Journal of a Sysadmin

Testing UTF-8

I’ve set the database settings to UTF-8 and I want to make sure at least this sstill works.

So far so good.

Tags: guinea pig

Oh, and we did skating this week

It was only for a short time, because we live in a Nordic country where it’s hellish cold (frozen tundra?) we could only stay out for 10 or 15 minutes before our noses and toeses started to hurt. But we did get a picture of it too.

Calm before the storm

We all knew it was coming. It was looming over the city this morning so thick and pungent I had to document it.

There was a storm brewing at 9:00am when I shot this:

I could feel the city starting to wake up, have their coffee, make their lists and check opening times. I could hear the engines of a hundred thousand cars warming up and the squeak of shoppers sliding onto leather and vinyl seats in heated garages from Copperfield to Tuscany.

It was Christmas Eve morning.

Be damned if I was going to be stuck in that mess so Jonah and I headed out to the chiropractor early, did the one exchange I had to do and pick up food for the one day of the year not everything can be purchased at the local store.

This Christmas Eve morning is slightly different for our family because there are so many storms looming on the horizon. We are in unknown waters and each day brings new perils which fray nerves and leave everyone unsteady and on unsure ground. Counting Crows only touched on how long a Long December can be, in the end everything I’m sure will be alright but our lives may be more or less rich because of it and this Fall will have touched us in so many ways.

So Jonah and I did our last bits and headed home. By the time we returned to the South West of Calgary our city of a million people was starting to bounce with Christmas spirit. Some guy actually stopped traffic in the middle lane to let us pull out of the local grocery store. Traffic of course was picking up, two light waits already by 10:30am on Richmond Road and I’m guessing by 12:30pm when Jaime left work tensions would have started to get high and people would be moving into aggressive “Get the fuck off the street and let me get home” mode.

So much for Christmas spirit.

Later today we are doing Chinese from our favourite local place and I’m hoping to watch some movies after we wrap presents tonight. Tomorrow will be home cooked dinner and maybe some surprise skating if it’s warm enough and not -30C.

We almost took too long trying to get to where we wanted to go but made it through before the traffic was too crazy.

Now we are going to wait for mommy to come home, hang out on the couch and watch Bob the Builder, Mighty Machines or Dog the Bounty Hunter. Just the way Christmas Eve should be spent.

House vs Hammer, what is the house?

OK, it’s taken me less time to clue into this one then the “cloud computing” thing (wtf would have thought publishing an API for your online services would become a meme?).

Anyway to the point, what is the house? Perhaps the #first-house could be platform diversification, or maybe make that platform independence.

I’ve been in IT for a while now, and I always see the same thing: Vendor sells product, swears product is a one size fits all, product turns out to support one implementation of said protocol and that’s all.

Case in point, an unnamed by request organization purchases a product which the vendor states “supports LDAP”, unfortunately LDAP in this case only refers to Active Directory and not “LDAP” the open standard. Same vendor has vaporware which should “support linux and MacOSX as a web client” at some point in the future. Right, and they will support OpenLDAP and eDiirectory for their directory services too I bet. At least that’s what they will say to make the sale.

So what is the problem with this? It’s a free market so it should follow that the top product on the market is on top because it’s the best. Actually I believe the top of the market in the IT game is who can force themselves onto the most computers. Jobs products might be the next one on the top but I don’t know if that will change anything, Apple too has shareholders, and I don’t personally know him…

I’ve also been a FOSS advocate for a while now and the reason sometimes gets lost in the argument. If I use OSS I get the advantage of being able to open the wall of the house, fix the wiring and then contact the contractor to provide feedback on a better house the next time around. I can’t do that with close source. I’m not only a systems administrator and a programmer, but I’m also a troubleshooter. I need the ability to see what the product is doing to determine what the problem is. I also don’t want to be taken to court because I am caught tracing a program or sniffing a network packet… That’s an entirely different threat on the same subject though.

Back on the subject of platform independance, there’s the client side as well which is even more important to us as developers, maintainers, and administrators. If your goal is uptake of a service (and who would not want that) you can’t force your clients to use a service and require that they use a specific browser or client. Web is definitely the way and I think building platform independence is where people need to concentrate on before pushing forward.

