MiguelitoNet

[ Viewing: “Babylon 5 – The Complete Fourth Season” (Tony Dow) ]

The more I use gentoo, the more I like it. I’ve yet to run into a single failed build, no dependency loops, nothing. I really like the little things too.

The latest little thing I like… when running an emerge, the process automatically updates the titlebar of the term it’s running in with info. Like so…

Simple.. but helpful and very cool. 🙂

Posted in: Misc by Miguelito /
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[ Viewing: “Babylon 5 – The Complete Fourth Season” (Tony Dow) ]

Yeah, I’ve been running through B5 again, and have it on the brain.. watching season 4 now… but…

I finally had a chance to take a real crack at installing Grey-Listing on our colo box (which also serves as MX for several of us), and holy crap does it make a difference. I got it up and running at 2:45PM on Thurs (Mar 23rd, 2006) and already it’s had a massive effect. In just over 48 hours now, the database the program uses already has 4037 records of mails that never properly tried to resend again (most likely spam) vs 365 mails that have properly resent after the initial delay (most likely not spam). Just goes to show that most spam is just blasted out from hosts that are hacked or setup just for spamming and they don’t want to deal with the bandwidth required to retry.

On top of that, I found I had a bug in spamassassin that was allowing it to pass quite a few spams into my inbox (and my sister’s as well) because the mail was never actually scanned properly. Only when I went to test a mail by hand to see why it hadn’t been flagged as spam (by cat’ing it into spamc myself) did I see the error, then I grep’d a ton out of the mail logs. The error was:
Mar 23 23:46:07 www spamd[15003]: error: Can’t locate object method “new” via package “Net::DNS::RR::TXT” at /usr/lib/perl5/vendor_perl/5.8.5/x86_64-linux/Net/DNS/RR.pm line 240._ , continuing

I looked on google and saw mention of updating that pkg, which I did. It had no effect. Then I started to noticed that the above has version 5.8.5 in the path, and I’d updated perl to 5.8.7 previously (back in Jan). Turns out the spamd process had been running for months… well back into 2005. So a quick restart of the daemon, now using the updated perl (and modules) and it fixed the problem. So spamassassin is catching more mails, which, coupled with grey-listing, has dropped spam down to almost nothing. I used to get 50+ spams in my inbox a day (on top of what spamassassin filtered out) and in the last 2 days I’ve had 2!

I even setup a cron job to graph the number of filtered spam vs inbox (vs 2 lists I’m on) here. Should be interesting to see how low the spam levels stay over the next few weeks. I notice that I’m still getting some spam, but spamassassin is filtering off so much more. Some of that is stuff that I signed up for long ago and forgot, or that I was signed up automatically for by using some website… working on getting off those lists as well.

Man it’s nice to have mailboxes that are more manageable again.

The quote from B5 is really fitting though.

Posted in: Misc, My l337 skillz by Miguelito /
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[ Viewing: “Star Trek Voyager – The Complete Seventh Season” (Jonathan Frakes, Anson Williams) ]

Yes, you read that right, I actually had a positive experience with the IRS. So in effect, this is almost an anti-rant…

A couple weeks ago I received a form from the IRS informing me that my 2004 taxes had a problem. My filed income didn’t match what had been submitted to them from employers and such. I had sold some options in 2004 and had the taxes withheld by my employer just as I had in the past. For some reason, E-trade filed a 1099-B this time listing the sales, worse they were listed at their gross sale values and listed taxes withheld as none. This had never happened in the past when I’d sold options, clearly something had changed at E-trade. I remember noting this when I did my taxes, but since I couldn’t find a way to list options sold yet mark them as already covered in another income stream, and I’d sold options in the past and didn’t have to list them, so I didn’t worry at the time.

Anyway, I only had a few days left before the deadline for responding to the form, so I called the listed number to get an extension in order to talk to a tax person to find out the best way to respond to ensure no more problems. After about 10 minutes of voicemail menus, then a good 20 minutes more of recordings, I got to sit on hold and listen to the Nutcracker Suite on hold for another 1/2 hour or so. Finally I got to a human.

