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Archive of "Work Stuff" Category
Screen
As a sysadmin I have lots of terminal sessions open simply because it’s usually easier for me to type in few commands as opposed to clicking around the gui. To help with this I use GNU’s Screen command. It allows you to open up a terminal and then detach that window and do that as many times as you like.
It does get rather confusing sometimes trying to remember what screen session is for what. This is what you see with multiple sessions:
<code>
There are screens on:
15767.pts-0.voodoo (Detached)
15809.pts-0.voodoo (Detached)<code>
Now I have no idea what is in either of those with that name. And to reattach those screen would require me typing ’screen -r 15767.pts-0.voodoo’. That’s too many keystrokes for my liking ;-). Luckly screen has some options that can help you identify what is on each screen. Using the command ’screen -S server1′. So instead of the output above you’d see:
<code>
There are screens on:
15922.server1 (Detached)
15964.server2 (Detached)
</code>Now all I have to type to reattach is ’screen -r server1′. Now that’s still a bit too much so I’m going to add an alias to my .bashrc file to make it a bit shorter..
<code>
alias jscreen=’screen -S $1′
</code>After I run ’source ~/.bashrc’ and then jscreen will be available. All I have to is type ‘jscreen server3′ and my server3 session is created.
Posted in Geek Stuff, Work Stuff |
No Comments »Problem with rm command
So in trying to clear out a *large* number of emails (>200k) from one our shared folders here at work I ran into the following issue:
[jwalters@helmsdeep]~/ rm -f 9*
-bash: /bin/rm: Argument list too long
To get around the buffer limitation I ran the following:
find . -name '9*' | xargs rm -f
Since raw emails are just a string of numbers I had to run that on all the strings replacing 9 with other numbers. Here is a better explanation of the limitation. Not really related to rm but to the kernel itself. Fairly technical read so beware ;-).
Posted in Geek Stuff, Work Stuff |
No Comments »Free and Open Java
Even though I’m not a fan of Jave, this makes me proud to work at Red Hat. Congrats to all involved in making this happen!
Rich Sharples’ Blog » Blog Archive » Java is finally Free and Open
As of writing, Fedora 9 is the only operating system to include a free and open Java SE 6 implementation that has passed the Java TCK. All of the code that makes this possible has been made available to the IcedTea project so everyone can benefit from the work.
Posted in Awesome Stuff!, Geek Stuff, Work Stuff |
No Comments »Setup Your Own Damn Mail Filters
Managment:We want all new users to have two default filters setup when they start..This seems to be a pain point for new hires.
Me:Really..There is a document that the Help Desk wrote on how to setup those filters..They even go over in the new hire orientation.
Managment:That’s all well and good but we don’t think that users should be burdened with having to create that.
Me:…
Me:But they are going to have to create more than two filters when they start..Shouldn’t they just learn the process and then create their own?
Management: No..They can just the others once they’re settled.
Me:*bangs head on desk*Posted in Work Stuff |
2 Comments »PITA POS Dell Server
So I’ve been dealing with one of our ancient Dell 4300 servers. This thing is a beast, weighs in ~70lbs and it only has two 400Mhz Pentium3 processors in it. So it’s been hanging on boot up complaining about firmware being out of date. I was unable to get into the bios, or the utility module since it would just hang there.
The solution: unplug the mouse…:sigh:
Unplugging the mouse eliminated the firmware error messages and the damn thing booted right up…Really…The mouse…:shakes head and goes back to work:
Posted in Computer stuff, Work Stuff |
2 Comments »Punctuation in email???????
I wonder why people feel the need to put an inordinate amount of punctuation in emails?????????? In my job people send in request for help………I guess they think that putting more than one question mark or exclamation mark will get their point across more clearly………Personally I hate seeing tons of punctuation in an email……It really gets under my skin!!!!!!!!!!!!! Anyway…….Glad to get that off my chest!!!!!!!!!!!!! Anyone else feel the same way?????????????
Posted in Things that suck!, Work Stuff |
5 Comments »Teaser Posts…Sorry
I thought I would be able to drop a bit more news about what’s going with the “big news”. But it looks like I’m going to have to wait until this week sometime..Hopefully. I promise I won’t talk about it again until I have some *real* news to share.
Work has been insane lately. We are currently in the middle of the internal roll out of RHEL5 and we’ve been seeing a few issues that didn’t come up with out testing. One of those is an annoying OpenOffice printing problem that causes OO to hang when trying to scan the printers on our local CUPS server. One of my co-workers found a fix for that seems to resolve the issue for now.
We’ve also seen issues with Cisco Aironet cards. And by issues I mean they don’t work under RHEL5 at all. They just keep trying to connect and never connect. We’ve tried upgrading the firmware on the airo cards and a few tricks to tell the card what it’s supposed to connect to. The only fix we’ve found to be for sure is replacing the CIsco card with an Intel card. It’s a nasty fix, I know..But it’s the only way we’ve found to make sure the wireless works.
Posted in Work Stuff |
1 Comment »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 »Stressful
Today has been one of those days. One of my co-workers is out sick so that leaves two of us working in an office of ~450 people…We always stress to our users to not walk up and see us unless it’s a *real* emergency. And by emergency I don’t mean “My battery won’t stay charged very long when I unplug my laptop”. No I mean “My laptop has turned into a flaming puddle of plasic on my desk”.
I have been told that I’m too nice. I can’t tell a user to go away. It’s just not in my nature. I am trying to get better about letting people know they are interupting me by asking them to wait until I finish whatever it is I’m currently doing or give me 15 min and I’ll give them a call to followup with their problem. It’s even more difficult since my back is facing my door which I hate, but I have no desk space around that side of my cube. I also hate to seem to busy to talk to them since, after all, we are a Help Desk. But there are some days I just have too much going on and I’m hanging on by a thread to my sanity. And today is one of those days…
Posted in Work Stuff |
2 Comments »First Day Back
Today was the first day back to work for me since I went on vacation for 9 days. I always hate the first week back after vacation/holiday. It just seems the days are 5 hours longer and the sun just forgets it’s supposed to be moving..And work just seems to save everything for when you return..Just in one email list that is between all my co-workers (~20 people) I had 289 unread messages…One good thing is that many of my daily routines are automated..Hey I work with Linux don’t judge me! That just made me remember a saying I read or heard someone say.
“Stop bothering me or I will replace you with a very small shell script”
Anyway, I checked all my notification emails and went through and fixed any errors that came up. Since I work at a Help Desk we, of course, have a ticket tracking system. I must admit it’s been quite nice to see that I have no tickets waiting. Well that changed within one hour of me getting to work this morning. I ended the day with only 5 tickets that I couldn’t close but it felt like I closed 20 or 30 when it was probably only half that in reality.
Posted in General, Work Stuff |
1 Comment »Good News And Stuff
I found out today that I have been promoted. I won’t get into the pay raise but let me tell you it’s the biggest pay raise I’ve every gotten at any job. With this promotion comes a lot more responsibilty which is going to force me to look at how I organize myself. Currently I use 30 boxes to setup reminders and then 30 Boxes sends me an SMS message over my phone. I have never been an “organized” person per se. I know where everything is, but I don’t really have a method of keeping up with everything.
(more…)Posted in Awesome Stuff!, Work Stuff |
7 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 »User quote
Tell me if this would help you troubleshoot a problem:
Seems to be random but fairly consistent.
Posted in General, User Quotes, Work Stuff |
3 Comments »
