mccain argues that flip-flops are an example of a political leader who can’t be trusted — so he might as well drop out of the race.

read the rest of this story (alternet.org)

for quite a long time, we didn’t have any type of environmental monitoring in our datacenter. i wasn’t there when our “new” building was built so i don’t know the reason (oversight, i imagine). several months ago, though, one of my co-workers (who arrives way before the rest of us) came in on a monday morning to find that our datacenter was extremely warm (he put his hand on the back of a server cabinet and quickly removed it, like when you touch a hot stove).

it didn’t take long to convince the $boss that we needed a way to keep an eye on the temperature. an acquaintance of mine at boeing recommended the apc environmental manager units, which were relatively cheap. guess what we now have in our datacenter?

what i really like about ‘em:

• quick, easy setup
• syslog logging
• user-defined thresholds
• e-mail notifications
• snmp!

i really, really like snmp. i snmp enable everything i can, and keep an eye on it all with various tools (zenoss, cacti, homebrew perl scripts, etc.).

we had an incident where the apc unit didn’t alert us like it was supposed to. that led me to spend 15 minutes banging out yet another perl script. this one, ran every 15 minutes from a crontab, polls the temperature oid of the environmental manager. what it does depends on a few things:

• if the unit doesn’t respond, an e-mail alert is generated
• if the unit responds and the temperature is below the threshold “x”, nothing happens
• if the unit responds and the temperature is above “x”, an e-mail to our internal list is sent
• if the unit responds and the temperature is above “x+5″, an e-mail to our internal list is sent, as well as an e-mail to our facilities staff’s internal list

the multiple levels of “escalation” ensure that if, for whatever reason, no one in my department responds, our facilities staff can be alerted and hopefully one of them will address the situation. the nice (arguably) thing is that as long as the temperature is above the threshold, the e-mails will continue to go out every 15 minutes until someone takes action. it doesn’t take long before those e-mails get annoying — especially for those of us who carry a blackberry 24/7!

in the battle against spam, yahoo said this week that it’s making headway in getting sites to adopt its e-mail-authenticating technology.

called domain keys identified mail, the program confirms that an e-mail is not faked, that it’s actually coming from the address it purports to be.

this has been tried before, in a number of different ways by a number of different companies (including microsoft). it hasn’t worked yet.

yahoo is hiring engineers who know how to identify networks of bots and is investing in technology that will allow yahoo servers around the world to respond and adapt automatically to threats, risher said.

yeah, right. since i’d say 99% of spam comes from botnets, this means we can expect that 1) yahoo will stop allowing spam to be sent through its servers and 2) it’ll stop blocking all of us .edu’s as spam, right? ask any mail admin at a .edu how much of a pain in the ass yahoo is to them if you wonder what i’m talking about.

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a 13 year old from texas who stole his dad’s credit card and ordered two hookers from an escort agency has today been convicted of fraud and given a three year community order.

ralph hardy, a 13 year old from newark, texas, confessed to ordering an extra credit card from his father’s existing credit card company, and took his friends on a $30,000 spending spree, culminating in playing “halo” on an xbox with a couple of hookers in a texas motel.

his ambition is to one day become a politician. i think he’s off to a good start. =)

[ read more ]

i was asked today to look at an issue where backups of our virtual machines on vmware esx had began to fail. we use vizioncore’s vranger pro for backing up the vm’s and it has a “user account” on each of the servers running vmware esx.

after a quick look, i figured out what happened. password aging was set to require a password change every 90 days. since we don’t ever “interactively” log in to the esx servers with this particular account, however, we didn’t see the warnings.

we currently don’t have a “you must change your password every x days” policy, because we have a policy of using long, complex passphrases. because of this we didn’t want to change those passwords every 90 days per the default.

the fix was to disable password aging for vranger’s account on each of the vmware esx hosts, like this:

# passwd -x 99999 -w 7 -n 0 vranger

(the “-w 7 -n 0″ are probably unnecessary, but keeps this account’s settings consistent with the others.)

a month or so ago, i downloaded jungle disk. i installed it on an older laptop i have running windows xp that has quite a few files on it i’d like to have backups of. i uploaded a few hundred megabytes of files to disk storage on the amazon s3 system and pretty much forgot about it.

a few days ago i was looking at my bank statement and seen a charge from amazon for $0.04 for the s3 storage. that got me thinking about backups again. i don’t really have any good backups here at home, other than keeping copies of “important stuff” on multiple machines — not exactly an ideal backup strategy.

i have an external usb drive that i’ve been wanting to use with time machine on my macbook to keep it backed up (it has pretty much became my “primary computer” in the last few months). i was keeping copies of important files on it, though, so i couldn’t just wipe it clean. instead, i first hooked it up to an ubuntu linux box that i have here, copied off all the important stuff, and then wiped it clean.

the external usb drive is now hooked up to the macbook and the first full backup (using time machine) is taking place as i write this (in textmate, of course!). it’s currently at 7.7gb of 105.9gb to back up. fun!

on the ubuntu linux box, jungle disk is hard at work backing up all my important files to the amazon s3 storage. i started out with 2.4gb of data to upload, mostly pictures and video that wouldn’t be easily replaced. with my cable modem connection (10 mbps down/1 mbps up), it’s going to take a while. once i get all the “important stuff” dumped onto amazon’s servers, however, and only occasionally add stuff to it, the backups will run much quicker.

i still have a few more pc’s to sift through in order to find everything i want backed up, but i don’t anticipate having more than 10gb or so of data stored on amazon’s servers. at their rates, that makes for very cheap off-site backups.

if you’re looking for a good solution to this same problem, i highly recommend amazon s3 and jungle disk. i’ve had no problems with either as of yet (granted i haven’t used either extensively). jungle disk is commercial software (only $20), but you can run it on as many pc’s as you have. they also have windows, linux, and os x versions that operate nearly identical. i haven’t installed the os x version yet, but i imagine i will before the day is over.

barack obama was in casper, wyoming, today at a town hall meeting. obama condemned the use of the bush’s administration habit of getting wiretaps without warrants and also their willingness to imprison people without actually charging them with anything.

“there’s nothing republican about that. everyone should be outraged…”

obama said that he would ask his attorney general “to review every executive order” that the bush administration implemented.

“we are going to overturn those that are unconstitutional. we are going to overturn those that are unnecessary.”

he was rewarded for that with a standing ovation.

i got bored tonight and, for some reason, decided to get out my trusty old dell laptop that has fedora linux (and, coincidentally, aircrack-ng) on it. as i was getting it, i seen my netgear wg511t wireless card that i bought specifically because it supported packet reinjection. fun ensued.using the somewhat new “ptw method”, i was able to crack a neighbor’s 128-bit wep key in as little as 96 seconds. as i noted on twitter, “even after all the times i’ve done it, i still get such a thrill out of cracking wep”.

…like the nsa headquarters.

thanks to the billboard liberation front!

just wanted to wish a belated happy birthday to president abraham lincoln, who was quoted as saying:

“i see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me, and causes me to tremble for the safety of our country. corporations have been enthroned, an era of corruption will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people, until wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the republic is destroyed.”