After a few minutes explaining what the deal was and asking what I needed to do to get an extension, the support person offered to fix the issue for me… if I wanted. Of course I said yes. After a few minutes of hearing him typing he came back to let me know that he’d filled in the information to clear up the problem, I should get an official response from the IRS within 30 days letting me know the issue is fixed, and that was it.

Here I was expecting to have to deal with a bunch of tax law crap, pay for a CPA to help refile an amended return, etc. I don’t think I’ve ever heard of anyone having such a positive experience with the IRS or their support staff, but I guess there’s s first time for everything.

Posted in: Uncategorized by Miguelito /
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[ Viewing: “Frasier – The Complete Fifth Season” (Paramount) ]

Woohoo! I finally have a working oven again. Bought my new Smooth top oven a good 9 months ago, if not more. Bought the new fridge, and washer and dryer at the same time. It was a switch from gas to electric (I wanted the smooth top for easy cleaning.. cooking with gas is nice but cleaning the thing sucked) and there was no line to use there.

My parents paid (thanks again guys) to have it hooked up finally. So I had to cook a little something just to break it in.. just made something easy.. eggs.

For those wondering why it took me so long to get it hooked up… I tend to let things, shall we say, sit undone. Just a bit of a procrastinator if it’s not obvious. Anyway, the same guys that hooked it up today were going to do it awhile ago, but I had started to talk to people about getting central heat and A/C installed and figured as long as I was going to have that electrical work done, I’d have them do it all in one shot… then that fell through. So they decided to use my birthday to get someone out to finally just do the work. So I’m up and running… now I can more healthy stuff again.

Posted in: Uncategorized by Miguelito /
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[ Viewing: “Frasier – Eight Season Pack (Includes Seasons 1-7, 11)” (Paramount Home Video) ]

Finally back online this morning after the cable modem was out since Sunday early afternoon. Turns out it was a bad cable drop from the pole to the house, exactly like I figured.

seem to be getting better bandwidth then I did ever before too.

Posted in: Uncategorized by Miguelito /
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[ Viewing: “Battlestar Galactica – Season 2.0” (Mca Home Video) ]

I like to read the letters to the editor on the website of our local newspaper The Union-Tribune, and today I read one that just grabbed my attention:

Off the shelf and on sale

The San Diego City Council approved spending $272,300 to increase its electronic database capacity from 160 gigabytes to 240 gigabytes. A Fry’s insert in the Union-Tribune has a 300 gigabyte hard drive for $99 after a rebate. I’ll pick one up, and sell that to the city for $200,000 and save it $72,300. I’d be happy to keep the difference.

And we wonder why the city is in a financial crisis.

GORDON A. GLENN
La Jolla

With all due respect to Mr. Glenn, he has no idea what it takes to do IT support for an organization, especially what it takes to serve data, keep it online and secure, etc. So I decided to send in my own letter in response:

Regarding the letter “Off the shelf and on sale,” of Dec 23rd. As someone
that works in IT, I regularly hear our users make the same assumptions: If
you can buy a large drive at Fry’s to slap into your PC, that’s the cost the
company should pay for data storage. However, this is ignoring what it takes
to actually serve data to a decently sized orgainization and to protect that
data.

Data, like a database, for any decently sized company, or for government
entities is something that has to be available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
In order to do this, one has to have a lot of redundency. This redundency
adds to the cost of a storage system. Any decent system will have redundant
and hot-swappable disks, power supplies, fans, network cards, etc; all to
protect against hardware failures. On top of this, there’s always the chance
that the data could become corrupted, or human error could destroy the data.
There’s also disaster recovery to plan for, perhaps a fire or earthquake
damages the computer room and equipment beyond repair. Therefore you now
have to include a backup system and offsite storage of some backups. A
backup system will need to store multiple copies of the data over time, and
the backup and restore times will likely need to be as short as possible,
again driving up the price. While the price quoted ($272,300) might be a bit
high, it is not fair to compare this price to a single hard drive.

