I’ve finally got motivated to make a few changes here.  Until recently it never occurred to me that people might possibly end up here on a mobile phone and that it would be a pain to navigate.  So I added a mobile pack pluggin for wordpress.  I’ll play around with themes a bit, but it’s installed and works…sort of.

There’s an issue with SI Captcha that won’t allow a user to leave a comment from a mobile phone.  I’ll look into that over the next couple of ways.  I also finally fixed the location of the captcha box, which was below the submit button on the forms.  That was just me being lazy for over a year.

I’m also playing around with some themes for desktop users.

We have a lot of what you might consider, legacy systems.  Primarily, most of our NetWare servers.  For us, they’re still highly used production machines.

One such server is a NetWare 6.5 box running iScsi target services.  That server is the shared storage for our Novell cluster.  I’m working on getting a base Zenoss install configured for some sort of host monitoring.  I couldn’t get the Netware server to talk back to the zenoss server.  I realized that the default gateway was wrong.  It was set to some bogus gateway from when we had a flat network and gateways were irrelevant.  The best part is, the reinitialize command doesn’t seem to work when I change any setting in inetcfg.  There is some goofy step when you first run inetcfg where it has to transfer from autoexec.ncf and requires a server reboot.  So basically, I have to drag the entire cluster offline to change the default gateway of the target server.

And people complained about having to restart windows 95/98 when you changed your IP!

I had a directory of pictures that I needed to prefix a zero to in the filename.  This is a simple bash script to do it.  I’m posting it here for when I forget what I did.    Cygwin on my work box running XP barfed running on it.  I used my Opensuse install on my laptop and just mounted a share on my XP machine and ran it from linux and it worked like a charm.

#!/bin/bash
for f in `ls`
do
echo “Prefixing Zero to filename $f…”
mv $f 0$f
done

I figure with any job, regardless how much you love it, you will run into times when you completely lack motivation.  I’m in a job where, beyond my own personal motivation, the only real motivation is not to get fired(Peter Gibbons, 1999).  I’m at an organization where good performance is rarely met with monetary rewards and making a vertical career moves means you have to “move out to move up”.  While I have gripes with the situation, it’s my own problem and I choose to be where I am.  Beyond all of that, my own motivation is what really keeps me going; my motivation to learn and suceed.

I’m going to make an assumption that not everyone is motivated 100% of the time.  How do you combat long droughts of motivation?  Beyond that, how do you know if it’s not just a matter of motivation and you have become stagnant in a position?

I’ve begun some initial looks at some SAN hardware for shared storage.  I’m just looking at iSCSI.  Fibre Channel is out of the question due to price.  I already have a home grown iScsi SAN/cluster running on top of NetWare, but it’s limited to iScsi Initiator access using NSS.  While its doing it’s job, it’s basically featureless.  Moreover, while the cluster resources are redundant, the shared storage is not.  There are some iSCSI appliances out there that will allow for redundancy between units.

That’s the major feature I’m looking for.  I hate the idea of having all of our eggs in one basket.  Even our core switches have redundant supervisor blades and power supplies and we have redundant port channel links to the IDFs spread out on separate gig blades in the event that one of those eat themselves.  We really need that redundancy with our storage.  We have a nice infrastructure in place to allow for iSCSI traffic between redundant sites.  Our main campus is a couple of miles away from our secondary campus, but we own the fiber on the poles in between.  So it’s one consitant LAN, no WAN links to worry about.  Beyond that, I’ve read a bit about snapshots and being able to back up data without the hassle of agent software on remote servers that has a tendancy to crap out.

Initially I’m looking at two devices, Lefthand’s Multisite San and EMC’s CLARiiON AX4.  If anyone has any advice, I’m all ears…er, eyes.

I’m giving a few wordpress themes a go.  Maybe I’ll find one I actually like!

I finally got around to pulling another NetWare 5.1 server which first served as our Bordermanager proxy server, then was moved to GroupWise GWIA duty.  Once I installed our SLES 10 box to run our GWIA, the NetWare server was just spinning its fans.  It served its purpose well.  There’s just one remaining 5.1 server left.  That server is the devil machine I mentioned before.  I fully expect to tear a hole in the universe when I try to pull that one out of the directory tree.  Daemons will spill out and attempt to destroy the world.  Make sure you have plenty of canned food, water, and lots of toilet paper.

I forgot a username/password for a website that I needed access to.  I had to wait until I got home to dig up a hard copy that had my account# on it.  That’s a pain in the butt.  Opensuse 11 comes preloaded with gpg.  Below is a link to a quick tutorial on how to use it to encrypt single files.  I’m thinking I’m going to put my obscure usernames/passwords in a file, encrypt it with gpg, and be able to access it whenever I have a machine with gpg on it.

On the other hand though, putting anything private in electronic form is a risk.  Anyone ever do this?  What are your opinions?  Drop me a message.

http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/linux-how-to-encrypt-and-decrypt-files-with-a-password.html

On Novell’s Communities site, I stumbled onto this posting.  I’m not sure if I agree with all of the points made, but it certainly hits on some major issues.  In my own personal viewpoint, the management tool piece is one that I’ve complained about myself.  If you’re an experienced GroupWise admin, it’s worth a read.

http://www.proprofs.com/certification/cisco/ccna/index.shtml