Older blog entries for rince (starting at number 5)

I really like our black-box-NFS System. We told the vendor that they have configured wrong the network-components within their system, but they wanted to believe until we proved it to them. Then they had to reconfigure every one of their datamover. Guess what they forgot: The Hotspare-Datamover. It was not really nice to see that there was a failover (which is okay if it works) - and that this failover has not resolved the problem. Oh, btw: the second path of alerting people will soon be email after the modem was not able multiple times to call out... anyway, who cares? At least I know now what I have to know about big storages :-) And I love to have ConCalls just because of these accidents.. What else? Has anyone tried to install Solaris 8 via CD? Whoever had this idea with using 5 CDs or more just to install a plain Solaris must be mad - it takes sooo long time... Where is my jumpstart-server-on-the-laptop...

18 Oct 2000 (updated 4 Nov 2000 at 09:22 UTC) »

This is a good day. This night we had a routing problem in the backbone - which meant that the servers I am working with were not reachable. Which meant that I got alerted.... Well - because it was a routing problem, I haven't had much to do except of traceroutes. After one hour that problem was fixed.

Then I had to make measurements how fast our black-box-NFS-Storage can be, mounted via NFS to a Solaris box. Its interesting; if the datamover is really idle you can find >8000 directories with "find /mount/point" within 10 seconds. But you have a datamover who is working this drops down very far....

And I just got the recent news: our company changed the mobile provider. Three days ago. Now everyone who has a company mobile has to switch to the new provider (now!), use the new number, copy all his numbers in the memory to the new card, publish the new card......

I like chaos, especially when I am not involved (my mobile is a private one).

And btw: the Apocalyptica Concert in Karlsruhe next week is sold out. Too bad.

Have I told you that I like environmental monitoring made by other departments? I like it to hear in the morning that there was a power peak (I knew this one before because my machines at home booted suddenly in the night, so much for a nice uptime) and now one really cared about the powerpeak in the computer rooms - well, someone discovered that there was a problem somewhere but who cares...

Anyway, I am surprised to find out that nearly everything is running fine, so I can concentrate on documentation and development - finding out how cfengine really works and how to get it used with checksums for some files :-)

It is a new week. It started with reading the mails of the last three days for work (including power loss in another city, routing problems and so on). Last week was surprisingly quiet - no real panics, no deadlines (yet). But that was only three real days.

Last weekend I examinde the "Citynightline" in Germany - enter the train at 23:20 in one City and arrived at 07:30 in another one. Nice trains, nice offer for a good trip. It was fun meeting some guys out there without having to wait to arrive the town.

The last days I was on vacation - I explored new worlds, saw IP packets going through my lines.

Just kidding :-)

The vacation has been last week and I met some guys (Cord, Bitkoenig,ToJe) on our more-or-less yearly party. After that, I made a visit of Duesseldorf and Koblenz, where I met Terry Pratchett (guess where my Nickname/login is coming from). Finally I went back home.

Yesterday I discovered that my friend tried to update his Orinoco Remote Office Router. This is good. After this, my line was down. This was bad.... Ten hours later my side of the ROR was updated too - and some hours later also the Laptop-Cards got their update (their Firmware wasn't good enough for the new ROR-Firmware...). Then I discovered that there are at least two drivers for Wavelan in the pcmcia-cs-stuff - one from Lucent itself, one written by another guy. And their config-files are incompatible. And as we are using encryption, this was fun... anyway, since this night I have the "free" written kernelmodule, looking through manpages, fiddling with configfiles - and shouting as I finally was able to go into the bath again with my laptop :-)

20 Sep 2000 (updated 2 Oct 2000 at 10:31 UTC) »

Today I started using Advogato.

This is a good day to start: Yesterday evening I was stuck on the phone because someone told me that he needs my help in the late evening for "installing Packages on a Solaris-Box". At midnight he called me that this has been cancelled...

Well - the usual morning stuff: reading mails, reading news. And asking myself why do I have customers with no clue?

Well - let's try to find out wether the new sysadmins are good, they just try to get a hold on our systems and to get them known :-)

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