Recent blog entries for csg

Cold weather sucks. Even in the midsouth. Its so dreary, and cold, and dreary. Just makes me feel awful.

On the bright side:

FedEx.com has been on the Keynote Business Top-10 for 150 weeks straight.
That's 3 years, and around 3-times the nearest competitor.
I think its quite an accomplishment for the team involved.

As for Recent Events, there aren't many. Poltics, Re-Orgs, and Layoff-Rumors, Oh My! Nothing substantial.

Haven't had time to post in a while. Major events, uh:

• I parked my Subaru in a ditch on my way home over Christmas
• The website set new shipping records over the holiday season, that's always good for continued employment
• I've been working to refactor the op(1) rulebase for the prod environment at work. Hundreds of developers, hundreds of projects, and re-orgs galore make priv delegation a complex task.
  Even if you take the time to factor the problem well.
• People in my group are leaving like rats on a sinking ship
• I love to drive my new Saab 93

My Friend Andy Korty (crt0) came to visit this weekend.

With Friends in town, I actually stayed away from work this weekend.
However, this past week, I got lots of stuff ready for the holiday freeze at work, including:

• Built around 40-50 linux machines to replace older Sun Ultra-2 and Ultra-10 gear in production.
• Helped pjr get port-NAT vips moved into production. Yay! No more messy port-NAT on the Firewalls! (There was much rejoicing).
• Helped track down (no pun intended) some bugs in tracking code with the devleopers. Plogs are open, and it looks like we'll have fixes in pre-freeze.
• Worked with developers on some preformance improvment in the cash-cow shipping applicaiton.

• Today I wrote 300 lines of shell code for "static.routes" the insane "where am I and how did I get in this handbasket?" /etc/init.d script we use at work. It figures out where you are, how you got there, how to get to all kinds of stub networks inside the DMZ, at OpCo's, or back on the corporate network. We recently added 2 business-logic networks (due to growth), and somebody had to do it.
• I automated the generation of port-nat VIPs on our www-tier. Provided you reserve the IP addresses in the reverse zones, the forwards (sorted, coalated, and tasty) can be generated with perl. No more typeo's in 1000 lines of DNS from silly transcription errors.
• I reviewd a draft of ptree(1) for FreeBSD written by my man, petef. Looking good.
• My FreeBSD: kern/58497 feature request for security.jail.jid sysctl-knob was turned down for good reason. There's no reason to leak that into into the Jail, and you can obtain the info from sysctl, provided you're acquainted with the C-Compiler. The in/out of jail flag for my /etc/init.d/** is still kewl with ps/awk.
• Marketing tried to add a bunch of javascript code to fetch hidden spyware images from hitbox.com. It was a big bust and broke a couple of applications in production. I should refrain from saying I told you so, because that would be rude in such a public forum.
• I spend the evening reading, and re-reading parts of Daniel L. Schacter's excellent book: The Seven Sins of Memory -- How the Mind Forgets and Remembers. (ISBN: 0-618-21919-6) If I'd only known this much about the brain, encoding information into neural nets, and the memory pifalls that the unsuspecting person can fall victim to when I was younger.... I hightly recommend the book, especially as a follow-on to the Edward DeBono books on thinking as a skill (trust me -- you can improve).

• Helped development get OpenView Performance Agent and ARM going for major www applications at work. Hopefully this will give folks the performance #'s from a trusted source to start tuning their apps.
• Submitted FreeBSD: kern/58497 to add the security.jail.jid sysctl knob. My cleanup of /etc/rc* for Jails depends on this feature.

• I wrote some perl code today to emit canonical configratuons for the DMZ load balancers and firewalls based on our local site policy (and some clever invariants). Not somethig for the community, but I was happy with 100 lines of perl, that takes table definition and generates about 2000 lines of DNS, Firewall Rules, and Cisco Configruation. Lots of typing to get precisely right.
• Went out for coffee with the wife this evening, and talked about frustraitons with 97th-percentile-disease, and relating to other people. Perhaps someday I'll get comfortable with being a member of a social species.
• Order'd an eye-trainer from Bernell Corp since my fusional convergance/divergance has been bugging me. I'd have used this more as a kid if I understood what was going on like I do now.
• I've been looking at software for speed-reading. If anybody reading this has suggestions, or experience here, drop me a line.
• Browsed the docs on OpenBSD's CARP VRRP/HSRP clone, looks interesting.

Another week past, it was a busy:

• Lots of cleanup at work on our Linux Build Process
• Got my crusty dual-450 up and running FreeBSD CURRENT so that I can submit patches for review.
• Fought with distcc for FreeBSD builds, I must be missing something obvious. Truss on the dual-althon doesn't really show where it's going bad. Shure would make the Dual450 get thru builds faster.
• Upadted my webpage at WaterSpout.
• Reviewd some additions to ACLD (link?) with ksb and petef. KSB reports that LPD works with no permissions now. Very cool.
• Messed with setting-up Apache/tomcat at work. I thought HTML::Mason was rough.
• Worked with Info Security and Networking to install a new ZMD (business logic) network at work. The new Nokia firewalls work pretty good for failover. I'm impressed.

Here's some catchup since I just started stopping by Advogato:

• I went to the datacenter with KSB and setup lots of Intel Gear. Someone needed to do this before the holiday freeze.
• I've been thinking that the /etc/rc handling in-jail on FreeBSD needs some work.
• I wrote a truss post-processor in perl with petef.
  It shows where you spend your time by file descriptor.