Preface While system administrators often have many different goals, here are two that seem fairly universal: Automate the redundant tasks Hand off the simple tasks I’ve recently found that the build utility Jenkins can be a major boon for an Operations team, and wanted to share my findings with others. What is Jenkins? So, what exactly is Jenkins? It’s a popular fork of the open source continuous integration tool, Hudson. While it is normally used for building and deploying software, it can easily be used for more interesting purposes.

So for whatever reason, I was googling around today and stumbled across this and saw that, damnit, someone stole my monkey. Not only that, but they’re linking directly to my server, and have been since 2006. I google more, and find someone using my security monkey to demonstrate an XSS attack. Now, the reason I created this image was for my security monkey shirt. I ask that everyone show their solidarity by spreading the work of the security monkey shirt to people most likely to buy one.

As a system administrator, monitoring is a key job responsibility, yet arguments seem to arise on how to implement it (usually with people who won’t be paged at 3am). Before writing this, I looked around for an article on the goals and philosophy of system monitoring, but found very little that really applied to this topic. Hopefully this will help set some expectations for admins, managers and stakeholders on what you should monitor, and why it should be monitored.

So some of you may know that I’ve been working on a second book- this one is music-based. Anyways, I have a few friends who are new to guitar and my book is more or less aimed at them, however some of them don’t know how to read tab- hence this post. So here’s the rundown: <br></br>e|-------------------------------------------<br></br>B|--------x----------------------------------<br></br>G|--------x-------5---5-7b9r7-5--------------<br></br>D|--------x--5h7---7--------------7~~~~------<br></br>A|---5/7--x----------------------------------<br></br>E|-------------------------------------------<br></br> The above is a sample of some tablature. Each of the 6 lines represents a string on the guitar, each number represents a fret on that string.

I’m the first to admit I’ve been slacking on my scales practice, mainly sticking to pentatonic (because I’m lazy). So while reading through my Scales and Modes book and I stumbled across something obvious, yet I’d never recognized. Each scale has a mode for each note in the scale- Major scale having 7, pentatonic scale having 5, etc. That I was remotely aware of, but didn’t think much of it.

Why yes, my internet connection is still fubar’d, thank you for asking. Here’s your epic fail for the day- my internet connection: Downstream Upstream Max Allowed Speed (kbps) 1184 768 SN Margin (dB) 4.70 6.00 Line Attenuation (dB) 34.50 20.50 CRC Errors 2516 413 This image is my download speed since I started monitoring. Note that this is just what the modem is reporting, it does not mean that the connection was usable- most of that time PPoE couldn’t authenticate.

My internet connection. SO here’s the scoop 5 days until cutover: I call AT&T, tell them I’m moving and need to transfer my Static IP DSL service on the 30th(Monday). Tech says no problem it’s all set. I am pleasantly surprised at how little of a hassle it was and that it was way smoother than any other interaction I’ve had with them. Saturday, 2 days until cutover: We’re planning on doing the actual moving Sunday morning and plan to spend Saturday packing and planning.

So it’s the end of November, and the final count is 53,708 words. I’ve submitted it to the nano site and got a nifty little image to display: It’s sorta funny because I finished early- I had a week left when I stopped writing, and I probably could have hit 60k if I had more plot. Maybe when the revision process starts I’ll get some ideas for back stories and such that I can weasel in there.

At 11:50pm on the 21st of November, I completed the NaNoWriMo challenge, writing 50,300 words for my book, Sinblade. I’m not done yet- I still have another 5-10k words to go before I’ll consider the rough draft complete. Here’s my ideal lifecycle for the book: Rough Draft: First complete version of the story. First Draft: First revised version I send out for people to read. Continuity and plot are checked. Second Draft: All first draft changes are merged.

I was planning on simply republishing my previous svn article, but realized that it sucked compared to what I know now. Prerequisites I’ll presume you have the following things. – a Linux machine – subversion already installed Terminology to Know There are a few terms that get mangled if you’re coming from other types of source control. This is just to clear things up. – Repository: the central storage place on the subversion server where your data is kept.

