I’ve been playing around with Drupal lately and started blogging over at www.trussinunix.com

Yep, sucks just as bad having a failed hard drive on a mac as it does any other system.

:(  tick tick tick  . ..squeall  and nada.

This has been something I’ve been looking for, for a while. As Gmail becomes a primary email account for more and more netizens, secure communication is more and more of a concern.

It didn’t occur to me until just a few moments ago for the hesitation on the part of the Gmail Team.    …..    It will break Ad-Sense.   How can the data hungry monster that is adsense target ads for encrypted emails.

I hope that is not the reason, but I have yet to see any communication from google that would lead me to think different.

Please join in and request pgp support via googles feedback link .

Frustration is having one you care about hurting and there is nothing you can do about it.

Long story short, my 14 month old German Shepherd is balding, bleeding, and just down right itchy.  I’ve had him to the vet and tested for mites, parasites, bacteria, and a whole slew of anything else that goes wiggle in the night.

The concenses is that his allment is allergy related.  Great that norrowed things down a bit . ..or did it.  I’ve tried suppliments, different kibble, and a RAW diet.  All the while doing a slow methodical elimination process trying to rule out food allergies.  So far 5 months later, no success.

In the mean time we had some not so wonderful experiences with Prednisone and a slew of antibiotics that all did nothing to FIX a problem..  only treating symptoms.

To top things off I’ve been waiting a month for the results to come back on an Allergy blood test.  3 week into it the vet called and said the lab had an accendent and the first sample was destroyed.  We needed to give a second sample and then continue to wait several more weeks.

Such is my and Berlin’s frustration.

Google Docs for Publishing Blog entries

Just trying something new. I’m going to be quite mobile the next few months due to the need to travel for work.
I’ve got quite a few things I need to stay ontop of for some personal and some work business. Need to keep track of bills, todos, and updating the resume if no raise comes of all this work. ;).
So I’ve been moving some of my budgeting spreadsheets and other documents to google Docs, and as of just a moment ago found this nifty setting that I can register with my blog.

Ehh, we’ll see how it works out.

I’ve been looking for a decent RSS reader to help me navigate through the waters of information overload.

I’ve tried sage for firefox, check out a few things like bloglines, but think I’ve settled on the Google Reader (part of google labs).  My Yahoo wasn’t too bad, if it wasn’t for all the damn ads.

I liked sage quite a bit, but the problem was that the Read topics don’t sync from my Workstation in the office to my PC at home .. thus I settled for a web solution.
Anyway, give it a shot.  http://www.google.com/reader

For several reasons we have migrated our DHCP infrastructure from Sun’s DHCP service to ISC dhcp here at work. To aide in the process I created a little perl script to generate the Host declarations for a given network.

dhcp_migration.pl
I’ve also created a manifest so that isc dhcp services can be integrated into Solaris 10’s SMF.

/lib/svc/method/isc-dhcp-server
/var/svc/manifest/system/isc-dhcp-server.xml
Copy both files into the locations show above, then run

svccfg import /var/svc/manifest/system/isc-dhcp-server.xml

…….

Extracted 2462.00 MB ( 99% of 2466.70 MB archive)
Extracted 2463.00 MB ( 99% of 2466.70 MB archive)
Extracted 2464.00 MB ( 99% of 2466.70 MB archive)
Extracted 2465.00 MB ( 99% of 2466.70 MB archive)
Extracted 2466.00 MB ( 99% of 2466.70 MB archive)
Extracted 2466.70 MB (100% of 2466.70 MB archive)
Extraction complete

Postdeployment processing

No local customization defined
sh: ./cc-client_cleanup: not found

ERROR: Error while processing custom script - cd /tmp/flash_tmp/postdeployment;./cc-client_cleanup
rm: Cannot remove any directory in the path of the current working directory
/tmp/flash_tmp/postcreation

ERROR: Postdeployment processing failure

ERROR: Flash installation failed
Solaris installation program exited.

Bahh ….

Initially I did some googling and round a possibly related bug 6460977 that is supposed to be resolved by patch 124171. My flash archive was at revision -03, and I patched up to the current -06 but it still did not resolve my issues.

I next attempted to replace the symlink in /etc/flash/postdeployment/cc-client_cleanup with the actual script located at /usr/lib/cc-cfw/framework/lib/client_cleanup. Then creating a new flash archive.  This worked according to a few forum users http://forum.java.sun.com/thread.jspa?threadID=5131857
This however still had dependencies to other scripts in /usr/lib/cc-cfw.

