mindless administrata

ruby: gem install dies with buffer overflow

2012-01-18T14:10:00.000-06:00

In hopes the Google machine will help some other poor hapless soul who stumbles across the same problem...

At work, I'm trying to use vlad-push to do pushes of current code to remote hosts. I found a few bugs, fixed, them on my Mac, minted a new gem, and then tried to make a RPM at work using the newly built gemfile. This fails spectacularly anytime you try to parse the gemfile's metadata, like so:

[nhruby@rpmbuilder1 rubygem-vlad-push]$ gem specification vlad-push-1.1.0.gem
*** buffer overflow detected ***: /usr/bin/ruby terminated
======= Backtrace: =========
/lib64/libc.so.6(__chk_fail+0x2f)[0x36cf6e807f]
/usr/lib64/ruby/1.8/x86_64-linux/syck.so(rb_syck_mktime+0x48e)[0x2aaaaade298e]
/usr/lib64/ruby/1.8/x86_64-linux/syck.so(yaml_org_handler+0x860)[0x2aaaaade32a0]
/usr/lib64/ruby/1.8/x86_64-linux/syck.so(syck_defaultresolver_node_import+0x39)[0x2aaaaade34a9]
/usr/lib64/libruby.so.1.8[0x322503492e] 
/usr/lib64/libruby.so.1.8[0x3225034e48] 
/usr/lib64/libruby.so.1.8[0x32250353f2] 
/usr/lib64/libruby.so.1.8(rb_funcall+0x85)[0x32250356c5]
/usr/lib64/ruby/1.8/x86_64-linux/syck.so(rb_syck_load_handler+0x47)[0x2aaaaade2437]
/usr/lib64/ruby/1.8/x86_64-linux/syck.so(syck_hdlr_add_node+0x39)[0x2aaaaaddd839]
/usr/lib64/ruby/1.8/x86_64-linux/syck.so(syckparse+0xb45)[0x2aaaaadde605]
/usr/lib64/ruby/1.8/x86_64-linux/syck.so(syck_parse+0x19)[0x2aaaaade6d29]
/usr/lib64/ruby/1.8/x86_64-linux/syck.so(syck_parser_load+0xed)[0x2aaaaade22ad]
/usr/lib64/libruby.so.1.8[0x322503492e]

On my Mac I use rbenv and had 1.9.3-p0 installed, which spits out a "date:" value in the metadata YAML that causes older version of ruby's YAML parser to crash on Linux systems with hardened glibc builds (more details found here).

Switching rbenv to use ruby 1.8.7 fixes the issue to produce a date field with saner value that older ruby version (such as those on CentOS/RHEL 5) can cope with.

Get out of the sysadmin firefighting business

2010-06-05T17:24:00.000-05:00

A while back there was a post on the lopsa-discuss mailing list about time management. If you read it and the ensuing thread there are a number of really good suggestions about how to more effectively handle your work time so that you are more productive, less harried and start to really gain a sense of situational awareness about your environment. It's all good stuff and I have used many of the suggestions in that thread with great success. If you're a system administrator and feel that you need 36 hours in a day, go read that thread and then do at least one of the recommendations. You'll never look back.

However, there was one particular bit from the original post that really has been hanging out in the back of my mind, bugging me:

I frequently find myself dealing with so many little things throughout the day that by the end of the day I feel like I've been busy but can't really point at what I've done during the day.

So the entire day is running around "fighting fires?" Time management can't fix that problem, trust me, I've tried. It can help and it's a great first step, you should do it. But at some point you need to stop looking for better firefighting techniques to fix problems and start looking at fireproofing things so they don't catch on fire in the first place. You might think that's a really hard (or even impossible) thing to do and that asbestos underwear is itchy. Luckily, you'd be wrong on the first part of that thought, and I'd like to talk about some high level, introductory concepts that can help you get started fireproofing quickly.

And, no, I don't really want to talk about your underwear.

The first step for me is always to fix the flare-ups, the small reoccurring fires. If you're constantly fighting the same fire, over and over again, then it's time you showed up with something more than a garden hose. You'll be happy, your users will be happy, your bosses will be happy. And as a wonderful side effect you'll have more time to manage because you won't be in a reactive mode all of the time fixing things!

In a perfect world you'd see the problem at its' very core, tackle the it with precision, and resolve the problem once and for all. Pesky print server? Replace it! Unhappy database server? Upgrade it!

We don't live in a perfect world though, so sometimes the only real fix is manage the problem such that the pain it causes stays at a bearable level until you can handle the problem correctly. One method is to isolate the problem so that when it explodes it can't take anything else out. For example, move that troublesome application that causes whatever hardware it's on to lock up and require a reboot to a dedicated host. That way the reboot only effects the application instead of everything on the server. Another method is to install some sprinklers that will automatically put out the fire for you. Got a service that likes to leak memory? Automate a restart during the lowest usage period so that the leak doesn't cause problems during peak usage times.

That's all fine for technical issues. If you're constantly putting out fires from end-user questions and tickets there are some other strategies that can help. Documentation is one method, but self-service documentation portals are only so useful. Often we forget to update the docs so they're a little bit wrong, users don't follow directions carefully, some just don't want to, etc... I additionally take a three pronged approach to handling fires from users:

Educate: Try to educate your users when you can so they understand the problem they're having. If you explain it well enough, they can synthesize the information and use it to help themselves later. Better yet, if you have desktop support or helpdesk staff, educate them so they can fix the problem on first contact with the user so everyone walks away happy.
Automate: Accountants are not sysadmins. They do not want to follow a 12 step process to reset their passwords. Automate thing things people do frequently that cause problems so it's easy and less error prone.
Facilitate: Some people just are not reasonable. Facilitate their needs by getting it done without argument or hassle so everyone can get on with their life. Often just doing whatever it is will take less time than arguing about it anyway, so skip the drama and suck it up.

A similar strategy can work for management initiated fires too, though with a heavier does of facilitation.

The take away here is that if you're fixing the same thing over and over again, you're not really fixing it. Step back, look at the problem from all sides, examine the pain points and find a way to get the fire under control enough so you get some time and sanity back and so that your users don't feel like they need those pitchforks and torches. If you can put the fire out once and for all, even better, if not, you're probably dealing with a big fire which takes a separate type of attention.

A side effect of fixing the flare-ups is that the air is a lot clearer to see the smoke from the real fires. So my second step in fireproofing is to start looking for that smoke and if possible, the flames at the source. In order to see the fire before your users do start monitoring the performance, capacity, and availability of your environment.

