Author Archives: srhuston

by srhuston

Ping!

Just something to type. Need to kill time while waiting for the RAID to finish rebuilding on the Beowulf cluster’s fileserver. It’s been giving me some headaches the last two days, dying at 0400 every night for no apparent reason. So I forced a reiserfsck (which came up with two errors that it corrected), and then forced a reindex.

Now I’m contemplating yanking one of the drives when it’s done, and twiddling it a bit since only that one drive has ever given any errors. Probably a loose cable. That’ll really make my day.

by srhuston

Schema-ing

So I’ve been getting back into the long-term project I’m working on at work, namely setting up an LDAP server to replace our NIS system. And of course I found that there’s some objects and attributes that I’d like to associate with entries in the directory, so I’m writing a schema to cover those things. And I quickly found that there isn’t quite as much documentation as I’d like to see. Granted, the one book that I have (“Understanding and Deploying LDAP Directory Services (2nd Edition)“) covers a *lot* of the information that one needs to know before setting up a LDAP directory, but it does lack a little bit in the information for creating your own schemas. Oh well, nothing like the tried and true trial-and-error method :>

by srhuston

There Went the Slashdot Crowd

So I got a couple interesting emails on the morning of the 13th. Seems a story was posted on Slashdot that had a link to our website at work (original story here). Okay, so I’m wondering how many pieces my poor webserver will be in when I get to work. But, it survived intact, and handled it quite well.

For those who like that sort of thing (I’m certainly one of them), here’s a graph of the traffic through our firewall during that time period. No wonder sites that have dynamic content tend to get flogged when a story goes on the front page:HP_OV Traffic Graph

by srhuston

You’re So Vain…

…you probably think this story’s about you. Okay, so I had to come up with a title, and couldn’t think of something. Sue me. No, wait, don’t do that. I don’t have anything to give up anyway.

So, it’s been an interesting week. My father-in-law had back surgery on Friday, and it took awhile before they got back to us to let us know the outcome. Finally heard on Friday afternoon that he came through just fine; there were a couple complications, however even with that he was in and out in 3.5 hours (they’d estimated 4 total). He was due to be released today, but on Saturday afternoon he was already home and enjoying the effects of the final shot of morphine they gave him. Next is 3 weeks of being stuck in the house (can’t go up and down stairs, and there’s stairs to every doorway). He should make a full recovery, and from the people who have had the surgery done before, he’ll be feeling better than he has in quite some time.

What else? Saw Big Fish on Sunday. It was most excellent. I was looking forward to hearing either I’ve Seen All Good People by Yes, or Solisbury Hill by Peter Gabriel, but the soundtrack was quite good even without their presence (both songs were used in the trailers I’ve seen). Very touching story, and also quite amusing to see the main character’s storytelling skills at work.

Well, I guess I should be off to bed. Stephanie is taking my Yes DVD’s down to her father’s tomorrow and spending the afternoon there so he’s not alone in the house. I wonder if he’s going to make her sit through all of them in a row…

by srhuston

Whoopee

Man am I bummed. Things have been so-so at work lately, and I keep having the feeling the Sword of Damocles is somewhere above me. I really like the people I work with, and the work that I do, just more often than not feel unappreciated from the higher-up types. It’s pretty bad when someone asks for your expert opinion on something, and then disregards it. *sigh*

Had a pretty good Holiday (and Birthday) Season. Got a ton of new movies (all said and done, seasons 2-4 of Stargate SG-1, there’s 15 DVDs right there, plus more), the latest release from Gary Larson which weighs a ton, and best of all the watch I’d been eyeing up since around Thanksgiving. Here is the webpage for the watch, and man is it neat.

by srhuston

Tongue-Tied and Twisted

So I’m working on deploying LDAP at work… we’re using NIS currently, and it’s a mess and ugly and doesn’t let me play with things I’d like to do (read: web-based account maintenance) without a lot of even uglier work… so LDAP is the way to go, for that and more reasons. Only problem is, I’m going cross-eyed reading all the information about how to go about doing it. Yeah, I could just forge ahead and make something, but then a year from now when I realize I’ve doomed myself to having to recreate the entire database just to add a certain bit of functionality, I jump off a bridge. Nah, books it is.

Just ordered two, “Understanding and Deploying LDAP Directory Services (2nd Edition)” and “LDAP System Administration” from Amazon. We’ll see I guess. They should be here around the 15th.

Mean time, I’ve got no pending issues going on at work, and only this as a long-term project that had been put off many times in the past and is now finally in the forefront. In other words, I’m spending a lot of time catching up on websites and magazine articles in between learning the internals of LDAP. Ugh. Oh well, back to something resembling work…

by srhuston

Alright, Now What?

Okay, now that I’ve got this up and running, what to do? I could import all the stories that were in the old system, which I think isn’t a terrible idea, but first I think I want to go through and change the style around a bit. Add some graphics (which I’ll first have to create), that sort of stuff. Now I’m starting to wish I’d actually cared to learn things like CSS and some real HTML design.

Nahhh….

by srhuston

And Now For Something Completely Different

Well, this is definitely different, isn’t it? After the last couple times I’ve installed Slashcode to do stuff with this website, I’ve always loved the results, but hated the fact that configuring it to look just how I want seemed like more than I wanted to do. So this time I thought I’d go for something a little more brain-dead. Not to say that Moveable Type is a brain-dead system, but it’s meant more for people who aren’t webmasters, don’t know how to do all the fancy Unix wizardry, and just want a corner of the WWW to call their own. So I thought I’d give it a try. So far, I like it. Seems pretty simple, and it seems like I can change how it looks without changing the content completely and such.

Okay, so I’m rambling mostly. Cut me some slack, Jack, I’m testing this stuff out. 😛