Anyone that thinks that simply buying that one hard drive and slapping it into
a PC to serve up data to an organization would find themselves out of a job
the first time any data was lost. Some people don’t realize such data likely
represents 10’s of thousands of man hours of work, and millions of dollars of
a company’s Intellectual Property (or the government’s data). When you
realize this, the cost for a highly available and redundant system (with
backups) suddenly isn’t easily compared to the cost of one hard drive.

We’ll see if they publish it or not.

Oops.. I forgot to spell check it before sending it.. I hope I didn’t make too many mistakes. 🙂

Posted in: Uncategorized by Miguelito /
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[ Music: The One I Love from the album “Life In Slow Motion” by David Gray ]

There are 2 good blog entries that were linked via Slashdot recently. Truths for SysAdmins and 8 End-User Troubleshooting Tips that have a lot of truth to them.

From the Sysadmin list…

#1.. yep, they lie. We all have stories, but my favorite is from a friend.. User needed keyboard to Sun workstation replaced. User swears up and down that s/he didn’t do anything, no spills of drinks, etc. Admin replaces keyboard and as he walks away with broken keyboard under arm, coffee runs down his arm. User had gone to the trouble of cleaning up all evidence of the spill, but hadn’t thought of the coffee in the keyboard itself.

Please.. just admit you spilled or broke something. We’re not going to fire you (and couldn’t even if we wanted to).

#8. This one can’t be stressed enough. You might fee superior, and where computers are concerned, you likely are, but don’t let that attitude creep into your voice. These people are likely going to have some sway in your future.. so be nice. Besides, keeping users working and happy is why we exist. As much as users can be a pain, without them, we don’t have a job.

#9… Yes, please take heed. We have a system that grew over time where I work that does all our unix system’s configuration management, and does it pretty damn well. We constantly have new vendors coming in hawking their wares for CM, that regularly leaving me feeling we’re better off with what we have. What’s worse is when a new vendor has some new whizzbang solution for doing installs all the way through CM, and the whole system is tied together. Well, they just hurt themselves as we don’t need to shell out more money for a system that often doesn’t appear to do as much as what our homegrown systems already do.

#10… Bah. Rebooting is NOT fixing a problem. Rebooting simply resets a system back to the original state, if there’s some kind of problem in hardware or in software that has to run, you’re just going to keep ending up right back at that problem state again and again. Now, the author can be somewhat excused since I gather from reading his site that he supports mostly windows hosts. Rebooting is considered a valid “fix” in that world.. but when you admin nothing but unix based OSes, you learn that a reboot is either a cop out for “I don’t know” or it’s just a time saver. The only times I reboot are when the host is non-responsive and I can’t do any troubleshooting… or, something like AFS or automounter on linux gets dorked. At that point , sure I could clear all user jobs and restart the whole subsystem, but it’s usually just quicker to reboot. Plus our auto-patching system can install any needed patches then.

We don’t reboot just because we see a problem though.

From the User tips…

#1… save as above. Especially when we’re talking unix boxes. At our company, we justified buying expensive workstations for engineers by using a job batch system to run jobs on the desktops when they’re idle. So if you rebooted your workstation, there was a good chance you killed someone else’s jobs too.

#3… Man is that true. Lost count of the number of times I’ve had people call in problems that were just loose cables.

#6.. Oh god yes. Not only would I say email if it’s not the end of the world, but if your company has support email lists you’re supposed to use.. use them!! Just because one admin helped you 3 months ago, doesn’t mean you’re now entitled to email that person directly from now on, expecting them to drop whatever it is they’re doing to help you. That goes double for calling… if your company has a help line, use it. I used to be so inundated with calls and emails directly from users that, no matter how many times I asked them nicely to use the help email/line, they kept coming directly to me that I had to start ignoring them. More then once I had people then email my boss, their boss, a VP, etc.. swearing that I was now responsible for their delays in their job. Of course, when my boss and theirs asked if they used the help address/line and if not, why… they suddenly retreated. Man, I love that.

THis ties directly into…
#8… Sending every request with a cc to tons of management is not going to make us work any harder for you. In fact, it’s apt to make us see exactly what you’re implying and cause us all to lose most interest in helping you.