Ok, so at the risk of screwing with the actuall jumpstart boot filesystem, I rsync /usr/lib/cc-cfw over to the appropriate place on the Boot file system on the jumpstart server.  NO..no..  That would be too easy  now we have dependencies in /usr/lib/cc-ccr.

Ok, so finally I run the cc-client_cleanup while chrooted in the /a file system.  YEAH it runs, but ..hmm  what other scripts are not being executed after the flash extraction?  Trying to boot the system off the disk just complains

{3} ok boot disk
Boot device: /pci@8,600000/SUNW,qlc@2/fp@0,0/disk@0,0  File and args:
The file just loaded does not appear to be executable.

Yeah so, I still haven’t gotten the hold on this whole blogging thing. I read some web article a few months back that explained how the whole blogging and public diary thing was on its way out. Summarized, Most people think it’s a cool idea to get up and start speaking to a crowed . ..but they slowly realize that either no one is listening, or that they really don’t have anything to say. I think I fit snuggly into both groups. Ahh what the hell, if anything It’ll be another post for the damn comment spammers to scrape and pillage.

On the home front, I’m the happy father of 2 puppies. One a purebred German Shepherd, the other a Miniature Rat Terrier, respectively named Berlin and Oscar. That by far has consumed much of my time. I’ve been getting involved in Schutzhund, which has been pretty fun so far. I’m getting a lot of pressure to Join the club, but I think the real reason is because I’m one of the only young guys fit enough to be mauled by a dog and to get up and do it again 10 minutes later. It’s a rush when you have a barking, drooling, foaming at the mouth cujo coming toward you. But the thing is . ..it’s all a game to the dog. They are waking their tail the whole time. For me on the other hand, it’s a freakin’ workout!
On the Geek Front, it’s been busy at work.

• Provisioning
• Monitoring
• Virtualization
• Troubleshooting Redhat
• Configuration Management

Provisioning and deploying new or refreshed hardware should be something we already have a handle on at my company, but for reasons I won’t go into now ..we need tighter reigns and a more intuative interface. I tried several solutions such as N1 system manager. However each has their limitations or compromises. In the end I decided to create a simple Web GUI and some backing scripts to handle and validate user input.

Although we are investing in “Enterprise Monitoring” by some big vendor, we in the Unix department still have certain requirement for monitoring and system management. As of lately I’ve been playing around heavily with Zenoss. I’ve been pretty pleased with the Discovery options and simple event monitoring. Again referring to the same frustrations as in the last point, with minimally to no effort, systems will be automagically added to the application and monitored.

We are currently weighing vmware and solaris zones options for virtualization. We are already using zones live in production, but are still trying to feel out the magic configuration for managing this environment. I’m excited about Solaris 10 Update 4, this should allow us to do much more with zones. Certain things in a Shared IP stack have introduced limitations that have caused us to not jump in quite as deep as I would like to have.

Wow, … I have not been very impressed by the error logging or system troubleshooting tools in Rhel4. We recently migrated off of our Sun Sparc systems to Red Hat on x86. Mostly Sun x4100s, but a few X4600s and more on the way. For the most part the transition has been fairly seamless, however after migrating our PRIMARY database over we quickly found some nasty kernel bugs. We’ll just say that was a long week on call. I also had a very difficult time explaining to RedHat support that I can just upload a 64Gb Netdump into the web gui. I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt, maybe they didn’t hear me say GIGABYTE twelves times. Seriously though, their support staff was quick and helpful, I’m just not so crazy about running beta kernels on the system that my Company and my paycheck depend on.

I’ve always been interested in Configuration managment and how other people are doing things in their shops. I’ve really taken a liking to the information available at Infastructures.org. Some I see we can apply to our current setup (based heavily on rdist and a home grown C template processor). I’m trying to find or create a happy marriage of a push/pull system. With the current setup it’s 100% push. Now this push system has worked very well for us, but our infrastructure is about to become very dynamic. Desktops, Virtual Systems, Thin Clients all being up and down, created and destroyed. The only way to manage and support these kind of systems is with a pull component. This is still a work in progress and very much an issue.

What’s the deal with Spam Comments on blogs?

Why can’t those asses stick with email …. I just wasted 3 whole minutes moderating comments …

I knew it was spam right off the bat …because No one actually visits this site …let alone leave comments..it’s strictly for my own entertainment purposed.