What about technicians using iPhones or iPod Touches as the web client using safari and with Fring installed to leaverage your budding VOIP services which are SIP compliant. Tech support reps can go to the desktop, update tickets, close calls, and never have to come back to the office to update and get the next ticket. It’s 2008 after all, not 1998.

The house has to be open. Open standards, open source, open products.

So from my customer service POV that’s where I see it. I also see other far more impacting applications of this rule.

Cloud computing, pushing your data to the net and having the net feed you back what you want filtered out (in a rough overview-esq 1000 mile out kind of view).

Imagine if you put your data in but it’s now locked up in that vendor. Current contracts may lock you into that vendor and this makes your data immobile. In theory your vendor could raise their fees and you would have little to no choice in the matter.

Imagine you put your data in then the service breaks. So what if you have an SLA with the vendor and that the vendor has promised free service until the end of time, it’s your data, live data, data that has changed since you stored it and now it’s unavailable. If you ever need to have an open solution that has to be it.

Your SLA has to include an clause which allows you open access to your data at any time. Ultimately this does not have to include open source software but frankly I’d be hard pressed to put my data into something that I’ve never seen the source code to. Of course on a day to day basis companies trust all kinds of data to all kinds of software. I’ve never seen the source to Oracle but at least I know who manages the firewall and I know the security on the box because I manage it. I have a reasonable level of trust in the security of that data.

Then we start to run into secure computing, the security of that data which you push into the cloud which you hope is manged by open standards and hasn’t locked you into a specific vendor.

When web services meet cloud computing meet secure computing. OK, I can see this snowballing out of control.

The subject is huge and I can go on all day about it but I’m on vacation and have people to meet and errands to run in the physical world. =)

I just want to close by saying that before we rush headlong into the implementation I think there is a lot to be said for reviewing what we have, where we have been and out of that create a rough trail of where we want to end up.

Grass Man!

The one thing I have never really liked about our house was the backyard. It was always so small and the deck looked kind of off, having a second level which was too small to really do much with. I’ve always wanted to do a brick patio but never did anything about it until now!

It started in August with, “oh that won’t cost too much” and ended with 4.5 yards of sand and gravel, 6 yards of black dirt, grass, and shale removed, 12 yards of trash from the deck removal gone, 1700 Holland pavers, 2 bags of masons sand and 38 rolls of sod, a sore back and extremely rough hands.

I have to finish sod one corner and one edge along the patio and then do the railing on the deck and frame in under the deck and side it somehow (still not sure what we’ll do that in). It is rewarding to go into the backyard now and see such a change, we can’t wait till next summer so we can use it.

Updates and redundancy

Updated all of my hosts here and at the coloc.

Created a redundant LDAP server using slurpd replication.

Holy Crap Batman!

That’s a crap load of pictures.

Jhb informed me last night that the number wrapped on the camera. In true to life Jim style I went, “wow that’s neat” grasping what was going on but not quite getting it completely.

Then today it dawned on me. The shutter on the D200 has shot over 10k pics in the past year.

Go go gadget camera!

Inagural Ride

For my Christmas present jhb bought me a new snowboard which is exactly what I asked for. We’ve been riding now since March of 2004 and I bought the board I had, second hand from a pawn shop 2 years ago. I did about 25 days that year, about 20 days last year and now that board has more gouges and gashes than Van Gogh’s ear.

So she let me take the pick of a few different boards, all in the mid-range and I picked out a K2 Select Wide.

On Saturday Connor and I woke up early, and drove the 1.5 hours to Sunshine (the closest decent hill is where we have our passes) and I took it for it’s first outing in the snow.

Now, I have to say coming from a 156 narrow to this thing is a big change. I’m having a bit of trouble in the switch ride department but it is more stable, which helps me to be faster, it’s more difficult (at least at this point) in the deeper snow but I think that too will be just a transition thing. I have really noticed the stability though, wow. Smoking along, you can hit a bit of a drop and catch some air without worrying about wiping out, as long as you can stay standing up .

We’re hoping to get out again on the 27th, hopefully that comes together, then again maybe on the 31st or on the 1st. The more time on the hill the better =).