If you don't have monitoring in place already, put some in and start with monitoring something about everything. Don't spend huge amounts of time or money on monitoring at this point because you'll have no idea what you really need. Stand up some cheap and easy monitoring solution and start tossing stuff into it and see what's useful. If something breaks, put in a monitor for it. Eventually you'll have enough monitoring in place (and experience from it) to make an educated and well formed decision about what you need to do in order to get to a point of comprehensive and useful monitoring. And be sure do do that evaluation, otherwise....

If you do have monitoring, fix it. Seriously. If you jut had to fix a series of flare ups and suffer from interruptions every minute of the day because something is broken or needs attention and you weren't proactive in getting it resolved before the users took notice then something is fundamentally broken with your monitoring. Evaluate what you monitor, how you monitor it, and what you monitor it with. Look to see where the breakdown is. Too many fine grained monitors make even a server reboot look like a calamity? Add in some dependencies. Monitoring package doesn't monitor services well? Add something else that does. Is it really hard to setup proper monitoring because each machine needs a finicky client installed? Find something new.

People laugh and think I'm joking when I say "Monitoring is a journey, not a destination" but I'm not. Things change and your monitoring will need to change along with those things. As a system administrator, it is the single most useful thing you can have in your arsenal.

So that's my simple two step, two minute introduction of how to start getting out of the sysadmin firefighting business. I don't maintain that these suggestions will put out every fire you may have or come across. I do think they offer a good place on the ground to start with. In future posts I'd like to examine how to deal with the larger fires that arise, tire fires, better fireproofing though design, and what kind of tools are out there to help you fight the fires.

Backup Applications for the Mac

2010-05-01T14:21:00.000-05:00

I love backups. They let me sleep well at night, they make me feel good in the morning, and that little pit of despair deep in my soul gets a little smaller every time I see my Time Machine icon spin. So imagine my reaction when my wife forwarded me an email from her campus IT folks that had this to say about Time Machine after she inquired about why it didn't seem to be installed on her Mac:

"Time Machine is not an enterprise product so is basically banned on campus. It works well and is great for home use but the security issues on campus comes from the fact that it backs up without you thinking about it. If someone sends you a file with SSNs in it, Time Machine backs it up. If you delete that file and empty your trash, Time Machine still retains a copy of it. Time Machine retains a lot of things that you intended to be deleted and never want back even."

The multiple layers of wrongness in that statement have confounded me for days. Even better, the small pit of despair is now growing again. So I'm spending my Saturday afternoon evaluating other backup applications for my wife's Time Machine-less laptop.

So far the leading contender is ChronoSync to do regular data protection tasks (backups, archives) of her home directory and Carbon Copy Cloner on a semi-regular basis for disaster recovery images. CCC is awesome and has been forever but this is the first time I've ever tried ChronoSync. It looks pretty nice. I'm interested to see how it does after a week or two on my wife's laptop going back and forth to work every day when the storage device it wants to use isn't available. The one thing I have found is that it can't automatically mount a remote share and use a disk image that's on the share. It's not a big deal, but it would be nice to have. Synk doesn't seem to support this either, so maybe it's not an oft requested feature.

Procedural note: At my wife's campus backups aren't banned, the genre of software known as "backup software" or "data protection software" as I far as I can find isn't banned, and the IT folks helpfully suggested to my wife that manually copying important data to a USB drive was an appropriate data protection method, so clearly copying data to some other location isn't banned. As a result I don't think that by setting this up for her by request I'm causing my wife to violate any work policies surrounding data storage, protection, or retention. For those of you following along at home: always check the fine print before futzing with a machine that isn't yours.

System Administration isn't doomed, but it's going to to be hella different real soon

2010-05-01T14:19:00.000-05:00

Let's compare and contrast these two articles:

My personal opinion is that cloud computing isn't going to take over the enterprise any time real soon. Most companies don't want their data floating on someone else's machines. And in terms of context and locality, it doesn't make sense to have a "print server in the cloud" much less a file share (and yes, there will always be file shares).

I do thing that the concept and arcitecture of "cloud computing" is going to change the I.T. industry and the profession of system administration a whole lot though. My particular vision goes something like:

Various {system,application,database,network} administration roles will blend more. In a cloud, it's much harder to build walls between hardware, network, applications, and "other stuff" because they all depend on each other. To a degree, this has already begun: witness SOA.
Scale will start to bite these fines folks. The tools will get better as a direct result.
Day to day "I.T. Guy" tasks will be automated/documented/made easy enough for them to be pushed down to the users, or at least desktop/helpdesk staff. "I.T. Guy" either moves laterally to another career, or refocuses as desktop/helpdesk or upper level administration.

Selling out, or selling up? Yes, I'm Enabling Ads

2010-04-11T11:43:00.001-05:00

When I first started trying to write and post regularly I found it difficult to do so. Part of my difficulty was trying to publish content that wasn't just a whiny rundown of my regular activities -- since my life is pretty boring, that kind of rundown really isn't very interesting either. The other difficulty I had was finding the will to regularly post. Two years later I think I'm starting to get the hang of the writing part and since I need to keep doing it in order to get better I'm looking for some extra motivation.

Love, happiness, and a sense of safety and well-being are all great motivators; but the Blogger "Monetize" tab looked much easier and quicker. So, I'm going to try serving some ads along with content in order to see if having a positive financial impact will spur me into posting more regularly. To keep my karma levels even I will apply the first $75 of revenue to a Kiva loan. Judging by the (lack of) traffic I get that will take a while to happen. Also, since my traffic levels are so low I'm not even going to worry about planning past that first $75. My goal is to post and write, so I'm really less concerned about money and more concerned about just producing something worthwhile. As things progress, I will post updates on the effectiveness of this scheme and link to whatever Kiva loans that are made as a result. Hey, look! It's already working, I have more stuff to write about!

Since I just enabled ads my request hasn't been fully processed yet. So in a wonderful twist of irony, this post to my blog about enabling ads on my blog will go live with, you got it, no ads.

Fedora 12: Usage review

2010-04-11T11:11:00.001-05:00

With Fedora 13 Alphas being released it seems like as good a time as any to plonk down some of my thoughts on Fedora 12.

Gnome Shell preview is really awesome. I like it, it works, and I'm excited to see what else might be in store. Hopefully a few keyboard shortcuts for flipping desktops.
NetworkManager continues to make the user networking experience good. At this point it's about as reliable and useful as my Mac.
Video/Media codec support still sucks. This is not Fedora's fault, it sucks on Mac too. Codecs just plain suck. Point in case? I installed mythfrontend during a demo at MilwaukeeLUG and it broke Totem's ability to play an Ogg file. After a few logouts and some more installs is started to work. Then broke again. Folks, this is why Flash video is successful. HTML5 video may standardize on a few codecs but I'm not terribly sure that will help. This has been a problem for close to a decade and I'm sometimes shocked it's still an issue.
Firefox is still slower than Firefox on my Mac.
For the most part, things just work.

