Diary of a Network Geek

Two great tastes that taste great together.

It's that magic time of year again, when I think about career paths and long-term goals and what I need to do to meet them. For IT geeks like me, that often means training and certification. They're not the same thing, incidentally. Sometimes, I think IT staff forget that. I've taken far more training courses than I'm certified in! But, since getting the right certifications can help get you past the gatekeepers in HR, they are important. And, even more important is getting the right one. So, here are the Top Ten Hottest Certifications for 2008, according to TechRepublic:

1. MCP (Microsoft Certified Professional)
2. CCNA (Cisco Certified Network Associate)
3. MCPD (Microsoft Certified Professional Developer)
4. SCJP (SUN Certified Java Programmer)
5. CISSP (Certified Information Systems Security Professional)
6. Comptia A+
7. Comptia Network +
8. MCTS SQL Server 2005 (The Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist)
9. RHCE (Red Hat Certified Engineer)
10. Comptia Security+

I have to admit, I was pleasantly surprised to see so many CompTIA certifications in that list. Why? Well, in part because I have one already, the CompTIA Linux+, but also because I'd been planning on doing another one which is on the list, CompTIA Security+. The other reason I really like the CompTIA certs is because once you certify, you never have to take the test again to maintain your cert. Trust me, that's a big, big deal to someone with a bunch of certifications!

The other thing that I was looking at the other day was the Dice.com Third Quarter IT Local Market Reports. These look at the hiring and general employment trends that DICE has seen over the financial quarter. You can probably find your major metropolitan area in there, or one close. I'm not sure how the whole country is doing, but, I'm pretty pleased with how things look in Houston. Always nice to know that there are jobs out there, just in case.

Anyway, I hope this helps some of my fellow geeks plan out their personal and professional goals for the next year. And, folks, if you haven't been planning, why not?

Wish I'd found this sooner.

No, really, I wish I'd found and read Time Management for System Administrators a long, long time ago. This book was great! Some of the techniques in the book I already do, but I had to learn them the hard way. But, there were many more things that I either had never thought of, or hadn't thought of in the context of time management or improving my personal efficiency.

For instance, I've used ToDo lists in the past, in fact, I'd started using one again recently. But, I've never looked at using them the way the author, Thomas Limoncelli, suggests using them in Chapter Five: The Cycle. The idea, in short, is to manage everything on your ToDo list today by either doing it, delegating it, or moving it to tomorrow's ToDo list. No matter what you do with it, it gets managed and everything on today's ToDo list gets dealt with, one way or another.
Another theme that Limoncelli harped on was, whichever way you choose to keep track of tasks and ToDo lists, it has to be a way that you keep with you. Either you learn to carry your organizer with you everywhere, or you have to adapt something that you do carry with you to hold the information you need. In my case, I decided to use the organizer functions on my cell phone. So far, that's been working well for me.
After reading this book, I was also inspired to document my workstation imaging system in much more detail. Now, I have the start of documentation that can, essentially, replace me. This particular document is now detailed enough that just about anyone with a little experience on computers can setup our standard workstation with all the programs installed already. This way, if I ever end up in the hospital again, someone else can keep making workstations. I'll do some more documentation of this kind and write some policies, too. In a couple of weeks, or months, I'll have a fairly complete set of IT documentation for this company and I can customize it for any place I might work again. (And, yes, I might post some of it here for you all to steal.)
As part of that documentation, I started a network diagram. I had started this before using an old copy of Visio, but that wasn't working too well. I got all obsessed with making the autodiscovery function work just right, and it wasn't, but until I read what Limoncelli had to say about the value of a quick, simple network diagram that isn't obsessively correct. After that, I grabbed a copy of Network Notepad, a freeware network diagram tool, and all the extra libraries. Then I spent a quick couple of hours getting used to the way Network Notepad works and creating the simple diagram. After using it a bit, I decided I really like it. It has some nice features, so it's worth checking out. And, I'm going to use it to diagram my home network, too.
I'm still working on formalizing my life goals and implementing the stuff from the stress fighting chapter, but I am getting there. It was very much the right book at the right time for me. But, I do have to admit, if I'd found it sooner in my career, I might be doing better today than I am. Well, maybe not, but I'm glad I read it now.

If you're a system administrator, no matter if it's on a Windows network or Unix, or whatever, or, if you work on an IT helpdesk of any kind, get this book, read it and put it to use. NOW.

Probably a good thing none of us have to pass it.

Apparently, they've updated the test that people applying for United States citizenship have to pass. Now, the question is, how many of us who were born U.S. Citizens can pass it?

Why not take the sample test and see for yourself?

Not a bad idea at all...

Okay, so the runners have their iPod toys, it only makes sense that someone would come up with a wireless iPod dock for your bike. It's not quite as "feature rich" as the Nike Plus  product, but it does have the charm of making your ride a little safer than earbuds would if you want music for your ride. And, since my doctor suggested bike riding is better for my knees than running, I'm actually thinking about this. Sadly, it's not available until sometime in 2008, even though we know it'll cost about $150.

A "new" technique that's more than three years old.

Huh. So, there was this article on MSN recently titled Lock Bumping: A new burglary threat. Now, I remember reading about this in 2600, the Hacker's Quarterly a really, really long time ago. And, I seem to recall it was a topic at DefCon a number of years ago, not to mention that Bruce Schneier talked about it in 2005.
But, what gets me is that the article itself mentions that the technique was mad popular by a video in Germany back in 2004.

So, how is this a "new" technique again?

Today is Wallace Shawn's Birthday.