This applied to oncall pages too. Don’t wake up the oncall admin because of something piddly like a printer is out of paper, or your job is running but it just doesn’t seem quite fast enough. We might counter being woken at 3am by insisting that we call (and wake up) your boss to verify that this really is important enough to warrant our time. 🙂

Anyway.. a couple of good articles at a new site I’ve stumbled upon.

Posted in: Comments on other blog entries by Miguelito /
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[ Music: Hunger from the album “Black Hawk Down” by Hans Zimmer ]

So I played in 2 Hold’em tournaments over the long holiday weekend, one on Friday, and the usual Sunday game. The Friday game was a $35 buy in, $3k in chips, no rebuys or add-ons.

Friday’s game I played pretty well, building up to about $15k in chips. It was a large tournament, something like 35 tables.. payouts were fairly high, 1st was going to get $2500 and 2nd $1500 IIRC. Not too shabby. Anyway, I got knocked out just under 1/2 way and was annoyed at the hand that lost it for me…

I had K10s and was sb. Noone raised, and I called. Flop was A73s so I flopped the winning flush. I put in $800 (blinds were $400/$800 at this point) and everyone folded but one other guy, and I’m thinking he’s got the queen flush, which would be great for me. The turn comes out 5h. I check and he goes all in… so I call all in (thinking I’ve suckered him in). I turn up my hand and everyone “ooooh”s.. then he turns up a 3/5 off suite. I’m favored 92% I believe.. then the river comes out.. 5c! He hits his full house and knocks me out.. damnit.

Sunday’s tournament is similar. I was playing even better, and was up to $25k in chips or so, after rebuying 2x during the start, so horrible start but now doing very well. Blinds are up to $2k/$4k and I get J8d. A few call, noone raises. Flop is JJ7. I’ve got a set. The first to act goes in for $17.5k, everyone folds and I figure he’s got a jack too, but what the hell. He even says (after I call) “oh, you’ve got the jack, don’t you?” And I did.. he flips up AA. The turn comes out… Ace! Damnit.. he’s hit his set too, and it’s better then mine. River is something lime like a 3.. so I’m again knocked out with a pretty strong hand. Damnit. Well, actually, I had $7k left, but at that point I was basically out.. had to go all in with next decent cards as blind came around to me and I lost.

Will have to see how I do this coming weekend. I’m definitely getting better, learning to read people more and knock out people with only medium strength hands by betting properly. All in all, even when I lose I have fun so it’s worth it.

Posted in: Poker / Gaming by Miguelito /
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[ Music: Get ‘Em Up from the album “Bunkka” by Paul Oakenfold ]

but I did. Had stopped to gas up on my way home from Sycuan on Sunday, and as I was paying at the atm interface on the island, I heard this loud metal “Ka-CHUNK” behind me, that sounded like a nozzle hitting the ground. I looked, and sure enough… there’s a nozzle on the ground and a woman in a car that has just stopped and is looking back. Yep.. she tried to drive off with the nozzle from the gas pump still in her tank. How anyone could miss that is beyond me, but she did. She was lucky in that it seemed to just fall out and nothing was broken.

And here I always felt stupid if I just forget to close the outer fuel door, which I haven’t done in ages. But to drive off with the nozzle still in? Yeesh.

Posted in: Misc by Miguelito /
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[ Music: Disappearing World from the album “Life In Slow Motion” by David Gray ]

I coded this ages ago, but noticed a few queries for it in the feature request page for WMDB. So here’s a quick bit on it..

Fairly simple, adds a borrowers bit similar to type, language, etc. Can do simple searches on what someone has borrowed, etc. I also added it in the base listing on the main display page so it’s clear up-front to friends or family if something new is already borrowed.

Here’s a diff patch you can download and patch against the latest 2.02 base.

Any problems? lemme know..

BTW, I saw the other request for ability to send a reminder email to borrowers.. shouldn’t be too hard to implement that, but I don’t have time right now.

Update: I guess I should explain for those that are wondering what the hell Wuffs Movie DB is… it’s the software I’m using to catalog my DVD collection online.

Posted in: My l337 skillz by Miguelito /
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