Diary of a Network Geek

Today, I bring you an actual technical tip.

Sadly, it's not a tip I bring to you via actual experience, but via a regular e-mail I get from the fine folks at TechRepublic. Among the many e-mail news updates I get, they send me a Linux "tech note" filled with helpful information. Today's was particularly useful, or would be if I were still actively using Linux at work. In the Windows world, a standard setting is to have the Windows password expire every so often, forcing users to create new ones. This usually prompts them to throw out their old yellow sticky note stuck to the bottom of their keyboard, too, but that's just a side effect of improved security. Now, thanks to this article, you can enable password aging on Linux, too.

Before you start creating users, edit the /etc/login.defs file. Change the following settings:
PASS_MAX_DAYS 99999
(Change this from 99,999 days to something more like 60 or 90. That will force users to change their password more often.)
PASS_MIN_DAYS 0
(Normally, you wouldn't need to change this.)
PASS_WARN_AGE 7
(This gives them a full week of warnings to change their password. You know your users, but I think "less is more". Five days should be more than enough.)

You will also want to edit the /etc/default/useradd file, looking for the INACTIVE and EXPIRE keywords:
INACTIVE=14
(This would make an account that has allowed its password to expire to go "inactive" after two weeks. That's a week of warnings and a week of not working. Should be plenty.)
EXPIRE=
(This sets a specific date for an account to "time out", regardless of when the password was set. Normally, I'd leave that alone, but if you really want to set it, it's done in the format YYYY-MM-DD.)

That should get you through most "normal" situations, but if you've already got existing users or want more information, read the article at Tech Republic.
Wow, that was fun. For me, at least. Now, all I need is a job that lets me actually use those Linux skills that are rusting like a horse-drawn plow in the Winter snow....

Many people will be thinking back to what happened on this day in 2001, when a group of tragically misguided fanatics created terror on a previously unimaginable level by flying two passenger airplanes into the the World Trade Center twin towers and a third into the Pentagon. Some fewer people may recall the heart rending heroism of the passengers on the fourth plane, who managed to wrest control back from the hijackers and, sacrificing their own lives, crashed their plane in a field where the damage and horror could be minimized, if such a thing is possible.
Many will remember the heros who went and did their job in the face of impossible odds, trying to save as many victims of that terrible tragedy of hate and terror and politics as they could. Many paid the ultimate price in that effort, giving up their own lives in exchange for others.

The terrorists who rained destruction on us five years ago wanted us to be crippled. For a time, we were. I don't think much work got done terrible day, five years ago. Though, I remember working a full day, even as people around me went home to sit glued to the television, frozen, impotent, and frustrated. I remember the shock and unreality of the whole thing. It didn't seem possible, but it had happened. And, five years later, we still feel the after-shock from that event. We still deal with the repercusions.

I hesitate to add my voice to the multitude. My message less uplifting, less hopeful. I worry that those brave people sacrificed their lives only to see us less free than we were before that terrible day. In the years since that horrific day, that event has been used to justify some of the worst abuses of power and violations of our freedom ever recorded. Which is precisely what the terrorists were after. They want us to be afraid. They want us to change our way of life based on their actions. They want us to live in such fear that we willingly give up what generations have fought for in this country; Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.
I've heard the arguments for why I shouldn't mind having my every move watched by government "keepers", all of whom, I have been repeatedly assured, are there for my own good. I've been told that if I have nothing to hide, I shouldn't mind the invasions of privacy or the loss of freedom. Interestingly enough, similar arguments are used for things like gun control. Why should I need to have a hand-gun to protect me? The government keeps me safe, right?
My response is the same, to both arguments. "Where do you draw the line?" and "That's what Chancellor Hitler told Germany, too." The second argument for what I shouldn't let the people in power erode my civil liberties comes right from my old neighborhood. From men and women with numbers tattooed on their arms. Men and women who remembered how things started there. How the loss of small freedoms, meant to "improve" life, led down that slippery slope into Hell. They remembered, but there aren't many left. Those survivors are mostly gone, lost to age and illness and time. We think we know better now, but we don't. As has been said before, those who do not remember history are destined to repeat it. We must remember. We must never forget either of these things and find the balance between protect ourselves and throwing away all the things that we have worked and sacrificed so very much to have. We're still the "freeist" country in the world, but that means less today than it did.

"Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety deserve neither Liberty nor Safety"
-Benjamin Franklin

Oh, yeah, this is cool!

Remember when the world was young and Atari was the only home entertainment system? Well, those times might be long gone, but Atari is still here. And, now, it's small enough that you can stick it in your pocket. Yes, thanks to ThinkGeek, you can hang a teeny, tiny Atari game on your keychain. And, yes, it works. You can hook it up to a TV or monitor and actually play this game! How cool is that?!  Yeah, well, maybe it's only cool to geeks like me, but, still, it sure brings back memories.
Hey, it's Friday, why not find out What's New at ThinkGeek?

I really don't mind flying with my boss, but I wish he'd stop saying that.

So, Thursday last week, things started to go wrong with our server in Bellechasse, or, as I think of it, the Sweaty Armpit of the Gulf Coast. First, it was a user who just couldn't seem to connect. Then, there was another user who couldn't connect, though that turned out to be a totally unrelated problem. After dinking around with the server and the workstation over the phone, we finally rebooted the server and the problems seemed to be solved.

Turns out, not so much. Friday I got a call shortly after 8:30AM letting me know that now four users can't connect to the server. So, again, after a few minutes of screwing around with a work station, I had them reboot the server, figuring that what worked the day before should work again. Seems like sound logic, right? Well, it is a Windows 2000 server, so logic probably wasn't the best tool to apply. Everything seemed fine, right up until the server hung up at the "Preparing network connections" message. We rebooted the server at least three times after that and even tried Safe Mode, but, to no avail. So, I broke the news to my boss who was barely able to contain his joy at having an excuse to fly.

I should mention that I've flown with him on several occasions without incident and, as far as I can tell, he seems to be a very fine pilot. Certainly the flight itself has been smoother than most commercial flights I've been on. And, being able to bypass any sort of security checkpoints or limited schedules is really nice. It means, generally, that I can fly over, fix the problem and fly back in the same day. All with out needing to fill out an expense report, I might add.

So, well before sunup on Tuesday, we flew over to a little flat spot on the edge of New Orleans they call Lakefront Airport. This trip, I noticed that the same roofs seemed to have the blue FEMA tarps over them, but more yards had the pre-distressed FEMA trailers in them. Not sure if that's progress or not, but, somehow, it seems like it should be. At least more of the traffic lights were working. Certainly, that has to be considered progress.
In any case, we got to the office about 9:00AM and I walked right to the server and got to work. I started by rebooting, just to see if I was going to get lucky. Naturally, I wasn't or this post would've just ended. So, I cycled through several different boot options and finally, after much weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth, I got the server into a semi-stable state by booting into Safe Mode with Networking Support, but via the Repair Mode on the Windows 2000 install disk. (No, don't ask me to recreate the steps because I wasn't taking notes and I was probably running a fever.)

So, guesses on what was wrong? Out of disk space. Or rather, there wasn't enough disk space for Active Directory to run properly. So, I killed a bunch of temporary files and cranked down on the size of the virtual memory paging file. Sure enough, when I rebooted into "normal" mode, the server came up and everyone was able to log in and all was well with the world. All done before lunch, I might add!
And, so it was that I humbly asked to be brought an oyster po'boy, dressed, sans tomato, with fries for lunch while I attempted to kill all spyware and adware and other such nastiness. What I got was a catfish po'boy, two hours later, and one machine that still has some spyware remnants on it that need to be cleaned up. How fleeting is glory... Oh, and that's not to mention the several requests I got that were far, far outside the scope of "fixing problems", which was, in fact, my stated purpose.

