Diary of a Network Geek

So, now that I’ve gotten a little more used to the inside of the new WordPress, I’m probably going to make some changes to the part that you all see.  I’ll probably play around with the theme here, and on my other blogs, for the next couple of days.  I might not add or change much, but, then again, WordPress has added some cool new features since I upgraded last, so I might end up making some pretty significant changes, too.  In any case, don’t be alarmed if you see bits and pieces of the blog appear and disappear, or colors change or anything like that.  It’s just all part of Uncle Jim’s Master Plan for World Domination, aka Diary of a Network Geek Spring Cleaning/Remodeling.

I’ll let you know when I’m done, too.  Then, probably have you all vote on it.  Or something.

What do you run on your monitor server?

Do you think you’re too small to run a monitoring server? Well, I have two local servers, a remote web server and a remote e-mail server that I’m in charge of worrying about and I run a monitoring server. It’s not much of a server, really, just an old workstation to which I added a bunch of spare memory and a large, clean hard drive. Naturally, I run Linux on my monitoring server, which, ironically enough, I named Monitor. Specifically, Monitor runs Red Hat Fedora.

Monitor runs Nagios, which I’ve mentioned before. With Nagios, I monitor both my main file server and my accounting SQL server. I also watch the off-site web server and the SMTP and POP3 e-mail services on the managed e-mail server we have through our ISP, just to make sure they’re up and running. (It’s a long story on why we have that, but, rather than run my own, to reduce hassle, headache and potential disaster, I let someone else worry about it.) Nagios tells me the status of drive space, the memory usage, the CPU usage and uptime on both servers. On the accounting SQL server, it verifies that the SQL service is available and that users can log into it. On the file server, it tells me the status of the Backupexec modules. Unfortunately, I haven’t figured out a way to get Nagios to tell me more than the running status of Backupexec, but, in my spare time, I still try to find a way to have it report the status of the last backup or restore job run. No joy yet, but I keep trying.

I also have a browser window open to the SolarWinds installation at our ISP. They monitor inbound and outbound traffic over the Internet connection we have. Usually, I keep a window open on the standard “interface details” reports which update regularly. Most of the time, I also open a window to the weekly history report on the min/max/average packets in and out. I have to update that manually, but it lets me quickly compare today’s traffic to network traffic for the past week. It’s nice to see those trends!
Lately, I’ve been keeping a browser window open to the national weather forecast, by hour, for our local area. In hurricane country, keeping track of the weather can be vitally important! But, if you live in snow country, the same thing would probably be true, too. I don’t recall heavy snow causing an outage during my time up North, but it’s not out of the realm of possibility.

Finally, I almost always have Wireshark running a packet capture, too. If I see a sudden spike in traffic, having a packet capture already running could make a big difference. I have that capture set to save files locally, too, just in case. I’ve been setting the capture to rotate nine files and to keep the files at seven megabytes each. That should give me a pretty good spread of captured network data if I ever need to go back and diagnose a traffic problem. And, since the machine is actually kind of stinky hardware and crashes on occasion, when I restart the packet capture, I rename the base file using the current date. That way, I can tell at a glance when the capture was started.

One day, I’d like to move this all to another machine that’s more stable, faster and has more drive space, but, until then, this works. It’s only on the private network, so I can’t look at it directly from the Internet, but, it still does enough for me. One of these days, I’ll look into some of Nagios’ data presentation modules and teach this old dog a few new tricks, like automated uptime reports and that kind of thing.

Hopefully, that hasn’t bored too many of my non-geek readers. And, I hope it’s given my geek readers something to think about. So, tell me in the comments, if you have a monitoring server/station/whatever, what does it run? If you don’t have one, why not?

I finished Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson last night.

Okay, so let me front-load this review with all the bad things up front. The main character’s name is Hiro Protagonist. I mean, can you get any more gimmicky than that? And, as often seems to happen with Stephenson’s books, things come to an end very quickly. And, by that I mean, they build to a state of extreme tension over more than three-hundred pages and then end in less than twenty, often without much in the way of explanations or tying up of loose ends. Snow Crash is no different.

But, those things aside, it’s a damn fine bit of science-fiction.
The story follows Hiro, who’s a hacker that’s currently working for Uncle Enzo’s Cosa Nostra Pizza as a delivery driver. Hiro, however, runs afoul of Uncle Enzo after crashing his delivery car trying to get a late pizza delivered on time. He’s aided by a skateboard courier by the name of Y.T. She’s a little under-age, but she’s a great courier and, now, a friend of Uncle Enzo. That’s a good thing, considering that the Mafia is a nearly ubiquitous franchise in the world of Snow Crash. In fact, most franchises seem to be nearly ubiquitous and have managed to become their own little countries, as are the California suburbs, or “Burbclaves”, where most of the book’s action takes place.
So, when Hiro gets fired from his job at Uncle Enzo’s, he goes to his part-time job as a stringer for the Central Intelligence Corporation and starts selling them intelligence. While in the on-line world known as the Metaverse, which Hiro helped program, searching for some juicy intel, he watches one of his hacker friends get infected with a new computer virus called “snow crash”. Nothing new there, right? Well, not quite… There’s a new twist to snow crash. It seems that this virus not only infects your computer, but it does something to your mind, too. And, now, someone’s trying to infect Hiro with it.

