(yes, it’s an oxymoron)
June 2nd, 2008 — linux
taking a page from the doctors at the moses taylor hospital, i.t. staff at the scranton, pa., facility last year diagnosed their messaging system and came up with an effective treatment that’s turned out to be a life saver.
the patient in this case was an aging microsoft exchange 5.5 environment that couldn’t support increased message loads and was going to cost a bundle to upgrade.
i love hearing stories like this.
[ read more... ]
May 27th, 2008 — networking
i originally wrote the following on 23-may-2007:
i installed red hat enterprise linux 4.5 on an hp dl365 yesterday to test out iscsi.
we carved out some space on the san to use for the testing, 500gb to be exact. the dl365 has a qlogic fiber-channel hba in it, connected to the hp san at 4 gbps. the 500gb of storage shows up on the rhel box at /dev/sda. no partitions or filesystems were created on the device.
as far as i can tell, rhel does not include support for being an iscsi target, which i did not find out until after i had it installed. fortunately, i came across the iscsi enterprise target project on sourceforge. their wiki led me to martin’s “iscsi target howto on enterprise linux (rhel4)“. by following that, i was able to get the iscsi target up and running, exporting the 500gb on /dev/sda.
the next step was to connect to that storage space from a windows box. this test is sort of a proof-of-concept to see if we can get things to work the way we want — which means windows “clients”, or initiators, will be used. i found anze vidmar’s “going enterprise — setup your fc4 iscsi target in 5 minutes” wiki page, which details setting up an iscsi initiator on windows. i grabbed the microsoft iscsi software initiator version 2.04 and installed it on my windows xp workstation (a vista version wasn’t available, or i’d have went for that).
following anze’s instructions allowed me to get the windows xp client configured as an initiator in just a few moments, and i had a p: drive showing up as a local disk, with an ~500gb ntfs filesystem on it for all my storage pleasure. excellent!
unfortunately, we need some access controls in our environment. if or when this goes into production, all iscsi traffic will be on an isolated, private network. i’m a big fan of the layered security approach, however, so while an isolated, private network is a good start, i want to implement the authentication that iet and the microsoft initiator are supposed to support.
enter problem. =)
anytime i try to set up some credentials on the target side (using “incominguser username password” in the /etc/ietd.conf config file) and use those same credentials in the microsoft iscsi initiator, i get a simple “authentication failure” dialog box on the client/initiator side. unfortunately, there aren’t any log entries on the server/target side (that i noticed, anyway) to help provide any insight.
anyone ran into this before and have any suggestions? tia.
update: seems i didn’t have any credentials listed in the “global” section of the /etc/ietd.conf file, which is needed if you try to do authentication during the discovery phase (i was). added that in and now have authentication working across the board.
May 3rd, 2008 — life
on season one, episode 9 of “house“, the was a conversation between john henry giles and dr. gregory house that went like this:
“i know that limp. i know the empty ring finger. and that obsessive nature of yours, that’s a big secret. you don’t risk jail and your career to save somebody that doesn’t want to be saved unless you got something, anything, one thing. the reason normal people got wives and kids and hobbies, whatever, that’s because they ain’t got that one thing that hits them that hard and that true. i got music. you got this. the thing you think about all the time. thing that keeps you south of normal. yeah, makes us great. makes us the best. all we miss out on is everything else. no woman waiting at home after work with a drink and a kiss; that ain’t gonna happen for us.”
wow… that really struck a cord with me.
see, i got that one thing. for me, it’s computers. as i write this, my girlfriend is at work and has been for about the last 10 hours. i came home when she went to work and i’ve pretty much been sitting here in front of a computer since then.
i’ve caught up on some work e-mail, read up on some bgp stuff, creating and set up some mpls vpn labs in dynamips, checked myspace and facebook, etc.
it was a beautiful day outside, if the weather widget on my dashboard and the kids playing up and down the street are any indication. i wouldn’t really know though, i haven’t stepped outside since i got home about 10:30am this morning.
when the girlfriend gets here after while, she’ll have my full attention and i won’t even touch a computer until after she leaves tomorrow, but, for me, computers — networking, to be more specific — is “the one thing”.
kinda makes me wonder if i shouldn’t re-evaluate things…
March 27th, 2008 — funny
windows toaster
the windows toaster looks great, but sometimes it just won’t make toast. it either comes out burnt or raw, and you have to unplug the toaster and plug it back in again each time you want to try and make some toast. for every loaf of bread you buy you are forced to buy a new toaster to go with it.
linux toaster
the linux toaster looks absolutely awful: it has wires crimped together, things are just hanging out of it. the first time you make toast with it the toaster burns it; the next time it’s raw. you read the man pages and invoke the command line “toast -verbose -breadsize 50132 -eject -o z3321 > /dev/toast” and it makes perfect toast ever after.
mac toaster
the mac toaster has no settings or controls. it looks very stylish, but will only accept proprietary-sized bread which can only be bought from apple dealers at ten times the cost of regular bread. the toast is fine except that the size of the bread is so odd that you can’t actually eat the toast it produces, although it does look very good.
February 3rd, 2008 — goals, gtd, life
this is a list of some of my “life goals” — things that i want to do at some point in my life. i usually track my short-term goals elsewhere (such as vitalist, my gtd system of choice), but it never hurts to make a list of things you want to do “someday” and refer to it often to keep you on track. a lot of these i will never get around to, for various reasons, and i’m fine with that.
with that, i present to you my list of “life goals”. it will be revised often and the list is not in any particular order.
February 1st, 2008 — apple, microsoft
today is february 1 and, as promised, microsoft office 2008 for os x has been made available on mvls for volume licensing customers.
w00t! downloading it now…
shared links