Interestingly enough, when we touched down again in Houston an essential piece of navigational hardware in the boss' plane locked and threw an error message. Then, up popped the infamous Windows NT "Blue Screen of Death", upside down on that oh, so essential monitor. Yes, boys and girls, our lives depended on hardware that runs the most unstable, buggy, crash-prone version of Windows I've ever worked with.
Yeah, we sure cheated death again. Barely.

Oh, so you thought a fancy title was enough?

Ah, I remember those fabulous days in the web bubble when everyone around me was selling out and making giant bank.  Not me, though.  Oh, no, I stuck to my principals and fought the noble fight for things like security and longevity and all that sort of silliness.  Ah, well, according to Wired magazine, those times may be fast approaching again.  So, this time, I'll be prepared with the Web 2.0 Business Plan Generator!  This time, I'll be able to get some of that venture capital for myself!!

Oh, well, maybe not, but at least making a random generator in PHP was fun.
Hey, it's Friday, cut me some slack!

But, instead of complaining about why I hate my job tonight, I'll tell you a joke that sums it all up.

A mother goes and wakes her son up on the first day of school.
"It's time to get up for school!" she says brightly.
"I don't like school and I don't want to go," he responds.
"Well, why don't you like school?"
"The teachers hate me.  The kids hate me.  And, I think the lunch lady is trying to poison me."
"Well, you still have to go to school."
"I hate school and they hate me.  Why do I have to go?"
"Well, because you're the principal."

Cleaning my house has become a treasure hunt.

Saturday, I was looking for something in the kitchen and found a large quantity of popcorn. Not microwave popcorn, all done up in nice, portioned packages, but two jars and a large bag of popcorn kernels. I stood and just starred at it for a few minutes before the implication sank in that somewhere, most likely in the kitchen, I must have a hot-air popcorn popper. So, naturally, I started rooting in odd, hard-to-reach corners of the kitchen cabinets finding, among other things, an EasyBake oven, a rock tumbler and an ice-cream maker. Oh, yes, and the much desired, though slightly antiquated, Poppery II hot-air popcorn popper by West Bend. I cleaned it, because, well, as I didn't know I owned it I also had no idea at all where it had been in its travels. Cleaning seemed a rather prudent step, even for a half-mad bachelor with a goat-like stomach who's favorite kitchen phrase is "Well, it doesn't smell bad yet..."

Then, however, the question of proper and safe usage began to worry me, so I Googled the Poppery II hoping to find manuals in PDF format on the web. Sadly, none were to be had, but I did stumble across a rather interesting community of home coffee roasters, to whom, the Poppery II seemed to represent a kind of Holy Grail. And, while that might be dreadfully useful and fascinating information for another time, it got me no closer to popped popcorn. So, in the end, I simply plugged it in, filled the scoop-like lid and, praying that I started only a small fire, dumped the popcorn of unknown vintage in.

At first, there was nothing but a loud whirring sound as the hot air spun round and round, then, as if by magic, I was rewarded with an explosive pop. This was quickly followed by another and another. Victory! Then, it became quickly apparent that I had chosen a slightly inadequate bowl as the popcorn overflowed the counter and started to spill on the floor. A minor setback! I had achieved fresh, unsalted, no-butter popcorn! Hmm, that seemed more exciting at the time. In any case, I have quite a supply of popcorn now and I can melt as much, or as little, butter as I'd like. I can also salt as much, or as little, as I'd like. Why, I could even add other flavors! I could douse my hot popcorn in Tabasco, if the mood should strike me! Though, frankly, I'm not sure what could move me to do such a thing to popcorn. Still, when I started cleaning in the kitchen, I certainly didn't expect to find that.
Not to mention the rock tumbler...

I had a bit of a surprise Thursday night at therapy.

My headshrink suggested that further sessions wouldn't be neccessary. Didn't see that one coming. At least, not quite this quickly. Granted, we'd cut our sessions back to every other week some time back, but I hadn't quite expected to cut them out entirely this soon. Still, I suppose if the professional says I'm mentally well enough to stop, I should listen, right? Well, I won't put up a survey on the state of my mental health, so, don't get your hopes up!