November is National Novel Writing Month, also known as NaNoWriMo. Basically there’s a month-long open contest to try and write a novel that’s 50,000+ words. My friend VP has written two books like that, Shining Star and Pulling Strings (both are good, go buy them). This year I thought I’d give it a try- I have a couple of stories kicking around in the back of my head that I’d like to write some day, and I figured this would be the perfect chance to stop putting it off.

So I’ve been working on a new project called Ruma(more on it later), and I’m beginning to get frustrated with the LDAP support. So far I’ve found * ruby/ldap, ruby-ldap, ldap-ruby by ian macdonald, last release 8/2006 * net-ldap, Net::LDAP by Francis Cianfrocca, last release 8/2006 * ruby-activeldap, ActiveLDAP-ruby by Will Drewry, last release 5/2007 ldap-ruby appears to be the frontrunner, but hasn’t been updated in a year- the forums appear to think it’s been abandoned.

So Jackie’s been sitting at home with Ian for 4 months now and is incredibly bored. All she every does is read. I suggested a hobby, but she doesn’t really have any (except scrapbooking, which is expensive)- So what I want to do is get some ideas from all the people who read my site. Here are the base rules: cheap- no more than $25 start up cost and that must last 3 weeks.

So I just realized that I’ve become uber busy as of late. My current side projects look like this: – Warhammer Army builder for ChrisP written in Ruby (on Rails) – reviving radio.morgajel.com and rebuilding my stream (RoR, again) – SecretWord module and Logging for Ziggy (Perl + Po::Co::IRC) – ImportLDIF plugin for Luma This isn’t including the miniature painting, work, or Ian. The weird part is it feels nice to be busy- but only when it’s busy on my terms 🙂

I’ve been using and promoting open source for about 7 years now- it started back in 2000 when I began writing php and playing with apache. In 2003 I made the full switch to Linux. Since then I’ve produced several small little projects and put them under the GPL in hopes that it would help someone else. I’ve also written many articles and how-tos for my site to help spread what I’ve learned.

Slashdot is full of random crap, cliches and trolls- but buried deep within this pile of refuse is some useful and interesting info waiting to get out. The following is my checklist to find the relevant posts: 1) only read stories that actually look interesting. It seems like a simple thing, but it’s completely overlooked. As heart-warming as it is to read about them recovering Scotty’s ashes, it’ll be a waste of half an hour reading the same old rehashed star trek jokes.

So I’m going to attempt a new routine- waking up at 6:30 and hitting the gym for 25 minutes every morning. It’s a 5 minute walk over to the gym, so I can get that done, hit the shower, and have plenty of time to get ready in the morning. The goal is to do this every morning, and after a month or so maybe scale back on weekends. I started on a saturday so I can get in the swing of it before the work week starts.

So I’m looking to play with some monitoring software to figure out why, every once in a while, I get laggy spots when connecting to my server from work. The latest toy I’m playing with is Cacti. Here’s what I’m planning on monitoring (partially because it’s useful, partially because it’s fun): link (Linksys router running dd-wrt) * bandwidth on external IP * bandwidth on each port * wireless bandwidth used

So I got the new hardware parts, so I figured I might as well document the process. I’ve decided on the name Unicron because it’s the biggest PC I’ve ever owned. I’ve been waiting over a year to really rebuild my servers- since I ran out of ide connectors in Pablo, I knew something had to change. The new case is MASSIVE- it’s sitting next to jackie’s machine and is a good 6″ longer and 3″ higher.

Doing another annual recap this year like I did last year. 2006 was a pretty rough year- move from DC Metro back to Grand Rapids, got a crappy job, found out jackie was pregnant, got laid off from crappy job, spent 3 months unemployed, and at the end of November was offered an awesome new job in Troy, MI (the other side of the state). Other than Ian, and the new job, the best good news is we finally have a decent couch- two of them, actually.

So I’ve had this on again, off again thing with ruby for a while now. Since I first started playing with ruby it got pretty big with rails, and I completely missed that boat. Well, now I’m playing with rails and it’s fairly interesting once you get it up and running. I picked up the O’Reilly book Ruby On Rails and have been walking through it’s Photo project. I’ve went so far as to even throw it in a subversion repository in case I pooch something.

