Y26.org
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Archive of "Geek Stuff" Category
Happy SysAdmin Day!!
Find your SysAdmin and give him/her a hug…They deserve it!!
Posted in Geek Stuff |
2 Comments »Local Backups vs Online Backups
I’m very paranoid about backing up my important data. I know that hard drives fail, computers die at the most inopportune times. That being said I am very nervous about all the online backup companies that are popping up. You know the one’s “give us $4.95 a month and we’ll give you 10G of storage space.” I could never, ever be comfortable with that for a several reasons:
- How good is the security on the servers/arrays my data is being stored on?
- Who has access to these servers?
- What kind of redundancy does the company have in place? (I don’t want to be told “Redundant routers, switches, hardware, and backup systems are employed to ensure high availability of the service”) I want tech specs.
Even after finding all of this out I don’t think I could put my least sensitive data up on a machine that I don’t have control over. Now this is not to say that I don’t favor, or encourge multiple backups. My backup scheme is pretty paranoid. I have this website along with a few others running on a shared server at Site5. I have a script setup on my work machine that does a daily rsync and pulls all new files added to an external 160G hard drive. I also have a dedicated machine at home that has the same script and pulls another backup daily to a 750G Raid 5 array. I have yet another script on my home machine that moves a copy to another external 250G hard drive attached to it. And that’s just all my websites. I also keep them in a SubVersion repository just in case I need to do a fast restore to test something. My really important files live on another encrypted hard drive. So..yea..I’m a bit paranoid about backups
But what does “Joe User” know about it. They see this great offer and are pulled in by the attraction of access their data from anywhere. I can certainly believe that someone will upload credit card info, old receipts or some other very sensitive papers. And in this day and age of identity thieves one can’t be too careful with sensitive information.
I’d be very interested to hear if anyone is making use of these “Internet Storage Solutions”. Also what do you do to ensure that you have working backups? I’ve seen many a SysAdmin not test their backups and when the time comes to restore for real the backup hasn’t successfully run in several months. On each of my backups the script will email me if something fails. I also get a weekly email of the last 7 lines of the log file that the script generates just as a precaution.
Posted in Geek Stuff |
1 Comment ».htaccess Redirect
For the longest time I had a problem getting my site to re-direct correctly. I wanted http://www.year26.org but for the longest time had http://year26.org. At one point it really didn’t matter to me but then when I started checking traffic stats it was difficult since I had to check both. Over the weekend I finally found the right mojo to do that via my .htaccess file.
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{http_host} ^year26.org
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.year26.org/$1 [R=301,L]
And now, of course, when looking at it it’s bloody obvious but this has been tripping me up for the longest time. So..Onward to find something else to trip me up
Posted in Geek Stuff, Website related |
1 Comment »CMS Recommendations
I’m looking to setup a new site with a blog(possibly) and a forum. I’m looking for recommendations for Content Management Systems like Joomla, etc..All suggestions welcome..
Posted in Geek Stuff |
No Comments »Standards
I have been dealing with an issue at work regarding a large vendor that handles our pay roll. We have a site setup to view and download pay stubs and W-2’s. This site was rolled out in August of 2006 and everything has been fine and dandy until this past weekend. Something happened/changed that now causes a simple javascript redirect to not function in Firefox anymore. If you manually change the URL to the link given in the redirect it works perfectly.
Now you maybe asking why this is such a big deal. Well, I’ll tell you. I work at an Open Source Company where it’s just not a couple of words but a way of life. I have seen the power of Open Source Software and if you are reading this blog you see it in the blog software and the server my blog is hosted on. I can, at any time, take the code for WordPress and change it to my heart’s content. There is a lot of power in that ability. I don’t have to wait for the developers to implement a feature or enhancement. I can implement it myself and then pass the code back to the WordPress devs and if they so choose they can implement it in WordPress proper.
Posted in Geek Stuff, rant |
1 Comment »Synergy
I’ve been using a great little program for over a year now that allows you to share a keyboard and mouse between to separate machines. I use it to combine my desktop and laptop at work. Check out Synergy and then head over to my Wiki where I have documented how to set it up and also included an auto start script.
