Category: Technology

I work in technology sector. And I do round a clock, not only from 9 to 5. It is my bread and butter, it is my hobby, it is the fascination of my life. And with the current rate of change particular in information technology (IT), there is always something new to learn, to try, to talk about. I often post news, thoughts, and reviews. And when I do, this is the category I use.

Computers aren’t stupid

Sometimes I have a feeling that computers aren’t that stupid. They know things. Here is a fresh example.

My office workstation started misbehaving. During the last few days it got to alsmost unbearable. It hangs every 20 minutes or so. I did all the troubleshooting and debugging and everything looks OK. I’ve monitored the motherboard and CPU temperatures – neither ever got above +34C. I ran a bunch of tests on the memory – everything is good. I checked both harddisks for bad blocks – none found. I removed all unused hardware and drivers. I have changed drivers for my video card, which is a normal NVidia GeForce MX 32. I did nothing fancy with the PC.

Still, about every 20-30 minutes it would hang totally dead. I got bored with the situation and ordered a replacement. One was going to happen sooner or later anyway, since my current workstation is pretty old.

We all know what jealosy is, don’t we? Well, guess what happened. The very next day after my purchase order was approved, I come to the office, login, and my workstation crashes on me. I reboot it as usual, but it refuses to come up. I get a kernel oops. And a one I haven’t ever seen before. Yey! I boot with the rescue CD and realize that my root filesystem is terribly broken. Coincidence? I think not.

fsck.ext3 was running for more than two hours trying to repair everything. But that didn’t help. The machine is coming up to some really strange state – it does not load any services on the startup an proceeds directly to the login screen. It does not allow in noone, even local root. Plenty of errors are getting dumped on the console about missing shared libraries and stuff like that.

In about one hour I’ll be out of ideas…

P.S.: I’ve mentioned the Murphy’s Law recently. Well, it struck again. Our backup library died a few days ago and we are in the process of replacing it. So even if there is any fresh backup of my computer, I can’t restore it at the moment. Cool!

Blogs Of The Day

I came across Blogs Of The Day a couple of days ago. It is a nice resources for those who maintain WordPress blogs. It is a some sort of rating site. You can install a WordPress plugin, activate it, and your blog will automatically participate in the ratings. Both most visited blogs and most popular articles are displayed. The site is still in beta, but it is rock solid and grows constantly. At this time it features 140 blogs.

I have installed and activated the pluging about two days ago. None of my posts are on the Buzzlist, but my blog is in the Top 40 Sites (17th at the moment) and in the Top 20 Homes (10th at the moment). Don’t ask me for the difference between Sites and Homes though as I haven’t figured it out myself yet.

Two good things about Blogs Of The Day are:

  • Constantly updated links to interesting stuff to read in other blogs. There is a list of categories that can be used for finding specific subjects, if Top lists don’t appeal to you.
  • More traffic for all listed blogs. I’ve noticed an increase in visitors of my blog. Some of them have even subscribed to RSS feeds and participated via comments.

If you run WordPress – try it out.

Recursively adding files and directories in Gnu Arch

One of the little annoyances of Gnu Arch is that it does not add files and directories recursively. Not to worry, though. Here is a little shell script that can assist with that task:

#!/bin/bash

# Find all files and directories, skipping ./{arch}
for FILE in `find . -path './{arch}' -prune -o -print`
do
        # Get rid of the leading ./
        FILE=`echo $FILE | sed -e 's/\.\///'`
        tla add "$FILE"
done

Skipping the script itself is left as an exercise to the reader.

Update: Simplier method indeed is 

tla inventory --source --names | xargs tla add

Murphy’s Law is still at work

Murphy’s Law is still at work:

If anything can go wrong, it will.

Just when I thought I was finishing with integrating main LDAP parts (that includes installation, configuration and testing of LDAP server, deployment of LDAP cluster, development of all needed web interfaces, documenting everything, training other people to use the system, etc) into our network infrastructure at work, I get these news:

“Red Hat Announces Directory Server”

Trying to keep myself positive, I was thinking that Red Hat will make it into a commercial product available for its Enterprise Linux product series. The second I thought that, I get these news:

“Fedora Directory Server Now Available to the Open Source Community”

Oh, well. The only thing I’m happy with is that I already have a tested and developed system, while all those people who are planning to use Red Hat Directory Server will just start their journey. And, of course, LDAP being an open standard, I am at easy with the possibilities of further migrations.

P.S.: More informationa about the Directory Server is here.

Weird

My boss has left the company. I had to delete his account and clean some groups and other access lists. It felt very weird. It felt like a beginning of the end. Although it’s not.

Not to mention that removing one of the global administrators, who had access virtually to every corner of the network, is not a trivial job…