So, that’s the basic premise. I won’t spoil the book by telling you how it all turns out. But, I will drop a few hints. There’s a bunch of religion involved. And ancient Sumerian artifacts and the Metaverse and one of Hiro’s ex-girlfriends and raft-riding refugees and more. It’s complicated, convoluted and entirely entertaining. In many places it seems so light and comical that it’s almost a farce, but, really, that just off-sets the intensity of the other, more philosophical passages.
If you haven’t read it yet, read Snow Crash.  It’s Neal Stephenson at his best and it’s great.

So, a funny thing happened Friday night.

As I wrote in my last entry, I went to dinner with three friends Friday, to celebrate one’s birthday. The prettier half of the married couple, actually, L. To make things easier, I ran by their apartment and rode with them to A’s apartment. As per usual, I snuck past the security gate behind someone else and popped up to their apartment to visit for a moment before we left to gather up our last gustatory adventurer.

We walked down to their car and I went around to the rear passenger-side door via the back of the car. I watched with growing horror as the couple parted, J going to the driver’s seat and L going, by herself, to the front passenger side door. She opened her door and let herself in. I sat down behind her.

“So, you guys have been married for a long time now, haven’t you?” I asked, knowing that it had been less than a year.
“What do you mean?” J asked me as his wife started to laugh. “What?”
“I think he was asking why you didn’t open the door for me.”

That scene repeated several times before J was finally shamed into opening his wife’s door for her.
You try to raise them right, but these kids today…

Advice from your Uncle Jim:
"You may give out, but never give up."
   --Mary Crowley

So, a married couple, a recent widow and a divorced man go out for dinner…

No, that’s not the start of a joke. Those are my plans for the evening.
It’s a sad, little personal life, but it’s mine, all mine.

(An interesting side note, though there is a word for a divorced woman, namely divorcee, there is not, apparently, an equivalent term for a man. How odd.)

Okay, not actually coffee, but a coffee mug.

In the same vein as T-Shirt For Tough Guys, a UK company is now offering a “Knuckle Duster Mug“. For those of you not familiar with the phrase, a “knuckle duster” is slang for brass knuckles. From what I understand, they’re quite nasty. Can’t say how well the coffee mug will stand up if you use it that way, though.

It’s the perfect thing for those of us who are thugish in the morning before we’ve had our coffee!

At least, that’s my story and I’m sticking to it!

Tuesday night, I took “before” pictures.
Knowing that the Queen of the Damned will likely read this, I hesitate to mention how heavy I’ve gotten. Let’s just say that I’m the heaviest I remember being, ever, and I’d like to lose forty pounds or so. And, it’s not like I haven’t been meaning to get back in shape after last year’s “little episode”. Chemotherapy takes that weight off great, but it all seems to come back with the hair! And, every pound seemed to bring a buddy!!

In any case, I started planning for this even before treatment ended. I got several books on exercise and I had a new pair of running shoes from before I was diagnosed. Not that I’m allowed to start running at my age, but they’ll give me support for taking the dog on walks.
I’ve had a subscription to Men’s Health for several months now. Believe it or not, in spite of being the male equivalent of Cosmo, there’s really a lot of pretty good health advice in there. Granted, there are lots of articles on women that my, admittedly limited, experience leads me to believe are somewhat suspect, but at least there aren’t any articles on how to achieve orgasm while caulking your windows. (I swear to you I actually saw an article like that in a women’s magazine when I was working as a security guard in college! I would not lie to you about something as important as this!) I’ve even bought several of their cookbooks now, in an attempt to eat better, and healthier. If I can just stop going out with friends so often, I think I’d do better there.
And, of course, all of this is just smoke and mirrors if I can’t get my shit together and actually start working out. Doing anything, really, would be better than I’ve been doing for the past couple of months. Just walking the dog would be a start.

So, that’s why I took the before pictures. I see those guys in Men’s Health all the time, those “before-and-after” guys, those “Bellyoff! Club” guys, and I want to be one of them. I need the “before” clearly in front of me. The last time I lost a bunch of weight, it was because I saw a picture of myself when my ex-wife and I were buying our house. I couldn’t believe I’d gotten so fat! Well, this is the same thing.

Now, I just need to make my “after” happen.

Update:  I discovered this morning that it turns out that I’m not quite at my heaviest ever, but I’d still like to lose thirty-five to forty pounds.

I know everyone’s communication strategies differ based on personal experience, but when someone walks into my office and says “Two hole punch”, do they really think that’s enough information?

Luckily, I’m cool under pressure because several of my potential responses to that are not safe for work, but, instead of using those, I calmly asked “Um, yes, what about a two hole punch?”
“Do you have one?”
“Ah, no.”
Then, without further ado, she was gone in flash of blond and a puff of lilac.

I hate having my office open up into the copier/fax room.