Lewis Pugh re-thinking swimming on Everest
Mind Shifting
July 30th, 2010So what to do
July 27th, 2010So here’s the thing, this site has been going on in one form or another since March 23rd 2000 which is 2466 posts of mainly mindless drivel on the interweb.
I’m almost proud to have done my bit to add to the general clutter, but I just can’t bring myself to kill the site, it sort of serves a purpose, and there have even been a couple of actual useful posts.
But what to do now?
First time for everything
April 12th, 2010
So this weekend I achieved a first, as I managed to crash a powered vehicle and not require the presence of the emergency services to get me out….
*thankfully*
Low speed incident in a car park, sadly it will be down as my fault and not that of the person doing 20+ MPH in a place with a speed limit of 10 MPH, one of those things I guess, and no one was hurt, just my pride and McQeen.
Seriously ?
April 7th, 2010
People fall for this shit ???
From: UK National Lottery HQ
Subject: Notice!! Form the National Lottery HQ. UK
Date: 7 April 2010 09:33:33 GMT+01:00
Reply-To: diliverycompany@gmail.com
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Delivery-Date: Wed, 07 Apr 2010 09:33:36 +0100
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X-Originating-Ip: 189.3.50.34
X-Mailer: Eircom Net CRC Webmail (http://www.eircom.net/)
Organization: Eircom Net (http://www.eircom.net/)
Office of the UK National Lottery London
Reference Number: UK/910/16454-Official
First Quarter Year Bonanza Notification Mail
The UK National Lottery Online Promotion Board wishes to inform you that your e-mail address have won you the 2010 Award promo lottery prize of 800,000,00 pounds, kindly contact your claims agent Mr. Carton Cole.with details below
1)Your Names:
2)Address:
3)Age:
4)Occupation:
5)Phone no:
6)Country:
7)Amount Won :
8)Reference Number:
9)Sex:
for more details and for due processing email processingunit2010@gmail.com Congrats..
MR. SAMUEL PHILIP.
CLEARING DEPT
Not so much the tools, more the user
March 15th, 2010So this blog, if not dead is certainly on its knees watching its own blood seeping into the ground… and I’ve been meaning to post stuff up, there is certainly plenty going on, but there is also plenty that I don’t feel I can write about for various reasons… and for this last reason I’ve just taken the easier option of doing fuck all.
So I’ve blamed the blogging tool, tumblr is easier, they certainly have a nice iPhonie app, but then I also use a combination of twitter / facebook to ensure I keep up with my daily quota of inane internet drivel (both of which also have nice iPhone apps) oh and of course my photos are on flickr (there’s an app for that) and then this blog is based on word press (there’s an app for that too)
And so what to do? I want to post (something) once and have it appear on appropriate sites, I want also to the win the lottery.
Oh and seeing as I forgot to mention it here just after it happened I’m dad again, Nell was born on the 30th November 2009
Blimey, I really have been shit.
Zimbra Upgrade (Take Two)
February 14th, 2010Ok going from 6.0.2 -> 6.0.5 NE on RHEL 4.x (Yes I know that the next major version won’t support 4.x) and I was hoping for a nice smooth upgrade, the previous SSL Comercial cert problems now showing as fixed in the bugtracker, however at the end of the process and I’m getting the same “Expired Cert” warning messages from email clients and the like….
So as root
cd /opt/zimbra/ssl/zimbra
/opt/zimbra/bin/zmcertmgr deploycrt comm commercial.6.0.2/commercial/commercial.crt commercial.6.0.2/commercial/commercial_ca.crt
Restart the services using ZMProv and all is good.
So new theme
January 14th, 2010So quickly found a new theme which is fairly customisable, need to track down some nice header images now and maybe play with the colouring… progress (sort of)
Why?
January 13th, 2010did no one tell me the old theme was dark (obvious) stylish (well to me) but totally unusable…
Theme hunting begins again, back to a default one for now.
VMWare Server Build
January 10th, 2010Well with the snow came the abuse of the company VPN (will post more about that later) and some sofa / server time.
The least shocking element was the amount of work I could get down with a 3 year old and 6 week old in the house, easier to work from the sofa (no office yet) and less distractions than being the office…
So it was time to build some servers, I’ve got SonicWalls Global Management System and ManageSoft all requiring servers, also as we change things around the way we build and use servers will be changing, so I had three servers to build, (well four when we take into account the new development server for the in house digital team)
1) Windows 2K3 (64Bit) and SQL 2K5 Server for ManageSoft and SGMS usage
2) 2 x Windows 2K3 (32Bit) for ManageSoft ECM and SGMS
3) RHEL 5.4 Server for dev.
The windows servers were pretty simple. Build a new server, fully patch, then clone to a template, then join the server to AD with it’s new name and carry on with the specific requirements for the server.
Next server.
Use the fully patched template you’ve just created for your shiny new server, join to AD and you’re done, new server in under 10 minutes, sit back and rejoice at your new power…. repeat.
Three servers created in the time it would take you to create one new server.
Did the same with RHEL, so now I have my four new servers and three templates to enable me to deploy a new instance in under 10 minutes.
Nice having uninterrupted time to get stuff done – also printed out the manuals for the NSA2400 / SGMS / SSL-VPN, time to get reading…. and shortly re-configuring the NSA to make the most of the new power (before deploying to the other new NSA units via SGMS…)
“I have a cunning plan m’lord…”
Migration Time
December 5th, 2009So it was time to replace the home Mac Mini, it had done sterling work as the main home machine serving as a home for all of our photos, music and used for general surfing, but it was certainly slowing down, the upgrade to Snow Leopard had gone well and helped prolong its life but the signs were there, time for something new and shiny.
The Mini was sitting on top of 2 x 1Tb Iomega Minimax drives which gave a useful number of extra USB boots and made for a neat tower / shrine. One drive was data the other was the time machine backup, but things had moved on, I now had a QNAP TS-439 with 4 x 2Tb (1863Gb Actual) drives installed and configured as RAID 6 (3664Gb usable) so there was plenty of storage to be had and the potential ability to recover from two drives failing.
I configured a number of iSCSI targets and using the Studio Solutions GlobalSAN iSCSI initiator connected up. This was a very simple, one minutes process and having done the same under Windows using the MicroSoft iSCSI initiator I know which I’d prefer to use in future.
I copied the data across into the relevant targets, music, photos and then setup backup using time machine to do the applications, user account and everything else other than the music and pics. To ensure everything worked I quickly re-opened iTunes and iPhoto and changed the library to the iSCSI targets, all was working lovely. Time taken to setup, 10 minutes, time to copy the data about 4 hours in total.
Now the migration, shut down the mac mini, spend an hour moving all the kit around and tidying up the wires and then for the moment of truth. Fire up the new mac, register and ignore the migration assistant for now. Once the mac is running I downloaded the initiator and installed, setup the connections to the iSCSI targets, open iPhoto and iTunes and point the applications to the iSCSI data and all was good. Just the application migration to go.
I opened up the ever so handy OSX Migration Assistant, pointed it at the time machine backup and recovered the old account data and applications on to the machine as a new account, logged out, logged in as the recovered account and the migration was done.
Work done, about 10 minutes, time taken 5 hours of data transfer backwards and forwards.
Job done, no problems and no fuss, technology as it should be.