big toys are fun. converting 600MB of ogg-files to mp3-files in about 5 mins. yummy.
hardware info for all the real geeks: sunfire x4600, 16 dual-core opteron processors running at 2.6GHz, with 64GB of ram. screenshot is of htop.

yup, sounds like me.

who’ve i confused so far? ok, the whole story is short and simple: we have a budget crisis this year (as in too much money to spend; don’t ask me why, you don’t want to know) so i get to go to the lisa06 (large installation system administration) conference in washington d.c. w00t! i’m really looking forward to it. and my flight leaves in exactly 9 hours, so i don’t really know what i’m still doing up, except for the fact that paul, peter, wolfi & douggl were round for drinks this evening. which was fun. but it looks like i’m getting up for good tomorrow at about 7ish. or something to that effect – i’ve more or less packed everything. anything that still needs packing but isn’t packed is on top of the case for shuffling in tomorrow before dashing to either taxi or bus to get to the airport. (bus is cheaper and almost as easy as taxi, as the bus stop is almost in front of the door).
anyway, i get to go to washington. i get to geek w/loads of other geeks. on the way back i get to layover for a day in boston, where i’ll be going to the cinema (why cinema in boston? dunno, ask nancie ). oh, and while in boston, i also get to meet nancie. she of the enigmatic supermom-imaginarybigsis-genericweirdolikeme nancie. yup, that is her. and it will be funne. i do so decree (and i don’t even need to do that, coz it will be).
now i’m running out of things to say except *bouncybouncybouncybouncybouncybouncybouncybouncybouncybouncy* i’m going to washington. but y’all don’t really want to hear that. especially because it’s in british and i’m going to be sticking out like 7 sore thumbs in d.c. with my real english. or as craig put it once, “you know him, leah, he’s the guy that speaks really funny english” [craig is from ohio, leah is his daughter, and i speak real english]
anyways, enough rambling, off to finish packing – of a sort. i don’t think throwing things at a case hoping they’ll go in quite counts. but i’ll get there.

Date: Tue, 11 Jul 2006 12:56:19 -0060
From: Pierre Fox 
To: @uibk.ac.at
Subject: Y0I
clean, not overgrown with any garbage, and unchanged in color. I just looked
practice, and low speed, and aerobatics..."
and ordered a flying boot. I looked over his map to see what  was  on it. It
paid. Jonathan Scagull discovered that boredom and fear and anger are  the

i think i’ll now see where i can order a flying boot. it sounds like fun…

Date: Tue, 11 Jul 2006 09:41:04 -0180
From: Janie Hinton 
To: @uibk.ac.at
Subject: FLU
all ideas  of such ceremonious bye-byes. I'll show  you how to say good-bye.
touch perfect speed. And that isn't flying a thousand miles an hour, or  a
hankies and an orchestra. it to say that there  has never been a  field of
literature so limitless, so

On Fri, Jun 30, 2006 at 09:52:42AM +0200, A COLLEAGUE wrote:
> As of this morning my screen is dead.
>
> And the computer refuses to reboot too.
today is a bad day for electronic stuff. my second screen was dead this morning
too. the printer was throwing a wobbly as well.
bad news:   something is buggered on your hard drive.
good news:  your data is all still there and can be accessed using knoppix.
bad news:   your system is currently unuseable
good news:  i have a spare drive, will install fedora 5 and transfer the data
from your existing drive. is there anything apart from your home
directory (and /usr/local i assume) that you need?
bad news:   your screen is dead
good news:  i've replaced it with one of the screens from the diploma student
pcs, the new screens will be coming on tuesday (probably) which
means i will be giving you a more stable one then (if you don't
prefer the one you have now).
bad news:   the printer cartridge was broken, leaking and had memory errors
good news:  replaced it with original HP spare, the printer works again now no
problem.
bad news:   i'm hungry
good news:  i'm getting lunch soon
regards,
sb

just some excerpts:

“go for papa palpatine!”

“what the hell is an aluminum falcon?”

“you’ve been flying around for two weeks trying to get a signal? you must smell like feet wrapped in leathery burnt bacon!”

“get your 7′2″ asthmatic ass back here or i’ll tell everyone what a whiny bitch you are about padamammae or pandabear or whatever the hell her name is … oh, jeez, he’s crying”

“look, i’m just dealing with a lot of crap right now, death-star blown up by a bunch of <beep>ing teenagers, you know, i didn’t mean to snap.”