A big thinks to the Fedora developers and community for making great stuff.

ldap time to perl time()

2010-04-05T11:41:00.000-05:00

This might save 30 seconds for someone else who wrongly thought that DateTime::Format:ISO8601 would parse an LDAP timestamp.

# Takes an ISO8601ish LDAP timestamp datatype and converts it into a perl time()
# compatible structure.  Requires Time::Local.
sub ldap2time
{
    my $ldap_ts = shift;
    return unless $ldap_ts =~ /(\d{4})(\d{2})(\d{2})(\d{2})(\d{2})(\d{2})Z/;
    my ($year, $mon, $day, $hour, $min, $sec) = ($1, $2, $3, $4, $5, $6);
    return timegm($sec, $min, $hour, $day, ($mon-1), $year);
}

Cricket Modem On Linux

2010-03-08T19:28:00.003-06:00

I have a Cal-Comp A600 USB 3G modem from Cricket as my backup internet connection. It's a "flip-flop" USB device that presents a small disk when first plugged in that has all the drivers you need to Windows and Mac. Once the drivers are installed, they know how to frob the device to make it look like a modem, and not just a USB stick.

Getting this to work in Linux seems really poorly documented, so here's my attempt to save some poor bastard in the future a few minutes of pain:

# Flip this device
usb_modeswitch -v 0x1f28 -p 0x0021 -m 0x08 -M 55534243b82e238c24000000800108df200000000000000000000000000000
# Hold a moment for things to catch up
sleep 5
# Reset the device so it will come back as a modem
usb_modeswitch -v 0x1f28 -p 0x0020 -R 1

After that, NetworkManager should see a CDMA modem and offer to set it up for you (at least on Fedora 11 and 12, and I guess other recent distros with recent NetworkManger).

The Great Start Page Debate and How to Abuse Firefox with Tree Style Tab

2010-02-21T15:07:00.000-06:00

Every now and again I see an online discussion about what the best start page is. Some people like a blank page, some folks like iGoogle, some folks like pictures of bunnies and kittens, etc.... I guess I'm odd or something. I have three separate start pages that I use on a daily basis.

That's right, three start pages. AT THE SAME FREAKIN' TIME. Suck it.

Since this topic comes up often enough in various online forums, it seems like I should briefly discuss my setup. I don't think it's perfect, it most certainly isn't for everyone and it does assume your browser is one of the primary applications you work with all day (AdiumX and iTerm are the other two I use constantly). But I do think my setup is unique enough to warrant some mention. So, my three start pages are:

One for my personal stuff that points at my personal iGoogle page
One for work related services, that points at the start page for our Google Apps
One for work related links I use every day (ticketing, wiki, monitoring, etc..)

That's a lot of pages and links. I probably could condense that down into one local page someplace if I really cared too. Frankly though, I like have things separated out since it allows me to visually segregate work related tabs versus personal related tabs. This setup also helps me stay focused on what I need to be doing without pulling in lots of other distractions from unrelated items. For example, I can't get distracted ^[1] by the TwitterGadget on my personal iGoogle page when looking at my work start pages. This also lets me have really focused start pages with minimal information that doesn't require a scroll down to see everything at a glance.

If visually segregating tabs sounds odd to you, then you haven't discovered the Tree Style Tab extension for Firefox. For someone like me who regularly has 75 browser tabs open on any given day and clicks a few hundred links in a day, it's a life-saver. Tree Style Tab lets me have a nice horizontal list of tabs on the side of the window that are indented with parent-child relationships. For the context of this post: the links I click on from one start page are created as new tabs under the start page from where they came, so everything stays grouped together instead of becoming a jumbled mess. When combined with the Vimperator extension which removes nearly all of the chrome from Firefox and gives me great keyboard shortcuts for nearly everything, I have tons of room on my widescreen monitor for the tabs listing. Tree Style Tab also allows me to only need one open browser window which is even more helpful since I use Alt-Tab as my primary method for switching between applications and in Mac OS X you can't target a specific window to switch to, just the most recently focused one for the app.

Have I sold you on Tree Style Tab yet? No? Well then perhaps a picture is worth more than the words in this post. Here's an example screenshot of my browser window right before I started writing:

The top three non-indented tabs on the left are my start pages, the tabs under them are related to the start page (and so on down the tree), and the things at the bottom are tabs I opened directly.

1 - Yes, I am easily distracted by shiny .... oooohhhhh

Unspamming facebook

2010-02-21T13:53:00.003-06:00

So, I have this blog imported into my Facebook account. Sadly, long rants about Linux and System Administration tend to seem silly in the light of Facebook, so I'm going to only import posts with the "facebook" tag now to try to not spam folks.

2009-10-22T20:49:00.001-05:00

dear perl: this syntax blows: $arrayref = $hashref->{foo}{array} ; for $item (@$arrayref) { $item->{something}; }

2009-10-22T14:46:00.001-05:00

oh hell yeah (thanks @snapl): http://ping.fm/5GnpR

2009-10-21T11:10:00.001-05:00

Rain has stopped and painters are here doing the front door

2009-10-21T08:51:00.001-05:00

Waiting for painters to show up so I can literally watch paint dry. Too bad it's raining.

2009-10-18T20:26:00.001-05:00

New cable lineup has channel with AIRWOLF! Channel also has ads for phreaker gear?

2009-10-18T14:56:00.001-05:00

Enjoying the first sunny day in weeks!

2009-10-17T21:06:00.001-05:00

Hulu player for mac does not suck

2009-10-11T10:39:00.001-05:00

Ack! It's cold!

2009-10-04T15:53:00.001-05:00

Requested a Google Wave invite, added awesome black bean soup recipe to the "tell us why" box, let's see if it works

2009-10-03T14:49:00.001-05:00

Ah, Saturday. They day where good intensions go to die. The cold, damp, grey weather isn't helping much either

2009-09-28T08:26:00.001-05:00

#MKE seems to have hit that point where the sun now rises after I need to wake up. Awesome.

2009-09-27T12:43:00.001-05:00

Think the feeling good from yesterday was simply euphoria from being sick.

2009-09-26T12:36:00.001-05:00

Feeling good and recharged after a long week.

2009-09-23T13:51:00.001-05:00

train + wireless broadband == epic win

2009-09-22T14:45:00.001-05:00

Whee! Get to go to Chicago tomorrow!