So I took up playing DnD again about 4 months or so ago and our “weekly” meetings lasted for all of 3 weeks before turning into monthly meetings- we’ve finally got things back on track with 2 games in a row, and here’s a little breakdown of what happened at this last one- the guys are trying to find this statue piece- they slaughtered a den of Lizardfolk looking for t and found out that they had just sold it for a can of “Holy Green Beans”.

I have a wacom drawing pad, and one thing that’s always bothered me was the whole way linux handled usb items- depending on the order they were plugged in, they would be given different names- sometimes my keyboard would be “/dev/input/event1”, sometimes my wacom or mouse. Udev was made to get around these issues, but I’ve been to distracted to give it much thought. lately I’ve been getting the following error messages with my ruby projects:

So we just got these shiny new Netgear GSM7224 layer two 24 port managed switches, and I went about setting up MRTG. mrtg and snmp are one of my weak areas- I’m not too good at networking stuff to begin with, and mrtg has always seemed just out of my reach. Well, between rewiring half of the serverroom and threatening mrtg with a stick, I got it all working! now I can finally monitor network traffic and figure out which one of these network cards is a chatty cathy.

Well, I’ve got this turd polished well enough to release Ziggy 1.0. There’s still a lot left to do, and a lot more to add, but this is a good place for people to start looking at it. Feel free to download it and take him apart- I’ve included the very truncated Dribbly.xml profile (dribbly is surly, be forewarned) and kept ziggy’s real config under wraps. enjoy!

ok, having another guitarday- looks like thursday is the day of choice from now on. 6:30pm till whenever. Let me know if you’re interested and bring an instrument. Thursday, July 13th, 6:30PM There, now you know.

For those that are not familiar with Ziggy, he is a character based on a DnD character from a few years back and has taken on a life of his own. He’s made an appearance in my Willis module for Neverwinter Nights (based off the same campaign), a book that I’m writing, several sketches as to what he looks like, and an IRC bot written in perl. The IRC bot is what has really shaped his personality, and he’s become pretty much another member of the group.

Well, the new job is gonna have a bucket full of FreeBSD servers. It’s been a while since I tinkered with FBSD, so it’ll be a challenge. To prepare for that challenge, I’ve decided to convert Draccus (my workstation) to BSD. The following is a list of hurdles I’ll need to surpass before I start in April: get draccus up and running get KDE up and running get Gimp working get my Wacom Graphire 3 tablet working get my Logitech Quickcam working get my m-audio keyboard working get rosegarden recording again burn a cd-rw burn a dvd+rw I’m presuming I’ll have no problems with my Nvidia 6600 GT, Audigy 4 soundcard, or other common hardware.

Midi- oh, how do I loathe thee? Let me count the ways… I’ve never liked midi, it’s fabricated, boring, hollow existence bothers me whenever I hear it, yet I am currently at it’s mercy. Linux may be ahead of other operating systems in many respects, but for some reason, midi support seems to have been completely passed over. One of my side projects right now is writing a CD. a useful tool for writing a CD is a Piano.

Fark has a great link for a DnD character personality test. Here’s what I came up with for me. Neutral Good Half-Elf Ranger Alignment: Neutral Good characters believe in the power of good above all else. They will work to make the world a better place, and will do whatever is necessary to bring that about, whether it goes for or against whatever is considered ‘normal’. Race: Half-Elves are a cross between a human and an elf.

Well, it’s Feb. 26th and it’s still nice out. it’s only 34, but it’s bright and sunshiney. It was 60 last week, and it’s been decent most of the winter. My brain is starting to activate and come out of winter hibernation, so that means it’s time to start planting. Since I live in an apartment, I don’t get a real garden, so we have a bunch of pots and windowboxes and such.

a couple of weeks ago the lotto hit $200 million, and I bought my annual lotto ticket. The lotto has a strange effect on people. It gives hope where there is none. Even I sat at a redlight imagining all of the wonderful things I could do with that amount of money. Of course erasing family debt, replacing vehicles, real honeymoon with jackie, etc was at the top of the list, but what would *I* do after that was said and done?