“yeah, i love you too”

too.funny.must.stop.laughing.must.catch.breath…

single point of failure

this was the first thing that needed sorting out. a single power distribution unit supplying all of one server cabinet and parts of the next one until the amount of plugs ran out.

this then led to the following situation (picture at right):
note the row of plugs outside of the cabinet – these plugs were supplied from the floor and all the power cables went all over the place, depending on where power was needed. note also the hub in the rack which is supplying network to numerous servers in the rack nextdoor…

one of the other horrible things that needed sorting out was the border hub for the DMZ with the web and mailservers. the picture at left show the border hub perched on top of the server cabinet. we exchanged the desktop playing firewall for a proper server a few weeks ago, but moving the hub was postponed until all the cabling could be done in one go.

This was the last reason for really tidying things up – finding which cable goes where was a nightmare. trying to guess which KVM cable belongs to which server was a hairy affair at best – trying not to jerk any cables free because they went every which way was not conducive to a pleasurable working with rack experience. ) so, this got seriously tidied as well.

after a day’s work

this power distribution unit is now one of four, which explains the empty plugs and the tidier look.

look, mum, no cables! that’s right, the extension lead lying on the floor was removed, the power cables brought round to one of the four power distribution units and the network cables laid properly (either under the floor, over the top of the racks or plugged into their own switches) and connected to the new gigabit switch which has been waiting for this day for the past 1 and a half years…

the DMZ hub now has a proper home. and its labelled, so ppl know not to touch. the firewall cable will be replaced with a red one next week, so other admins really know which cable not to touch…

all these cables are now easy to follow, the KVM switches are properly cascaded with a logical distribution. the only thing left to do now is to attach plastic marking signs to the cables so other ppl can easily find things in the racks. that will be done next week as well as putting proper velcro cable-binders around the cable trunks. all in all, it was a good day’s work. P

but saying that, perl does have its good sides. i haven’t found them yet, but they’re supposed to be there.
one of the good things i did find though is cpan – in particular, the cpan shell. this works a treat. want to install a perl module, open up cpan and type install <module>. that works. if the module has requirements, they are added to the queue and installed as well. if the dependencies are weird though, it may happen that the whole system seizes up and goes off into a corner to sulk. until the brave and daring admin goes in there with a pitchfork the size of a keyboard and pushes the perl system back into a working state. it’s almost fun – in a sick kind of way.
one of the good things about cpan is the autobundle option. this option is cool, because it basically means you can shoot your system anywhichway and have more chance than an icecube in hell of restoring your system – well, your perl subsystem, anyhows – back to a working state. great if you only shoot perl to pieces and have though about creating an autobundle beforehands (i was good, i did).
the only reason i’m ranting on about this stuff is because perl does not play nicely with anything if it’s been compiled to support multiple-threads. this normally wouldn’t be a problem, because everybody recommends against using multi-threaded perl in a production environment. but all distributors deliver pre-packaged perl supporting multiple threads.
aarrrGGG!!!
so, i needed to recompile perl. easy, rpmbuild Is Your Friend™. i thought. setup the .spec file, run rpmbuild and larry wall’s your uncle. before you run rpm -Uvh perl though, make sure that you’ve made a cpan autobundle. i was good, i did.
perl recompiled after ages, installed in seconds, and cpan was shot to pieces. so, cpan got setup again and was told to install my snapshot. which it did, until it decided to throw a wobbly, because the newest versions of some packages are only available for the newest version of perl. which i didn’t have because i’m using a package based distribution. aarrrGGG again (you didn’t click the last time, did you?)!!!
i managed to find a source rpm of the latest perl version in the development version of the distro, and that rebuilt without any problems. now cpan is happily purring away in another shell, and i’m a happy admin. until it [hopefully doesn't but may] throw[s] a wobbly at me in a few minutes time. and if it does, i’m leaving for home. if it doesn’t throw a wobbly and everything works, i’m leaving for a quiet beer, then home. sounds like a good plan to me, let’s see if Perl Is My Friend™…

what the heck is the picture?

i use enlightenment as my window manager — that makes for some really cool effects. and tons of space on the desktop. if you click on the picture, you can see what half of my working environment looks like. i think i may end up losing some windows in the near future, but the geekness of working with two monitors is just cool.
the working environment is still very uncluttered, as you can see — this machine has only been up since 12:30 this afternoon. give me a few weeks and i’ll put another more cluttered screenshot up.