2009-09-13T15:54:00.001-05:00

got air pump for bike tires, found a nice loop to ride in the mornings

2009-08-30T18:55:00.001-05:00

Damn You NewEgg. Damn you straight to hell. http://ping.fm/7B4aV

2009-08-29T10:40:00.001-05:00

Dear Milwaukee Weather: It is still August, not October. So get with the program, jerk. mke

2009-08-27T20:14:00.001-05:00

Installed baskets on bike, they rock & will fit 1 bag of groceries each. Totally will try to not use car in Sept. 30DaysOfBike

2009-08-26T21:34:00.001-05:00

Dear NBC: I would like to watch heros online (and would pay for it), please to make it not unpossible

2009-08-22T11:09:00.001-05:00

Got baskets for bike, should make grocery trips easy. Perhaps September will be no-car month? (Except trips to the 'burbs for dog kibble.)

2009-08-19T21:47:00.001-05:00

Some days I forget about the White Stripes. Somedays I am extremely stupid.

2009-08-15T15:27:00.001-05:00

WI State fair is pretty awesome as is choc.covered bacon

2009-08-12T21:39:00.001-05:00

ping.fs test 2

Circus, Parade, Woot

2009-07-12T21:22:00.003-05:00

Circus Day Parade 2009

Spring is Awesome

2009-05-03T20:38:00.002-05:00

Long time, no post. That's mainly because winter in Wisconsin absolutely completely fucking sucks. Seriously.

But now it's spring, and all is much better. I've been giving the grill a good workout this weekend and I bought a bike from a local bike shop to better enjoy the town. It's been 15ish years since I had a bike and I forgot how damn much fun it is to ride around. It's also been a longer time since I road in an urban setting, so some re-learning of how to deal with traffic and streets has been interesting.

Among other recent springtime revelations: I think I'm starting to like perl more than php. We do lots of perl at work and afer doing perl and then hitting php again, it seemed really restrictive. I'm planning a personal php project to see if that's really true, or because my php skills are just really rusty.

Go Spring.

The Obligatory RAID and Backup Post

2009-02-22T12:03:00.004-06:00

This weekend I upgraded my back up server at home from mirrored 160GB disks to mirrored 1TB disks, so here's my obligatory "Linux RAID is insanely great" post:

Linux RAID is about as great as all other high quality RAID: It just plain works. It's not sexy, it's not going to get you borged by Google, but it will get the job done reliably with a minimum of fuss. Which is exactly what you want in your storage solution.

There are a lot of writeups about moving arrays around, so I'll skip the commentary and get to the "Mirrored disk migration HOWTO". This assumes you have two disks, sda and sdb being mirrored, and that your /boot is a separate ext3 filesystem that's being mirrored (eg: not in LVM)

grub-install /dev/sda
grub-install /dev/sdb
sfdisk -d /dev/sda > sda.partmap
sfdisk -d /dev/sdb > sdb.partmap
tar -cpvf boot-backup.tgz /boot
mdadm /dev/md0 --fail /dev/sda1 # wash rinse repeat for each md you have
halt
swap disk with nice shiny new disk
boot, if you get grub issues you probably need to do something like this at the grub prompt to get your menu back:
# root (hd1,0)
# configfile /grub/grub.conf
then edit your boot line in the menu to make sure you boot off the other disk for this boot
sfdisk /dev/sda <>
mdadm /dev/md0 --re-add /dev/sda1 #wash, rinse, repeat for remaining partitions, watch /proc/mdstat for completion times
grub-install /dev/sda
Wash, Rinse, Repeat the above for /dev/sdb
At this point you can extend the last partition by blowing it away and making a new partition of larger size to use the rest of the disk and then use mdadm's --grow flag to make the md device use the new space. Alternatively, you can make a new md device with a new partition. I chose the latter because I then LVM the md device. yes, I know, that's very belt-and-suspenders of me and I could use the built in RAID features of LVM now, but hey, dm-raid was new when I did the original build of this system.

The important part to note here is that you need to make sure that you grub-install each disk before, during, and after, the migration. Otherwise you'll find yourself lacking an MBR a bootlaoder and sitting at a "PLEASE INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ANY KEY TO CONTINUE" prompt. If you find yourself in that situation, just grab a LiveCD from your distro, boot it, and use grub-install from that like so (assuming your mirror of /boot is on sd{a,b}1):

mount -t ext2 /dev/sda1 /mnt
grub-install --root-dir=/mnt
umount /mnt
reboot

After that, it's a short hop, skip and a jump to use Time Machine to backup your Mac or something like rsnapshot, duplicity, Unison, BackupPC, or Bacula

Dinner is HARD! But I love it so....

2009-01-25T19:38:00.006-06:00

One of our resolutions last year was to eat better so we decided to cook more and rely less on eating out and "instant meal" solutions like frozen dinners, etc... As a result of that decision and Jess' dairy allergy that's also meant some extra time spent planning ahead by making a menu for the week and doing a large grocery trip for ingredients. If we don't plan and stage ahead of time we end up in the nightly cycle of trying to decide on dinner and shop while hungry. That's never a good place to be:

"What do you want for dinner?"
"I dunno. Food."
"What kind of food?"
"Food type food...."
"Umm..."
"Food type food flavored food?"
"For the love of God and all that is holy: Please use a damn noun?"
"Healthy, delicious, wholesome and nutritious food-type food flavored food!"
"Jerk."

Things don't get better from there.

Planning a week's worth of food and then shopping for it takes a lot of time and energy on a Sunday (about half a day all told) but I think it's very much worth it. We get to eat some wonderful tasty food that's not horrible for us and we've been trying to add at least one new thing each week so there's a tad of excitement too. We also get to talk about our weekly schedules as part of figuring out how much cooking time we'll have in the week and setup a general plan for (both food and non-food related). Good food and togetherness it's pretty darn good to me.

The weeks that we do this we generally are also more prepared and can help each other out with life stuff in addition to having some time to cook in the evening. It also means that the majority of the things I buy at the store tend to be fresh ingredients: veggies, fruits, meat, etc.. which always makes me happy. This also has the side benefit of freaking people at at the store; a few times I've had people comment on my fresh/pre-prep ratio. Counterculture though nutrition? Sure, I'll take it!

I know it seems hard sometimes to make the time to plan a menu, do the shopping, and then cook but I highly recommend it. It's rewarding on a number of levels and a time saver too. Maybe lots of people do this and I'm just crazy? Judging by the other people at the store, possibly. Then again, At the Kinko's today there was a man trying to buy some boxes and was really kind of angry that there wasn't someone there to help him the moment he walked in the door so perhaps I'm not the best judge.

