Older blog entries for jlf (starting at number 7)

Joy. It's a gorgeous day out.

I'm in the lab trying to raise a squid box from the dead. I think the RAID controller is toast because it's marked a new disk as bad. I'll test it to be sure, but I have a hard time believing that not only did two disks die simultaneously, but that the two new disks are also dead. Righto.

Chris is back. Vacation wasn't as planned. Nothing ever seems to go as planned.

Evening update

Fairly productive day...turns out the RAID controller still works okay in the squid box. It just wanted someone to come play. I removed one bad disk and the other disk marked failed started working again. Joy. Still problems, but the server works again, mostly.

Hey, Stan, that code I sent you long ago became Dhcpreg. It's up on Systhug. I don't think there have been changes since then. If you have improvements, by all means, bring 'em back, I'll package them up with it. Or maybe it should go to CPAN ?

It's been a slow day today. I'm extremely thankful for that. These past two weeks have basically been one kick in the crotch after another.

I've spent most of today doing piddly little administrative type junk. And while I usually hate that sort of thing it was okay today. It was sort of calming and that is good. I'm finally starting to almost feel okay again. I still waiver between lots of anger for a couple of people, then I sway back into understanding, then I fall into feeling lost, then back to a level ship. I think maybe I need to self-medicate or seek some sort of help.

At any rate, I went out for a short while with Stan, Ed, and Josh. It was a good time, but I was really tired, so I went home fairly early. I need to do things like that more often. It's so easy to go home and just mope around and be a recliner potato.

My god ! I've gone Green.

I guess I need to go add myself to the project(s) I work with and maybe even post my own.

Next step, plaid. Really, though, it'll be nice to be able to connect myself to projects and at least feel like I'm contributing. :)

Security. Sigh. That's something else I'm supposed to spearhead around here. Nothing like a perl/mailx bug to really get your week going well. That and one of my firewalls wasn't configured quite as tightly as I thought it was...one of the other guys happened to catch it. It's fixed now, but it irritates me when I do stupid things.

Oh well...at least I'm not playing politics and going to meetings, right...I'm actually working with real live computers. Oh the humanity. Or something. Okay, break's over...

A night of merriment was exactly what I needed. I'm feeling a little better.

I thought about Dhcpreg some this morning and think that may having a full blown dhcp config creator that creates a dhcpreg ready config might be cool. Other people have made config creators, so it's not terribly original but it could prove useful.

I've had some downloads of Dhcpreg and a lot of people looking at it, but little to no feedback. I wonder if anyone finds it useful ?

Big brother has arrived. I've decided that at this moment in time, I hate my job. That's not to say that my opinion won't change after the heavy drinking I have planned for later, though.

Ever since I decided to take the manager's job, it's just been stress on stress. I'm tired of it. I should have just stayed a peon, setting up servers and being a sysadmin. I'm tempted to just pack it in now.

So, today has been a wash. I had the weekly heads meeting today. Sounds like a convention of drug dealers, doesn't it ? There was some talk about how inappropriate the means of posting about AgendaMaker was...but frankly, I just don't care right now. If I think about it, I get pissed off. If I get pissed off, my stomach really starts hurting again. My respect levels for my boss are in the toilet right now.

I did come to realize, though, that something Stan made me realize something about myself. He was saying that everyone he knows seems to be upset with their job except for him...and that maybe he didn't expect enough from work and if he did, he would then be upset, too. Well, maybe the galoot is on to something there. I think about it, and maybe I just want too much from work. Maybe I'm looking to work to fill things that are best filled from other aspects of my life. Perhaps that's unreasonable. Perhaps it's stupid. I don't know. I really used to enjoy the cameraderie and general cohesiveness of the group I work in. I think it's frayed somewhat. It saddens me quite a bit.

I feel a bit that no matter what I do, someone loses. That's a fucking demoralizing and depressing feeling. I think a trip to the batting cages is due very soon. Either that or I might have a coronary or something.

So, I posted to the dhcp-server list to ask whether or not people would be interested in a utility suite. I got one response in about 30 seconds. That kinda surprised me. It was someone else doing a cable modem rollout. That seems encouraging. Perhaps I'll just go ahead and clean the code and documentation up and put it out...just to do it. It might make me feel like I'm accomplishing something.

In other news, Chris decided to send out his AgendaMaker script to the staff. It's something that probably should exist, given the structure of management here. As expected, there's a lot of kerfluffle. At first, I was irritated by it. As he explained it to me, I understood a need for it.

-=-=-=-=-=-=-

So, time has passed. since the initial portion (above this) of this diary entry. I worked a couple of hours after work and got the dhcp utils cleaned up a bit. The documentation is still not perfect, but it is functional. I also thought of other things I'd like to add to the util suite. For instance, the 'ipchange' util that lets you add other configs needs a way to see the results of what you've changed beyond doing a grep some-macaddr -A 2 -B 2 /etc/dhcpd.conf.

The URL for the dhcpreg stuff is http://www.systhug.com/dhcpreg/.

This is actually the first software I've ever put out for public consumption on my own. I've shared stuff with other people, like scripts and the like in newsgroups, but this is my first run at trying to make a supported-type free software package. It's nothing fancy, but I learned some stuff doing it and that's a big part of this, right ? I hope people like it. I actually got about 7 or 8 responses this morning after I asked about it on the dhcp-server list. It's kinda nice to know that people out there are interested.

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