brokebit’s

I'm done with class. Took my final yesterday. Don't have a grade yet, but I think I did fairly well. I finally get my evenings back.

I went to install some HBAs in our Exchange server this evening. I disconnected all the cables from it, unscrewed the screws that secure it and stop it from sliding forward/backwards and tugged. It didn't move, at least not easily. The server above it was not on rails. It was literally sitting on top of it and it was our production database server. I could not shut it down, and I couldn't pull it out live. So I got creative: 

We had Eno's six month Neuro followup this week and got some great news. Dr. feels that Eno is recovering fast and better than he expected. They are rating him at roughly 75% recovered with a solid chance to getting to 100%. He gets to cut his thearpy back to once a week now instead of twice. 

Congrats to Brendan!

Who should coordinate this?

Work has been totally fun. I don’t miss being responsible for all of infrastructure. I was a little worried at first. I can spend the entire day concentrating on two or three technical projects and not worry about all the other stuff. I miss the old Fujisawa days, but I don’t miss Astellas for second. If anyone else is thinking about leaving I highly recommend it! That place is diseased.

Also, since a bunch of us are leaving, please fill out this form to determine where we should take you to dinner.

• Dining Plan

I am still messing around with building RPMs. Things got a bit more interesting because we now have some 32bit Intel Xeon machines and some 64bit AMD machines. I had to rebuild all the packages on the AMD machine so that they would be 64bit. I thought it would be as simple as just adding the –target option to rpmbuild but no. Many programs failed to compile because many libraries have been moved to /lib64 instead of /lib. So I spent a better part of the day tweaking more SPEC files to get stuff to build.

I also had a pretty major “O’h Shit!” moment. I accidently hit CTRL ALT DEL on the wrong Redhat box and rebooted it! Mother F#@!IN B%#CH! The machine was our primary NFS server with the main data volume being a LVM volume. After the OS came back I noticed that I could not mount /data. So I did a pvscan. That worked. Then I did a vgscan. That worked. Then I did a vgchange -a y to active the the volume group and that didn’t work. I got a bunch of nasty errors about Invalid arguments and not being able to insert devices into the dtree. /dev/data/data did not exist.
This was bad. All the work I had just spent the last 8 days working was in /data and there was no backup yet. Long story short. It was a bug in the stock Redhat ES server kernel. I upgraded from 2.6.9-5 to 2.6.9-22 and everything just work like it was supposed to. Oh how I long for Debian and my custom kernels! I can’t believe we are paying for this shit.

Here is wierd one.. The IT department at my newCo Install OS on the servers, configures routers and switches, runs the phone system, etc, etc.. but contracts with ADT to come and rack mount new servers! Really!

I dropped the Apple G4 Powerbook off at the Apple store to get the display replaced. It suffered from “white spots” (http://www.apple.com/support/powerbook/displayprogram/) problem. They are going to replace the display for FREE! Yippie. Troy is going to buy it when I get it back.

Everyone should go look at the H20 Plus website (http://www.h20plus.com). Lonnie is doing the advertising. Images and ad copy.

I know of a good third shift operations position if anyone is interested!

Congrats dillb!

Today was my last day with Fujisawa/Astellas. Just over 10 years. I never thought things would have gone this far 10 years ago when I took the job. I was so naive!

Today was a bitter-sweet experience. I have much to be thankful for. Fujisawa and Jim D. allowed me to get my career started and for that I am thankful and eternally in debt. I spent the day feeling melancholy thinking about the close working relationships, friendships, technology, and experiences from the last years but then I realized that environment was long gone. (April 1^st 2005 to be exact!) The current environment is diseased with politics, backstabbing, lies, and stupid people. There is no leadership! My mood improved once I realized I wouldn’t need to see two certain individuals ever again!

“make them mad, make them sad, make them add two and two
make them me, make them you, make them do what you want them to
make them laugh, make them cry, make them lie down and die” – Pink Floyd

Anyway, the new job starts Monday. I will let you know how it goes.

Unrelated thought: Apple says installing bootcamp voids your warranty. What about installing a virus?

My new job is with a startup hedge fund firm in downtown Evanston. No managment, no strategy, just pure technical hands on work supporting a large enterprise Linux installation and thier developers.

Lonnie and Eno are coming for a final lunch Tuesday.

Stranded in the Deerfield Carr America Park! The next 15 Survivors will meet a whole new set of sights and challenges. Will they be able to survive in the vast lands three parkway North, countless consultants, and fierce a VP with the intent to stomp problem solving?

And perhaps more importantly, will they be able to survive each other?

The place may be different, but the game is still the same: Who will outwit, outplay, and outlast all others on Survivor: Deerfield? Tune in to the season premiere on April 3rd 2006, right after the fiscal year.