This weeks' menu:

Sunday: Stuffed Peppers (modified Joy of Cooking recipe -- more tomato and lemon)
Monday: Leftover Stuffed Peppers (tight schedule for Monday, so leftovers rock)
Tuesday: Mushroom Barley Soup (How to Cook Everything -- prep time is a tad long, but doable and hearty enough to make it worthwhile)
Wednesday: Catfish Poached in Ginger Sauce (How to Cook Everything -- new for us, but is super easy and sounds tasy.. serving with udon noodles and fresh scallions)
Thursday: Roman Chicken (we made this once before, flavor was good but we kind of screwed up the execution, redemption time for this one)
Friday: Unknown... We may go out, or we may have a craving for something, we generally leave one day a week as undecided in case we need to punt for a pizza.

If you haven't noticed, I recently picked up an older copy of How to Cook Everything by Mark Bittman which is a wonderful fabulous terrific awesome book that's full of win. Get it. Read it. Cook it. I love Joy of Cooking because it really is the de-facto reference for the home cook and when I have a oddball question like "How do you field dress a rabbit?" it's the thing I turn to first. But How to Cook Everything really edits cooking from something that seems daunting to something that seems natural. It's the mid-70's S0Ho to Joy's Upper West Side on The Park.

Also, I seem to be missing New York tonight. Not sure what that's about. Probably Luis Villa's dent about lunching at Union Square Cafe a while back. Rat bastid.

Lastly: WTF does Corn Syrup now have a lobbyist group and friggin' commercials on TV now?

Long time, No Post

2009-01-25T12:06:00.006-06:00

Random Braindump because I haven't posted in a while.

Work:
The new job is doing well so far but still learning workflow and systems. I'm the on-call at the moment which has proved highly interesting. I am enjoying things so far and as an added bonus it's raised my interest level in actually participating in FOSS again.

Food:
Made baked eggs to go with corned beef hash last weekend. I overcooked the eggs a tad but they were still tasty as well as easy. I have no idea why I haven't done this before. I'm going to try to work that into menu again this week, or possibly upgrade to huevos rancheros.

Made Chile Verde again on Friday too. Still damn tasty.

Linux:
Work has given me a Dell Dimension E6400c. It's very nice looking. Linux doesn't work on it well due to hardware newness. I'm running F10 on it now and the i915 and ALPS drivers cause major pain (OOPSes, video IRQ gets disabled, random noise in the input stream for the trackpad generates clicks and repositions the pointer). I'm hoping to punt back to CentOS 5.3 when it comes out which should work but have less "features" -- 5.2 didn't have any knowledge about the ICH8 chipset in this thing so no wired or wireless networking.

I also got roped into giving a presentation on SELinux at the Milwaukee LUG meeting in February. If you're in the neighborhood, drop by!

TeeVee:
I've been using First Gen Intel Core Duo 20" iMac with Elgato EyeTV as the primary TV lately so I can watch a few channels in HD. It's been a 50/50 experience so far. I like having HD, I like some of the timeshifting features, and I like the program guide. It's a much more pleasant experience than Time Warner's Mystro cable box which has a painfully slow program guide, takes 5 minutes to boot, and crashes weekly. How they can make something without a hard drive take 5 minutes to boot is truly beyond me.

On the downside, the Elgato doesn't have twin tuners, so you can only watch/record one thing at a time and there's a enough of a delay that it makes using the Wii very hard. Also, the provided remote sucks and on-screen controls when using the Apple Remote (which Jess has dubbed "The Tic-Tac") are a tad clunky.

All in all it's made me just hate television providers even more. All I want is about 30-odd ClearQAM channels in unencrypted form and I'm willing to pay for the service, why is that so hard for cable companies to provide?

I'm still waiting for the HD TV market to settle down a bit. There's a glut of cheapo 720p displays out there but 1080p displays are starting to become more prevalent and similar at the feature base. My back-of-the-envelope trending makes me think sometime this summer will be the time to buy. Then I can re-evaluate the media situation again.

Loving 24 so far, waiting for Heroes to return. Somehow I missed out on BSG, which makes me think I need to Netflix the whole thing.

Random:

TabKit is a wonderful, wonderful thing. If you use a lot of tabs in Firefox: get this now.
identi.ca upgraded to Laconia 0.7 this week. It's got some bugs but overall is very nice (groups, Twitter OMB integration, and a new look).
Super happy to have a smart president again.
Craving Nutty Bars, can't have them thanks to the poison peanut pandemic.
I derive an unhealthy amount of pleasure from Passive Aggressive Notes
Milwaukee is cold in the winter. I knew it would be, but damn, I can't wait for spring.

Chile Verde FTW!

2009-01-04T19:54:00.003-06:00

Of late I have been craving Chile Verde. It's one of the few things I really was missing about living in Oklahoma. I've never made it before, but today I decided to bite the bullet and make some. Pork, Tomatillo, Peppers, Yum.

I suspect there's a few places in Milwaukee to get good Chile Verde, but hey, I was in a mood. Also, Jess generally doesn't like Mexican food. Probably because she falls in the intersection of "dairy allergic" and "thinks cilantro tastes like soap" which makes most stops at Mexican restaurants a less than pleasant experience. Since I can swap out the cilantro for Flat Leaf Parsley when I make it I figured this might be a way to have my cake, eat it too, and learn something new.

Mmmmmmm...... Cake. But I digress.

The recipe I followed was from Hot Sauce Blog and it was really good. I found a few others but almost all of them involved a pork shoulder and took a few hours which I didn't have -- this one took about an hour and a half or so including prep. In retrospect using a pork shoulder probably would have been better in terms of the texture of the meat, so maybe next time I'll find a slow cooker method. Regardless it was really good.

I did make some variations to the recipe to note:

Dialed down the Jalapeño from 4 to two. Next time, two Jalapeño and two Serrano peppers.
As mentioned, swapped the cilantro for flat leaf parsley.
Served with rice and tortillas. The rice helped thicken the sauce a bit without needing to pick up a big thing of Masa flour.
Added some oil when browning the meat.
Added salt and pepper at various steps of cooking (meat, onions, at simmer)
The pork tenderloin I got was nearly free of fat, so instead of draining the juices from the resting pork I added it back to the pot. All flavor, all good.
Since the meat was both lean and the sauce was thin, maybe next time I'll quickly dredge the meat though some flower before browning so it'll thicken during cooking and have a better chance of browning without overcooking the meat.
When the onions were done and it was time to add everything together, I added half a cup of the chicken broth to the onions first to deglaze the pot. Since I don't have a food processor and was using a blender, I used a cup of the broth to rinse out the blender to get all the peppery goodness poured into the pot.
Omitted the Jalapeño powder because I'm trying to save a buck and didn't want to spend money on it. Also, I'm a tad chicken when it comes to super spicy food.
Served with a squeeze of lime juice.

The result was fantastic. We were were planning on having the leftovers for dinner tomorrow but Jess is now thinking lunch instead because she "doesn't want to wait a whole 24 hours for more."

