Wednesday, 17. April 2013
Two weeks ago I thought to myself ‘Gee, now that Samba 4 has a real release out, wouldn’t it be fun to test it out and see how it holds up?‘ And so my adventure began. Now mind you, I’m not a novice to Samba, or to Active Directory, so I figured this would be a simple setup and test. How hard could it be?
Friday, 1. March 2013
Wednesday, 16. January 2013
Saturday, 12. January 2013
Wednesday, 13. June 2012
Well, if we have learned anything from the past, if it can go wrong, it will… Although this has been downplayed by the companies involved,  there is no doubt in my mind that many people will be effected by this compromise. Once again, public networking sites storing user data on the internet, have failed to protect that data, and worse, have tried to hide the importance of this compromise. This is sad, but certainly is nothing new. We can take some comfort in the fact that these companies at least used sha1 hashing when storing the password data. Thing is, we don’t know what other information was compromised besides the passwords.
Tuesday, 29. May 2012
Seems like most of my job now a days is looking at large systems and isolating problem areas. Things like performance problems, data corruption, or even failure analysis. Many of these systems have several independently managed processes, all tied together in a single forward facing application. Over the years, I’ve developed some methods of approaching system failures and problems that gives me a better chance of quickly evaluating and repairing the issues that plague these systems. I used to believe that these methods were only valid on larger system models, then, one day, a colleague of mine and I were sitting in a small coffee house discussing a problem they were having with one of the desktops they manage. While we exchanged ideas, I suddenly realized that I was using the same mental process on this little desktop as I did with the large cluster systems.
Friday, 18. November 2011
Back in 1999, My company, ACT USA leased a small storefront in Thousand Oaks, CA. At the time, we did just about everything related to business computing. Not only did we service desktops back then, but we also served as a Corporate ISP to many of our customers, with T1s and Frame Relay connections terminating directly to that little facility.
A few months back, the CFO and I started to review our costs, and came to the conclusion, that we no longer needed to host any services locally, and that we could save a fair amount of money relocating to a business / industrial park. So, the hunt was on for a new facility. We managed to locate a new office only five miles from our old storefront that was perfect for our use.
Needless to say, these are exciting times for all of us at ACT USA. New bigger office in a beautiful complex, with a large shop area and room for a classroom! This move however, set into motion the dismantling of our NOC in that office.
See, the only way the move really made sense, was to completely eliminate all outward facing services from the Thousand Oaks NOC. This idea was nothing new, I had started this process almost 5 years ago, but found a few services / customers to be difficult and expensive to move, so I procrastinated. Well, that procrastination ended with the signing of a new lease, and all of a sudden I was faced with unraveling a location that I had personally kept operational 24/7 the last 12 years.
Today, November 18th, 2011, without fan fair or even a whimper… Yes, today, the NOC in Thousand Oaks fell silent. As I reached over and turned off the last router (border1), the sound of absolute silence over whelmed me. I had spent the last 12 years making sure this room stayed noisy, keeping this equipment running. Yes, the last 12 years… Responding to power failures and carrier issues all times of day and night. And now… Silence… How strange… How strange…
— Stu
Monday, 1. August 2011
Some of the early groups of articles I penned on this blog, were comparisons of Open Source Groupware projects. At that time, the only one I could really recommend was eGroupware. Although I still believe eGroupware is a valid contender for your Groupware server, I have discovered a project, that in my opinion is leaps and bounds ahead of the pack. The project is called SOGo.
Thursday, 3. February 2011
At a ceremony today, February 3, 2011, the last five /8s were delegated to RIRs. For most people, this has little meaning, but to us that make our livings from the IPv4 protocol, and who have spent countless years learning the tricks of the trade, this marks an end of an era.
As for me, I’m ready for the ‘big switch’ to IPv6. But I know many of my friends and colleagues that have procrastinated, claiming this day would never come, or are waiting for a vendor to swoop in and save the day. Well, to those I say, WAKE UP! The companies you work for, and the customers you service will be greatly effected by the IPv4 shortage and the logical adoption of IPv6. The day is at hand, and vendors stand to make their money by just selling the upgrades to their equipment to handle IPv6, so I don’t think a magic bullet is in the cards. As of now, the best solution for your company to look at is dual stack. In as short a time as a year, you could have customers that are unable to reach your web based services, or only able to connect at modem speeds to them, due to overloaded proxies. I strongly suggest you start working on this now, especially if you have outward facing services such as a web server or email server.
That’s it for now, I’m busy preparing for the Southern California Linux Expo. This year it will be held at the Hilton LAX on February 25-27, 2011. Look forward to seeing you all there!
— Stu