Wallace Shawn is an avant garde playwright who was born in New York on this day in 1943. He's the son of the former New Yorker editor William Shawn. I find him interesting, in part, because, even though his his friends took jobs writing for his father's magazine, he didn't. Instead, Shawn supported his playwriting by working as a photocopy clerk. But, and this is the idea that I like, he also got the idea of selling stock in himself, and managed to raise $2,500 from investors. To this day, he sends all those early investors a small annual check.

The other thing that fascinates me about Shawn is that you have probably seen him, even if you don't recognize his name. You see, he wrote and starred in a movie titled My Dinner with Andre which came out in 1981 to much critical acclaim, which consists entirely of Shawn and the theater director Andre Gregory talking over dinner. I don't know how well it did in the theatres at the time, but it became a cult classic.
You're even more likely to know him as Mr. Wendell Hall from the movie Clueless, or Vizzini from The Princess Bride. Or, perhaps even as the voice of Rex from Toy Story. (For more of his acting resume, you can check out the Wallace Shawn entry on IMDB.)
I found it interesting that, for all his spot on timing in humorous roles, he claims not to understand what people find so funny about his acting or the characters he plays. He's quoted on IMDB as having said, "I don't happen to have a sense of humor personally, so I don't know what's funny about a character... This happens to be a feature of my life generally. I do things, and other people laugh at them. I rarely know what the joke is supposed to be or why they're laughing."

Anyway, he's an interesting guy and I hope he has a happy birthday.

I've been doing some guerrilla blog marketing lately.

Nothing underhanded or even sneaky, but I've been doing some different things to promote my blog.
For one thing, I've been leaving comments on other people's blogs with links back to mine.  Not the usual suspects, mind you, but new blogs that I haven't really read before or read on a regular basis.  And, to find those places, those blogging "undiscovered countries", so to speak, I've been following links in comments on blogs that I do read on a regular basis.  But, beyond that, you may have noticed the BlogRush widget on my sidebar.  I've been looking at blogs from there, too, in part because I've never read them, but also because they've probably never read me.  So, I go and, if they seem interesting or cool or whatever, I leave a comment with a link back to my blog, hoping that folks will find my comment interesting and come take a look.  No idea, yet, how BlogRush is affecting my overall traffic, though.  I like the idea in theory, but in practice... Well, who knows.  If it brings me even one more reader, that's good enough.

The other thing I've been doing is leaving stuff with my blog's name and address on it in physical locations.
So, in the past couple of weeks, I've had to go to the clinic a couple of times for various reasons and I thought it would be a good idea to leave business cards on tables with my blog information.  Again, if it brings even one more reader, why not, right?  Oh, and for those of you who are new, the "clinic" isn't the free clinic to find out if I have a sexually transmitted disease, but the lymphoma clinic at M. D. Anderson.  Nothing to worry about, just blood work.
Yesterday, I left magazines with stickers on them that said "This magazine donated by: Diary of a Network Geek" and, again, gave the web address.  I left old copies of Men's Health and 2600, The Hacker's Quarterly in a couple of spots in the clinic waiting room.  Next time, I'll have both Men's Health and Wired magazines.  In fact, today I was sorting a couple of old Wired magazines and stickering them in preparation of the next visit to a waiting room.

Honestly, I don't know that any of that will be very effective in driving my readership up at all, but, I have the old magazines and stickers and business cards, so, I figure, what can it hurt.
Have any of my readers done anything similar?  If so, what were your results?

Cheap is good, but free is better.

Okay, so I'm always looking for cheap or free tools that let me develop my various web sites quickly and easily. Well, I found two that sort of go together. First, there's Firebug, which is a plugin for Firefox that lets you edit webpages. To compliment that, though, there's YSlow for Firebug, which helps you diagnose problems with your website.

I know a lot of bloggers now.

I may not "power Blogger", but I know a lot of people who do. One of them is very sweet, owns an adorable chocolate (aka brown) lab, and is a cracker jack photographer. She wrote a post you all need to read: Second Hands.
Also, read the comments. Sometimes, the comments say as much as the posts do on a blog.

Besides, I don't want to write it again.

This time, we'll restore the image we made last time
mkdir /tmp/server
mount -t smbfs -o username=my_user_name //server_name/share /tmp/server
Now, this assumes that you don't have anything installed on the new pc yet and are working with just a blank, unformatted hard drive. First, I restored the partition table and the master boot record:
# sfdisk /dev/sda < /tmp/server/images/cad1r-sfdisk-sda.dump
# dd if=/tmp/server/images/cad1-sda.mbr of=/dev/sda

And then the partitions. Since I had several files produced by split for my primary partition, I needed to take them all, in the right order of course. Now, keep in mind that when we used split in the last post, it added "aa", "ab", "ac", etc. to the end of the file name.

# ls -l /tmp/server

will help you check which files you need for the next step.

Now, again, this all assumes that you had a single partition on the original machine and are restoring a single partition. First, change to the directory where the images are:
cd /tmp/server
Now, we restore the image files with the command below. You'll have to "cat" all the files in the image directory on the server. Notice the pattern of the file names? That's what split did for us. Now, rather than do the work manually to restore them, I used a little bit of shell code and a variable reference to save you the need to type the names of all the files. Also, the little "-" at the end of the line does matter, so don't forget it. Oh, and this command should all be on one line.
cat cad1-sda1.img.gz_a[a-z] | gunzip -c | ntfsclone --restore-image --overwrite /dev/sda1 -
Reboot into your new Windows XP clone.
It's just like magic, isn't it?