Cake, Ice Cream, and a Pony.

National "Clean Up Your Computer" Month!

2009-01-01T15:23:00.002-06:00

Random Linkdump: The League of Professional System Administrators has fine idea: make January National Clean Up Your Computer Month.

I'm a big fan, if only because for me I tend to stash data in random places throughout the year. Making January the time to catalog, clean, purge and back up everything seems like a smart thing to do, along with changing the batteries in the smoke detectors, seasoning the cast iron skillet and ~~making lists of things you'll never do but will depress you anyway~~ new year resolutions.

Yet another list-of-predictions for 2009

2008-12-29T12:10:00.003-06:00

Everyone likes to make predictions for the coming year. Here's my baker's dozen of 2009 predictions for system administration and technology in general.

Cloud computing will experience a major fail. As a result smaller clouds ("Mom and Pop Cloud computing" ?) will appear, powered by ASP/ISP/Enterprise "cloudlike" computing offerings from large vendors.
Further balkanization of the field of system administration. More divergence into "operator" and "analyst" type roles. MIS graduates rejoice.
Little progress will be made by ISP's for solving the last mile problem, U.S. will remain in the boradband backwater. Things might look more promising after the Obama administration kicks in with their broadband initiatives but it'll take more than a year. 3G cell service and 4G tech like WiMax and LTE really won't make a major impact unless you live in a test market and even then, you're paying to beta test stuff that will probably go away shortly after the kinks are worked out.
Video, facbook/myspace, twitter, blogging, RSS will start to surpass email. David Allen already prepping an updated revision of GTD with sections on coping with tweets and FriendFeed.
One major tech company will fail. IBM? AT&T? Sun? Vonage? Someone is going down. What happens in the aftermath will be interesting in terms of Free Software (will a failure result in a large drop of code from the cathedral?) and in terms of what everyone else does (I expect most companies will pull in risky ventures and focus on "core competencies" ... the funny thing will be that those who don't do that will probably be the most successful ones).
Configuration management will continue to see increased adoption rates; someone might actually figure out how to do something for unix and windows in one system. Regardless, expect management to start to want systems and networks to be more autonomic and less hand mangled^Wmanaged.
Linux won't happen on the desktop, but SugarOS will make play for the netbook market as a way to keep the OLPC project running.
More hardware will have iPhone-like touch input methods. For example: your fridge.
Digital Rights Management will see a major downturn in adoption. Consumers hate it, vendors find it challenging to have to support something forever, etc.... My supposition is either more trust with unencumbered formats, with more targeted RIAA/MPAA suits or larger adoption of "leased media" models where you can have all you can eat for a regular fee.
Computer security won't get much better, despite some very high profile breeches. Seriously, we're still trying to get patch management and virus mitigation under control. Managing a wider body of threat vectors is nearly impossible right now. See also: prediction #6.
Corollary to 5: the failure will cause some ramifications in terms of the internet continuing to function. Eg: If Sun poops, that's a lot of unsupported servers in critical roles that will need migrating to something and sitting unpatched and vulnerable. The loss of a major player in the tech sector will cause "availability ripple" as people react.
Someone will figure out how to do backups and restores right for mere mortals. Apple's Time Machine is pretty good, but it's ecosystem specific and has the usual list of Appleisms. Someone will figure out to take the elegance of Apple's interface, make it work on Linux/OSX/Windows and back up your cloud data too (Gmail, google docs, flickr, facebook, etc..) too. See also: prediction #1.
Corollary to 6: Configuration management and autonomic computing will spur better monitoring and log analysis. The lack of instrumentation in a lot of technology will finally start to be understood.

Making apline see a default CAFile on OSX

2008-12-13T11:57:00.005-06:00

One of the problems with doing Linux almost exclusively is that I get real lazy when it comes to small things. Most Linux distros sand the rough edges well enough that there's stuff I just don't remember how to do anymore because "they just work" now, when previously they didn't. Dealing with OpenSSL's default CAFile is one of those things.

Luckily, OSX to the rescue. I've started using OS X as my primary desktop platform for 100% of my duties. This includes email so I need my mail client of preference: pine. For the last bunch of years I've just been using Fedora which has had alpine (and Dag had pine for RHEL in the pre-alpine days.. thanks Dag!). Even when I was using a Mac in the past, I'd ssh over to the Linux box to use pine because it was easier. Now, I'm not ditching Linux, but I am trying some different workflows and working methods out as part of my new job.

So I installed pine with MacPorts, which also installed a MacPorts version of OpenSSL, which also does not come with a default ca-bundle.crt. This causes alpine (and/or most SSL apps in MacPorts) to complain LOUDLY about not being able to validate the cert as trusted. Worse, is that after poking at pine with dtrace it was using what I think is a very linuxy version of the ca-bundle.crt (eg: /opt/local/etc/openssl/cert.pem instead.. ha!).

So to fix (after a few hours of poking around... this stuff is not well documented) do something akin to the following:

Grab the mk-ca-bundle.pl script from the fine folks at cURL.
This script is perl, and needs LWP. I'm assuming you're using MacPorts, so
sudo port install p5-libwww-perl
Run mk-ca-bundle.pl
sudo -s
cd /opt/local/etc/openssl
mkdir certs
cp /path/to/generated/ca-bundle.crt certs/ca-bundle.pem
ln -s certs/ca-bundle.pem cert.pem
cd certs
c_rehash .
ln -s ca-bundle.pem ca-bundle.crt

After which MacPorts bianries (including alpine) should have a nice large CAFile by default and much of your "O. M. G. YOUR SSL IZ BUSTED" errors should go away.

You'll also note that I rename the bundle with a .pem extension and then may a symlink for the .crt pointing at them .pem. I do this mainly because I'm kind of anal.. the ca-bundle.crt that is generated by mk-ca-bundle.pl is full of PEM formatted CA certs, as openssl expects. So I like to be extra descriptive about what exactly the file is, but lots of stuff seems to maybe expect a ca-bundle.crt as well.

Sigh. Security needs be easier than this.

Here we go!

2008-11-03T20:09:00.001-06:00

So Long Archway

2008-10-31T16:51:00.003-05:00

Damn.

I knew Mother's was going out of business, but I didn't know that Archway was the same company and that there would be no more Archway cookies either. I loved Archway cookies when I was kid, I thought they were so special because there were less in a pack than Chips Ahoy. Or something. Still, I'm sad to not have them anymore.

Damnit people, think of the cookies! Fix the economy, vote for Obama.

Vote.

2008-10-29T20:18:00.003-05:00

I ALREADY DID.

http://www.designforobama.org/index.php?p=102&page=2&sort=tv

Fall!

