MessyMissy's Place » Work

Well I didn’t get anything for sysadmin day…

Messy — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 16:06:03 +0000

Oh well… there is always next year…

Lansing City Market rocks

Messy — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 16:02:47 +0000

There is one staple in my life, The Lansing City Market. The people there are the ones that you can always count on to know what you need and are always willing to help you out.

I’m a member of ELFCO (East Lansing Food Co-Op), but since they opened their stand at the City Market I really haven’t had a need to go to the actual store. They have everything I need!

I love this place!

Another of my favorite stops is Materagaia, for all our organic beer brewing needs! Great people great supplies!

And then there is Hill’s Cheese. /me drools I know I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again… They have THE BEST cheese in the my little slice of the world!

Thus ends today’s City Market Love Fest…

And I didn’t even get to Moo-ville, Otto’s Chicken and Westwind Milling…

Frustration running rampant today

Messy — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 20:51:26 +0000

First my update of Apache for the webserver hosed the ColdFusion installation, then trying to follow the update procedure for ColdFusion’s Apache connector was less than successful. Then to top it all off the auth program that worked in the Dev environ is throwing all kinds of errors at me in production. yay. Just yay. Some days I just want to take a sledge hammer to servers.

EM01b Websensor – revisited

Messy — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 19:23:57 +0000

I’m still not 100% pleased with this little thing.
It seems to work most of the time, but I’m still seeing random points where it just won’t talk to the Nagios server. If there was a pattern that’d be one thing I could track down the cause. I know it has to be there, but the correlation to some other event on the network escapes me.

Finally got my new Apple Keyboard

Messy — Fri, 21 Sep 2007 20:48:31 +0000

w00t!
I ordered it back on August 20th and just got it Monday. I didn’t think I’d like it the first day I was using it, but its definitely grown on me. Everyone who comes in is really envious of it too, which makes it both worth the wait and very pleasing on a ‘Ha ha I’ve got one and you’re stuck with a Windows keyboard’ level.

EM01b Websensor

Messy — Wed, 15 Aug 2007 19:17:23 +0000

I got an EM01b Websensor the other day so we could monitor the environmental conditions for the server room. Over all the device seems pretty cool. I do tend to have some connection issues with it, but that could just be because of network traffic, but who knows. I had to quit having Nagios ping it , because the Nagios server was sending me probably 100 emails over the weekends and anywhere from 10 – 15 a night when it couldn’t ping it, and then another 10 – 15 more when it was able to reconnect. Other than that the data has been good from the environmental portion. We were able to prove that we weren’t making up the desert like conditions in the server room. We’re finally getting the cooling system we’ve been asking for! W00t!

Oh yeah so back to the sensor. The technical support was pretty good. They did try and fix my ping problem even sending me a new sensor, configuration and the new c file to compile, but alas I still have the problem.

Compiling the c file was cake and the Nagios plugins were easy to use. Over all I’m giving it a B.

y2k7DST update

Messy — Fri, 09 Mar 2007 15:01:30 +0000

So with only today to go in the work week before Daylight Savings Time, we hope that everyone has applied the patches and that all is well and right with the world. Though now that I’ve hear that the call volume for Microsoft is up 66%, I’m thinking probably not. Fortunately, at work we were able to WSUS the patch out to everyone for the OS and that just left the Wimdows 2000 boxes and Outlook. We made a site for the change though to help them through it http://help.ess.msu.edu/dst2007. It seems to have filled everyones need with all the pretty pictures and all that.

As a side note, Michigan State University alone has already spent more than the person who proposed this change thought it would save for the whole state. Way to go!

y2k7DST can kiss my @$$!

Messy — Thu, 22 Feb 2007 19:32:11 +0000

I’d like to strangle the people who voted for the change in daylight savings time. Nothing like causing another Y2K-esque time for technology professionals. Great job! Already we’re seeing swaths of people with calendar data out of sync with reality.

My brain hurts trying to think of all the ways that this could possibly turn into a major 2 week nightmare. First there isn’t a ‘real’ patch for Windows 2000, it is after all not supported by Microsoft any more. Sure you can buy the patch for it from Microsoft, for $4000. Yippie! Like anyone in education has that kind of money to spend. Well ok, i’m sure there are a few, but we aren’t talking about them. What about all those poor saps that are home users still using Legacy Operating systems? You know who you are Mr. & Mrs. Win 9x. Not to mention Windows NT users.

OK enough of that… back to firefighting!

(thanks to Downgrade.org for the great acronym!)

Am I in a freezer?

Messy — Fri, 19 Jan 2007 19:15:44 +0000

Ok, so I like winter. Not the uber cold frozen brass bra part, but the snow and fun that comes with snow. The one thing that really throws me though, is when I come into my office and half of it is cozy but yet the other half, by the window, might as well be a meat locker. The only way to keep a ‘semi’ balanced temperature is to duct tape my the window closed. And I’m sure you all know just how well duct tape adheres to cold metal… Yeah it doesn’t.

servers suck

Messy — Tue, 09 Jan 2007 16:45:54 +0000

Sometimes I just hate Linux, but then I think about it and say to myself… ‘Well it could be windows…’. Not that Windows servers don’t have their place. For the web however, the only way to go, well in my opinion anyway, is Linux or Unix. There is just too much overhead for Windows and the poor little boxes I have to work with just don’t cut the mustard under its massive weight. Now you’re saying well what are you using for servers?!? You really don’t want to know. Lets just say in today’s penny pinching budgetary world, I haven’t had a new server since 2003. So back to my angst. Linux Networking. If there is one thing that makes my head hurt more than anything else, its Linux networking. Its probably just me being unab;e to grasp its easy happiness, but it torments me with its funky non-working self and its multiple change points and commands. I’d rather rebuild a server from scratch then mess with the networking. That’s how much I hate it. Just thought I’d share…