I guess I should have gotten a clue when that one girl from Match.com wrote that I "seem like a regular guy looking for a regular gal" and I had to agree. I'm not half as complicated as I like to think I am. And, the fact that she subsequently vanished from Match? Well, I'm not quite narcissistic enough to think that was about me. At least, not all about me. Yes, I still tend to believe the worst about myself, but, then, don't a lot of people? I mean, when we spill our coffee, aren't most of us sure that the whole world is judging us as a result?

Yeah, I'd love to spend more time digging for more answers about why I am the way I am, but, in the end, does it really matter? I'm me, good and bad, and I'm fairly aware of what would be good to change or improve. And, while I might not agree with everyone else's opinions about that, I have enough clarity to pay attention and work on stuff I want to work on. Like that whole dating thing. I'm still not quite convinced the Bookstore Method works, but, it can't be any worse than Match.com, right? Right? RIGHT?!
Aw, even that didn't turn out too badly. Sure, it would have been nice if things had gone a little better, but, well, they sure could have gone worse. Well, I have been cooking more lately, and I keep meaning to post about that. And, I have a copy of Cooking to Hook Up : The Bachelor's Date-Night Cookbook. So, I suppose I am fairly well armed for a date at home. Of course, that does assume I can ever get my house cleaned enough for another human to see it. Seems like as soon as I clean up one thing, two more collapse into entropy.

Well, in any case, I'll go back at least once more, next month, and then, probably, call it quits. If something comes up, I can always make another appointment and, in the mean time, that co-pay will go a fair way towards paying off that laptop or buying dinner for a date. So, I guess it all works out. Watch this space for my dating adventures and misadventures. When I finally find a girl that I don't scare off too soon. ;)

Gear that's fun and for fun.

Okay, so a couple of days ago, I discovered a blog/review website called Gearlog. I don't remember why I went there in the first place or what I was looking for, but what I found was the coolest gear ever!
Start with the SMS-able Crystal Ball. Yes, that's right, fortune telling has arrived in the technological age and given us the easiest way to scam little, old, gullible ladies out of their money. Or, a cool accessory for a dorm room. Either way, this "crystal ball" hooks into a cell network and accepts SMS text messages. What could be more fun?

Well, if you're a college student, looking to have a decent computer workstation, to make more room and make an interior design statement, the Computer Bed could be more fun. This baby also comes via Gearlog, though I linked directly to the website. Oh, I would have so loved to have this in college! Of course, there's some question about how sturdy it is and if it would have held up under the Freshman Fifteen, but, still, it looks cool, right? Cool enough to impress a date? Well, maybe, but only if she's a computer geek.

And, finally, speaking of hot geeks, check out the ultimate geek chick accessory, the iPanty! Okay, it's actually called the iGroove Panty for the iPod Nano, but iPanty sounds cooler, doesn't it? (Oh, by the way, I cannot promise that link is safe for work. Be warned!) Now, if only I could find a girl who thought that was cool and funny and would be willing to try it at least once for me... Hey, it's not such a longshot! After all, they're sold out of the iPanty right now!

So, yes, this is just the kind of website I love. God bless you, Gearlog, for appealing to a geek's baser nature! Aw, c'mon, it's Friday! Cut me some slack and click the links.

Oh, this cannot be a good sign...

So, as many of my regular readers know, I occasionally entertain dreams of being a professional writer. Toward that end, I have a massive library of non-fiction books about writing. In fact, my current "bathroom reading" is The Writer's idea Book, by Jack Heffron. Here's the most recent writing prompt I read, on page 62, with some added emphasis:

Talk to family members in search of a mysterious relative from the past: someone who struck out on his own and was never heard from again; someone who lived modestly and died with a surprising amount of money; someone who abrubtly left a marriage, someone who lived alone and rarely visited anyone in the family. Imagine a life for this person, the details, based on what you know but pushing beyond into the realm of fiction.

Oh, God, I've become a writing prompt....