2008-10-26T12:47:00.004-05:00

Wheeee!

It's fall in Milwaukee and the colors are great. I took some pictures last week, and they're linked below. After being in the south for 10ish years, it's nice to see trees turn a color other than a bland murky brownish-grey.

We've also gotten the chance to do some other great fall things like: roast a turkey breast, have apple cider, light a fire in the fireplace, and go get a pumpkin from a local church that was selling them on their front lawn. We're going to try to carve the pumpkin today before the trick-or-treaters show up. It's supposed to be cold (windy, with a possibility of flurries) tonight so we'll probably do another fire too. This place is pretty freakin' awesome. Winter, I fear, will suck but so far the rest of the seasons seem to make it worthwhile.

Another fall tradition is voting, which we did early here in Milwaukee. If you can, go do it now.

Fall in the neighborhood

Constraints are good

2008-10-25T12:15:00.005-05:00

I may have written about this in the past.. I dunno. Also, someone seems to have put extra zen in my coffee this morning, so consider this a pontification warning.

If you check out this blog posting by Jamis Buck at 37Signals about embracing constraints, Jamis talks about self-immolation due to neato-creep and how important it is to realize the real world issues and separate them from the coolness factor issues you may have in your head. Part of me agrees with this -- part of me also thinks that sometimes we need to make the kinds of mistakes Jamis talks about in order to learn. If "less is more" then you need to understand more before you can understand less. That journey is incredibly valuable and I think Jamis' post is mildly dismissive of that. I don't think it was his intention to do so, but I think it bears pointing out the value of experience.

I think more importantly, his posting made me remember why I think the "embrace your constraints" is a valuable idiom. To me, it's because your constraints create the context in which you make decisions and by embracing your constraints you're lead to a better understanding of Why you're doing what you're doing. It means you can look at the environment, not just the moss on the side of the tree.

Why is this important for System Administration? I've too often seen admins get upset because the situation wasn't optimum for the conception of a system they had in their head. Instead of stepping back, embracing the constraints, and progressing toward their goal with a new understanding of the context, they'll shut down and not do anything, or rant-and-rave and make others fall into their line, or just do what they wanted in the first place and say "damn the torpedoes!" ignoring the constraints and end up with more enterprise cruft. That never works well for anyone and I think is a major reason why smart people hate enterprises.

Embracing constraints requires thoughtful reflection of the situation. Not doing so creates a toxic environment of anti-intellectualism [1].

Look at any ERP or Business Intelligence implementation and then look at what it replaced, and you'll see that the names are different but the larger issues are probably the same. It's because those systems, in a very real-world way, interface not just at data levels, but at context levels. They push and pull data that has a meta-value in the context of that data. Most people don't look at those contexts, or the corollary constraints those contexts give. So you end up with large brittle systems that mingle meaning and action and break when either change.

So, I guess, I don't think "embracing your constraints" as something of a trendy productivity enhancement catchphrase. Instead, I think it's a mantra for doing.

1 - Why is it toxic? Programming, System Administration, and computing in general all deal with virtual, logical, ephemeral things. They can and do change rapidly. Taking an anti-intellectual stance towards your environment means you'll never grow or learn with those things and always be in a reactionary, fire-fighting mode of operation. And you won't even know it. If you read The Daily WTF? you'll see examples of this every day. It's sad, really.

Livna -> RPMFusion migration

2008-10-25T11:47:00.004-05:00

Thorsten Leemhuis writes to remind us about the loss of the Livna mailing lists and the continuing migration of the Livna repos for Fedora to the RPMFusion repos announces a few months ago.

If you're a Livna, FreshRPMS, or Dribble user (and if you have an nvida card, ati card, mp3, or dvd around, you most probably are) you should probably start taking heed of the changes.

live blogging and iphone

2008-10-07T21:57:00.002-05:00

I live blogged a bunch of reactions to the debate tonight. Sadly, I did so on my iPhone whihc really isn't the greatest tool for that, so the spelling and posting is funkified.

I don't hate people

2008-09-07T10:43:00.005-05:00

For anyone who might possibly be reading the notes on my Shared Items Google reader page you might think that I hate people. That's not true. Part of it is that I've been in a less than great mood this week for various personal reasons. Chief among them is that I seem to have caught a cold.

Another big part though is that I am continually annoyed at how technology is marketed. We continue to push forward the myth that "computers make things easier" and continue to foist metaphors of technology with meatspace equivalents. The thing is computers don't make things easier, they make things faster and more widely available. Where things start to break down is when the metaphors we use fail to address the issues of speed and availability. I think when that happens for non-techy people they just give up and figure out a way to muddle though. I think that's where we're at now: the majority of people muddling though a day full of computing by blasting email out on a near continual basis because they know it sorta works for everything they need. That frustrates me because I can see their frustration.

IMHO, the fix is not to simply show a person how to use Word. Instead we need to educate with information and time management skills and work harder to make the tools they use simpler. People shouldn't need training on how to use a pile of software, but people do need training on how to deal with the junk that software creates.

Carpet Fresh and Assumptions

2008-09-06T14:53:00.004-05:00

Martha Stewart believes you should clean your dishwasher. If you have dogs, you also know that even that spendy Dyson Animal needs a good cleaning once in a while because, frankly, dogs are damn gross. This is mainly because even though we assume our cleaning tools are by nature clean, it's a wrong assumption.

We recently moved into a new apartment which has wall-to-wall carpeting. The previous residents used Carpet Fresh. How do I know? Because today I went to empty the bin on our new vacuum cleaner it was full of carpet fresh like stuff. But we've been sucking it up since we moved in, it hangs around in your carpet forever and starts to stink after a while. That there was funk in the bin didn't surprise me. I also noticed that there was some dog fuzz in the part of the bin that caused the dirt to spin around. I popped it out to unwrap the hair and *plonk* out came a giant mess of dog fuzz bound with a huge amount of Carpet Fresh. Dust flew everywhere causing me to get insanely pissed. It also made me think "Huh, that's why every time we vacuum it smells worse.. I just assumed we were kicking up leftover Carpet Fresh from the carpet." I took everything apart, cleaned it, and put it back together. Now things work better. I knew that this was something I really should do once a week, but I got lazy and assumed that my shiny new cleaning tool was by nature, clean.

So how does this relate to system administration? We assume a lot in our line of work. We assume (or perhaps "believe") that things break in the same way, that data formats are correct, that things that do have inter-relations don't, that someone else hasn't changed that script in the past year. That cleaning tools don't also need a good cleaning once in a while. When we don't check what we definitively don't know about a system or process before we build upon those assumptions, we'll get bitten at some point.

identi.ca

2008-08-31T12:21:00.001-05:00

So, I figured since keeping up with being articulate here is only working so well, I'd also try easing into it with some microblogging at identi.ca also.

