, so things are still working. I need to get an old machine and test some last stuff though. Apparently we need to keep Windows 95 and 98 machines working like they're part of the domain for a bit longer. :( We'll see if I get motivated to actually do stuff on Sunday. Maybe I should do a couple smaller movie nights this week just to force me to to take a break after last week.

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2004/08/04
 23:50:05

SYNC Timing Synchronization failure - Failed to receive MAC SYNC frame within time-out period
SYNC Timing Scnchronization failure - Failed to acquire FEC framing
SYNC Timing Synchronization failure - Failed to acquire QAM/QPSK symbol timing

That's a fancy way for the cable modem to say that it can't talk to the cable company. I think it's scary that I know what those mean even though I've never actually worked with cable modems other than using them. Guess that's what I get for being into both networking and radio stuff. Can anyone else say what QAM/QPSK stands for without looking? Hint - QAM is the cable alternative to the 8VSB format used for terrestrial DTV broadcasting. :)

Work today was decent. Dave and I got to learn a lot of passwords and get diagrams and explanations of how to reboot the server rooms if stuff goes horribly wrong. I hope I don't have to use them. In finishing up things before he left my boss also set up some stuff so I can test the new list server. Now the trick is just to make sure I don't completely collapse Bethel's mail server cluster again. How many thousands of bounces can it handle per minute... :) I have the routing changes necessary to only test on half the cluster now though, so if I kill anything it shouldn't be bad.

I figured out how to disable drag and drop as well as cross-application copy/paste under OS X today. I guess "figured out" sorta implies that I was trying to do so, while in reality it was a side effect of trying to eliminate unnecessary services from my machine - pbs tends to be handy. Although the good news is you can run for many hours without it no problem, and despite the man page saying users shouldn't manually run it if you know where to find it I thing you're qualified to do so (everything seems to work). I finally killed off blued and stopped it from respawning by changing filesystem permissions. If you don't have bluetooth enabled there's no reason to be running it's daemon. Yet Apple seems to have a lot of crap enabled. Also disabled automount, cups, nfs, crashreporter, and some other junk. The stupid iChat helper is on the list to kill occationally. I don't use or want iChat. And then there's AppleSpell. I don't find a spell checker handy enough to have it running all the time in the background. It looks like X11 is the program starting it too, which makes no sense. Spell check in a terminal window?!? Oh well, I think the best part of OS X is chmod -x. :)

OK, enough geeky ranting. I just want a UI that doesn't add random delays to stuff.

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2004/08/03
 23:50:06

And the skips are gone. A while back I applied a firmware update to my Karma. It was a minor bugfix one, mainly detecting more types of corrupted audio files and allowing them to be partially played or flagged so they are disabled in playlists until corrected. This was all fine until I tried playing some tracks which are encoded in 320kbps vorbis. About halfway through the song it'd start skipping occationally and stuff. Only happened on those and most other portable players which can even play 320kbps don't do it well, so no big deal. I went and told it to rebuild the song database tonight and after pausing my song for about 2 minutes all is fixed. This firmware version also makes it so the ethernet works better and it just pauses during the transfer rather than actually stopping playback too, which is cool. According to the docs they fixed some unicode locality stuff and support UTF-8/16 and Kanji so maybe I can upload tracks with non-ascii names now. Can't argue with a player you can sync over ethernet and they release free upgrades to it every month or two. :)

Sunday went OK. I got home from church and couldn't get my email. Turns out the IMAP server crashed again. Brent's replacing that as soon as he gets back from vacation - hopefully it won't happen again until after he gets back. That meant a run in to Bethel, but luckily it was an easy problem to fix. I had tell a former student to stop writing bad code and loading down the shell server and do it right, but he seemed to take it well. If you have procmail available, a perl script which goes and shuffles things around through IMAP is just painful to yourself. After rebooting more bethelwulf nodes to stop the emails from them, left and headed to family birthdays. It had been months so there were a lot of birthdays. Was a decent time. I ended up loading up the back of my car and bringing home more toys, this time speakers. Stopped by my parents place to grab the amps to go with said speakers and for some reason the family was playing with a sphygmomanometer and decided to check my bloodpressure for fun (guess that's what I get for having so many medical people in the family). Of course the timing was just after I had just restacked a pile of amps downstairs and lugged two 7301s up the stairs. And they wondered why my systolic was a little high... Now I just need to buy or build a crossover and I can try and not blow out the windows in the house or burn up the wiring. They'd be great for the outdoor movie night idea, but nobody seems to like the idea of helping me move them. Something about the speakers being heavier than the amps or some crazy thing. May have to try it once though.

Monday was a Monday. Started sorting things out at work, working on more automation and stuff. Blah. After work I'm relaxing at home and the server room calls me to complain about its temperature. I tell it to stop calling people and ignore it for a while. Still bad so go in and check on it. Turns out Bethel had a power outages I thought was minor but the air conditioner didn't like them much. It was hot and humid, so I turned on the old unit and tried to get it to not drip all over the hallway. It sorta works so I leave. On my way out security is escorting an Xcel truck through campus. I saw said Xcel truck leaving when I got to work this morning - turns out there was more than one outage and apparently not minor. I know a lawnmower and a 220 line were involved in an incident on campus in the same general timeframe, but I think that's actually completely separate and happened this morning (unless they were mowing after 10pm, in which case no wonder they hit it).

Tuesday was routine as well. Dave forgot his DVDs, so we went to Wendy's instead. I also rebuilt one Windows server, and automated more stuff. We got free corn in the afternoon, and while not as good as past years it was still free. Finished off the day by making a list of IPs/hostnames and what I think they do. Tomorrow is the boss's last day before a week and a half of vacation, and Dave and I get to try and pick up the slack. We get to learn about everything he's done so far this summer tomorrow. Should be an interesting day...

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2004/07/31
 23:55:34

I think Mozilla can get really confused on downloads. I never noticed that on linux, but then I don't download big files that often. I think that started happening at about the 2GB mark, which makes sense if they're using 32bit numbers. They should probably fix that as more people get broadband or use local networks these days. I should have known it wouldn't display right when it had no clue of the file length or estimated time when it started.

Thursday night Dave and I watched The Bourne Identity (the new mangled 2002 version). He didn't remember much of what was in it and afterwards we determined that was because he hadn't seen the whole thing. That movie has a well mixed soundtrack, and good environmental effects. Plus it has a DTS soundtrack to actually take advantage of it. Nothing quite like gunshots and explosions at reference levels. Well, other than the real thing that is.

Friday was System Administrators Appreciation day. Seemed like any other day to me, although I was mainly doing little cleanup tasks. Did some group cleanup in Active Directory. I still have a ton more to do there before school starts. Like building all the departmental areas on our main file server. I did request a lot of database access permissions though, and Dave got them all set up. I completed two automated data sync projects, with architecture in place for another once some other stuff is in place. This will also allow me to start getting the list server stuff together too (finally).

Saturday was relaxing. I saw this article over at slashdot which was interesting. I've always thought something like that would be cool to do (basically like movie night, but outside). Not as an invite-the-public type thing, but just with a bunch of friends some weekend or something. The bugs in MN make it a bit of a pain to pick a location though. Anyone have any good ideas?

And crap - that download died. Seems when the number reached 0 (about 4GB), Mozilla crapped out. And wget -c doesn't like continuing at that stage, so I may be downloading again. :( While I was writing this I was poking around on my computer a bit, looking to find the big space consumers. I think the winner is iDVD. 1.09GB for a single App (that I'll maybe use once or twice)? What the heck?!? After a backup to DVD I think that one is going through the rip out most themes inside it process.

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