Posted in Computer stuff, Geek Stuff |
1 Comment »Easily Keep Wordpress Updated
Over at Lone SysAdmin Bob links to a great doc on the Wordpress Codex showing you how to update your blog using Subversion. I followed it and had my blog updated within 5 min to the newest version. Now all I have to do to update my blog is run:
$ svn co http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/tags/$NEW_VERSION .and then go to the admin page, let Wordpress upgrade my database and everything is up and running. Of course make sure you back everything up before trying this but it worked for me in less than 5 minutes my blog was running new code.Posted in Geek Stuff, Website related, Wordpress |
3 Comments »Merging PDF’s
I had a user ask me if it was possible to merge multiple pdf’s into a single pdf. Why of course it’s possible. Grab the following script and make it executable. It runs from the command line right now. I will probably get around to making a gui for it this weekend. Usage is as follows:
mergepdf 1.pdf 2.pdf 3.pdf 4.pdf etcYou will need to rename your pdf’s in the order you want them to appear in hte merged copy. A new page will be created for each number.
Posted in Computer stuff, Geek Stuff |
1 Comment »Randoms
Sorry for disappearing…I’ve got some pretty big stuff in the works that some of you know about but I’m not really ready to post anything about it on here just yet. I should know for sure tomorrow if it’s going to go through.. In the meantime here a quote from one of my users:
When the VPN provides me an ip address it works, when it drops the ip address it doesn’t work
Posted in Geek Stuff, User Quotes |
3 Comments »Request Tracker
I’ve been able to play around with the latest version of RT at work. Currently we are using a really old version in the early 3.x series. 3.0.6 to be exact. The upgrade will bring us up to 3.6.x. So far I am very impressed with the new features and the improved searching. But when you have a database that’s 8.5GB searching anything is a chore no matter what improvements have been made…
Testing starts Thursday and I think I’ve gotten a fairly good sampling of both technical and non-technical users. I only have about 25 users in the testing group and in a company of a little over 2100 people that’s not a lot. But my co-workers are part of the test group and since we are the largest group and probably the heaviest users of RT it should be a fairly good test. I have already told everyone to download the “Refresh Every” plugin for Firefox and set it to auto refresh every 20-30 seconds. Hopefully with 25 people banging on it we can find and fix any major issues before rollout.
It’s like 3am and I’m tired and have to be back at work at 7am so I’m going to try and sleep..
Posted in Geek Stuff, Work Stuff |
2 Comments »RHEL5 Is Out
As of 12pm EDT Red Hat Enterprise Linux has been unleased into the wild. Not only as someone who works at Red Hat but also someone who has been using RHEL5 since Beta 1 release I am truly impressed at the overall performance and feel of RHEL5. With full Xen VIrtualization support built in this can revolutionize the way servers are setup. I have been using VMWare , which is the proprietary virtual machine company, at home and I’m really looking forward to giving Xen my full support…
Here are some links:
Cnet story on RHEL5
Eweek.com coveragePosted in Awesome Stuff!, Geek Stuff, Work Stuff |
No Comments »Contest
I’ve never been one to enter online contests simply because I never win…ever. But this contest is different. Over at John Chow dot com aka “The Root Of All Evil” there is a contest in progress for A Nintendo Wii. The way this works is once this post is approved my email message will be printed dropped into a drawing for the almighty Wii.
The folks over at 1234pens.com were kind enough to provide the Wii for John to give away. He’s given away some pens from their site before but this is the first time I’ve actually looked at the 1234pens site. Instead of the King of Cars they are the King Of Pens. They should get in touch with the King of Cars and get a rap song spun up for them. So…Wish me luck in my quest to get a free Wii
Posted in Geek Stuff |
2 Comments »BattleStar Galactica
I honestly love BSG but this pattern they’ve fallen into of one action packed episode with all kinds of scenes involving Raptors, Cyclons and everything that else that makes for damn good TV to these “get in their head” episodes that just seem to drag on and on and on. Some of the characters are simply not stong enough to carry an episode by themselves in my opinion.
(more…)Posted in Geek Stuff |
2 Comments »New Project
My task is to find a load balancing method to relieve the load on an overworked server. So far i’m looking at Dynamic Load Balancing DNS. More links to follow. If anyone has any suggestions feel free to contact me or leave a comment…
Posted in Geek Stuff, Work Stuff |
No Comments »New Theme…and stuff
So I found this theme last night and it really caught my eye. I installed it and it really seems to suit my site. It’s very simple and clean looking which I like a lot. And aside from the CSS stylesheet being a jumbled mess it’s quite easy to work on and customize. I have been thinking about putting more into my site and possibly adding some Google AdSense ads to see if I can make a bit of money off this thing. I will need to be a lot more active in my posting and possibly find a topic to blog about regularly.
Posted in Geek Stuff, General, Website related |
2 Comments »