Install Fest at Milwaukee LUG!

2008-08-17T15:03:00.001-05:00

Advance warning that the Milwaukee Area LUG is having an Install Fest on Sept. 13th. More info can be found in the wiki. I'm going to try to be there with my laptop and a copy of liveusb-creator to make some USB Fedora keys for folks who want them as well as lend a hand.

If I have extra time, I'll try to setup DHCP on my laptop to run as an option server to present PXE'able images for various installers. This will require a bunch of downloading across my poor little cable-modem to get said images, so that might not happen, unless of course I travel to $hq and can co-opt their link.

If you're in Milwaukee, drop by and say "Hi" or bring a machine to install Linux on!

I hate interviews, interviewing, resumes and cover letters

2008-08-17T14:31:00.002-05:00

Ahem. yep. That's it. The job search and interview process scares the crap out of me and I hate it.

I shake when writing cover letters. I've lost jobs because I got nervous during on-site interviews and babbled the first thing that sprang into my head. So much so that one recruiter even asked me flat out "What the hell happened in there?" It's worse now that I've learned how to keep calm during phone interviews, because my inability to sound intelligent during an on-site generally rings bullshit alarms even louder now.

So to all of you who will have to interview me, read my resume or cover letter, or generally deal with me on the applicant end of a hiring process: I apologize. I'm smart, I can do the job, I just evidently have some sort of emotional interview baggage I haven't fully realized yet.

Or something. Maybe airing my issues publicly is the first step to fixing them, I dunno.

CAR-MAX Sucks

2008-07-12T17:25:00.000-05:00

So we're moving and the place we're moving to only has a 1 car garage. Since I'll be telecommuting for the near future, we figured we'd ditch one of the cars because we wouldn't need it. To do so we sold the car to Car-Max on Tuesday.

It's now Saturday and they have not paid off the loan I had on the car as they said they would. After several phones calls trying to talk to their business office (several times I was sent to voice-mail for some other random department and had to call back) I finally got someone. They claim their check-scanner was broken and so, everything needed to be hand-entered. That wasn't the case on Tuesday and I know it doesn't take the better part of a week to get a scanner fixed or do hand entry.

Their suggestion? "Call back on Tuesday if it doesn't post on your account, kthxbai!"

Bimbos.

If it doesn't post by Tuesday I'm reporting the vehicle stolen.

UPDATE: Aug 17, 2008: Car-Max figured their stuff out by Wednesday, but still, please.

Please leave a message at the sound of the tone....

2008-07-08T22:02:00.000-05:00

I'm quiet not because I'm lazy but because I'm moving. More on the move, and the destination at some point.

Things that are interesting to me, that I'd like to write about in the near future:
- http://lopsa.org/pipermail/discuss/2008-July/003730.html
- http://times.usefulinc.com/2008/06/16-ops-now
- http://nasrat.livejournal.com/52943.html

Enjoy!

Red Hat Frees RHN Satellite product

2008-06-19T12:36:00.001-05:00

Wootness!

Red Hat has finally opened up their RHN product. I guess they're finally taking that "we're a solutions company, not a software company" thing to heart. Good for them. I know this has been a large part of their revenue model since they started it, so releasing the code must not have been easy for them. I don't think it will hurt them in the long run and hopefully will help because now it would/could/should be possible to integrate stuff like puppet, cfengine, func, cobbler/koan and all sorts of other fun stuff.

Fun times ahead.

obligatory iPhone post

2008-06-17T22:56:00.000-05:00

Please excuse this mindless post while I futz around.

Also: packetshaper + steelhead = funky traffic data

one step forward...

2008-06-16T18:37:00.001-05:00

Things that rock: Documentation

Things that suck: Documentation in a Word .doc file that's 95% composed of mostly illegible screenshots.

USENIX, LOPSA continue fight; Community looses

2008-06-14T07:13:00.000-05:00

First, the various announcements about the lawsuit:

So, at this point you might be thinking "Huh?" so here's my attempt at providing some small bit of context to these current events:

Several years ago the small group within USENIX called SAGE (a system administration focused community) tried to break off from USENIX, ostensibly with the support of USENIX, to further its' own goals. Somehow, something went very wrong with the process. The break never happened and many people were left angry and hurt. From that aborted process LOPSA was born as a separate entity to replace what would have been the spun-off SAGE group while SAGE continued to exsist within USENIX as a special intrest group.

I'll not link to the documents and email threads of the past that describe the details, because I think there's no clear series of well-documented events that chronicle everything. If you need to know Google is your buddy, as is the sage-members list archive, if it's still available publicly.

This suit is one of the closing matters of that aborted process, namely, who should be paying the bill to Association Headquarters (aka: "AH" -- the management company that provides the business infrastructure for the organizations) for the time they spent with the pre-LOPSA organization during the failed separation process. AH started this suit in order to get payment on an outstanding account, AH looked at USENIX who's now pointing the finger at LOPSA. Who really is responsible for that payment can only truthfully be determined by looking at the aborted process and picking it apart. In court. With expensive lawyers. I also doubt that the legal proceedings would identify one specific organization as fully responsible either.

I can't imagine that the outstanding bill AH is holding is a substantial amount or that it is more than what the combined legal fees that AH, USENIX and LOPSA will have to incur just to deal with the legal proceedings of this suit. Why not just split the AH bill between USENIX and LOPSA and everyone pays their own legal fees? I suspect the out-of-pocket expense would still be less than the several years of litigation for this matter to be settled.

I beg all parties to not bring this issue further into the community, to sit down with cool heads and find a solution to this issue quickly.

This suit, its' exposure in the public, and the dialogue it has created does not help the members of the organizations, does not help the community at large, and does not help the practice, art, or science of System Administration. If anything, it paints us all as petulant children who can do nothing more constructive with their time then squabble and taunt each other. I've said before that the biggest hindrance to getting System Administration recognized and respected as a real honest-to-god profession is ourselves. The entire USENIX/SAGE/LOPSA drama, and this suit in particular, again underscores that sentiment. We're sabotaging ourselves. We need to get over it. We need to move forward.

And we need to do it now before the world writes us and our profession off as nothing more than a real life version of a Saturday Night Live sketch.

zombie meme

2008-06-07T10:55:00.000-05:00

mindlessly following the meme:

> You are in a mall when zombies attack. You have:
> 1. One weapon
Flamethrower (I figure the fry-o-lators in the food court should provide plenty of ammo)

> 2. One song blasting on the speakers
It's a Small World (After All)

> 3. One famous person to fight along side you.
Jack Bauer (or if it has to be a *real* person, Keith Olberman)