Archive for the ‘Geek’ Category

OpenDNS and VPN issues

Thursday, February 14th, 2008

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I’ve been running into DNS problems when using the CheckPoint VPN connection from work and finally figured out the issue. I setup my home network to use OpenDNS and since it returns a default entry for any unknown lookups it kept sending my intranet lookups to them.

The workaround is to configure OpenDNS to NOT try and “fix” lookups for certain domains. The process is outlined here: http://www.opendns.com/support/article/164

And if you’re not using OpenDNS, it’s worth checking out. DNS lookups are much faster than your upstream ISPs servers. And if you’ve got kids, you can set it up to block DNS for questionable sites.

Updated list of Firefox Extensions

Sunday, January 21st, 2007

I figured it was time to update my list of firefox add-ons since my last posting. Firefox has integrated a lot of features that used to require add-ons.

BetterSearch
Book Burro
BugMeNot
del.icio.us
Download Statusbar
FireBug
Flashblock
Foxylicious
FoxyProxy
Google Toolbar
Greasemonkey
IE Tab
Live HTTP Headers
Performancing
View Source Chart
Web Developer

More Sysadmin Truths

Sunday, January 21st, 2007

Another great blog entry from lonesysadmin.net! I’ve been burned too many times by upgrades too. Either they fail or leave a lot of cruft behind. As a result, I try and do fresh installs whenever I can. Or use linux distros such as Gentoo which are designed to handle rolling upgrades.

To make installations as easy as possible, I try and set up the infrastructure to automate it. I wish there was one common way to do this. Instead I’ve had to use kickstart, jumpstart, IgniteUX, and multiple Windows techniques. It’s a pain to go through this exercise but it pays off in the long run when kicking off a system build only takes a few minutes.

” In-Place Upgrades Suck” by The Lone Sysadmin

[tags]sysadmin, geek, gentoo, automation[/tags]

Data Hoarding (or Why Are We Out of Disk Space Again?)

Sunday, January 21st, 2007

As a systems administrator/configuration engineer, I’m well aware of the value in organizing and maintaining data. But as this blog posting by a fellow sysadmin attests, often we go overboard.

If you’ve worked in IT long enough, you’ve heard the platitude that “disk space is cheap”. Sure, compared to the washing machine sized disks from the mainframe era it is cheap, but it’s still far from next to nothing. And I don’t think it ever will be. In terms of hardware, enterprise RAID storage is still more expensive than the $1k consumer terrabyte media servers that are becoming popular. But the human cost is always there- time spent searching through useless data, time spent shuffling ancient data between servers, time spent backing up data that will never be looked it.

” Only Keep What We Need” by The Lone Sysadmin

[tags]sysadmin, storage[/tags]

Updated list of Firefox Extensions

Wednesday, January 17th, 2007

I figured it was time to update my list of firefox add-ons since my last posting. Firefox has integrated a lot of features that used to require add-ons.

BetterSearch
Book Burro
BugMeNot
del.icio.us
Download Statusbar
FireBug
Flashblock
Foxylicious
FoxyProxy
Google Toolbar
Greasemonkey
IE Tab
Live HTTP Headers
Performancing
View Source Chart
Web Developer

Clearing the Attention Light on a HP Lxxxx Class Server

Tuesday, November 22nd, 2005

To clear the Attention light on a HP Lxxxx class server, perform the following from the console terminal:


  • Login as “root” and press CTRL B. This will enter the GSP mode(Guardian Service Processor).
  • Hit the “Enter” key twicewhen asked for the login name and password, as they most likely haven’t been set.
  • Enter “sl” from the command line, e.g. GSP> sl
  • When prompted to select the logs to view, select “E” for the error logs.
  • View the error on the screen, which is the latest error logged that caused the “Attention” light to start blinking.
  • Take the necessary action(s) to fix the error.
  • The light should now be off.
  • Enter “q” from the command line to end the session.
  • Enter “co” to return to the “root” console prompt.

Cobb County Public Library Lookup Bookmarklet

Tuesday, November 22nd, 2005

Normally I’d simply add this to my del.icio.us bookmark list but since it’s a javascript bookmarklet, I don’t think it will accept it.

This will scan the current web page for an ISBN number, then see if the Cobb County Library system has the book available. Useful for reducing the regular Amazon tithing!

Drag this link to your Bookmarks Toolbar: Cobb County Public Library

Found via Jon Udell’s blog

Firefox and cool extensions

Friday, June 3rd, 2005

Here’s some of the extensions I use with Firefox that make it much more useful than IE!

Googlebar: Adds a Google Toolbar to the top of the browser, Just as featurefull (and then some!) compared to Google’s own toolbar.
Bloglines Toolkit: Adds a small notifier that tells you if you have new Bloglines subscriptions available.
del.icio.us: If you don’t already use del.icio.us, read some of my previous postings about it. This makes browser bookmarking a dream!
BugMeNot: Tired of being prompted to create a login for a web page, just to read one article? Join several others that create “fake” logins and pool them into this resource. No more registering as Amanda Huginkiss who lives at 123 Main Street!
BetterSearch: This improves search pages on Google, del.icio.us, Amazon, etc. by adding thumbnail previews, site info and a bunch of other features to your search results.
Foxylicious: An even better way to sync your bookmarks with del.icio.us than the way I described here.
LiveLines: Adds a notification icon to the bottom of your browser window when a site has an RSS feed. You can configure it to subscribe to the feed via Bloglines.
miniT: Adds better tab functionality such as rearranging them via drag and drop and opening new tab windows after the current window instead of the end of the tab list.
GreaseMonkey: A fairly new extension, this one lets you add scripts to web pages that enhance their functionality. For instance, I use these scripts:

Book Burro: Adds a drop down menu on Amazon’s web pages that compares prices of the book you’re viewing at Borders, Powell’s and several other book stores.
RSS AdFilter: Filters out the ads you’re starting to see in RSS and Atom feeds.
And there’s a bunch more available.

Playing Dumb

Wednesday, December 15th, 2004

Here’s a valuable negotiating technique I often forget, whether I’m in a job interview or trying to sell something. I’ll often say the positive and negative sides, thinking I’m giving additional information when in fact, less is more.

Everything Sysadmin: The right answer

The name for this technique is “playing dumb.” It is a technique that we geeks often forget. We geeks are smart. We get paid for being smart. We get paid for having all the answers. Someone once told me, “My value to the company is to be the guy that knows everything.” That’s us. We’re the smart people. It’s difficult to not give a well-reasoned answer even when it won’t work.

Keeping bookmarks in sync across multiple browsers

Thursday, October 7th, 2004

Some more followup to my earlier posting about better browser functionality…

I use multiple computers (often several in the course of one day!) and subsequently have web bookmarks spread all over the place. I mentioned the benefits of del.icio.us previously but couldn’t figure out a seamless way to get it to work in Mozilla Firefox other than via the plugin for it. Today I upgraded my laptop’s Firefox install to the 1.0 Preview Release. One new feature it added was Live Bookmarks. It’s a fancy way of saying that you can make a bookmark entry dynamic- they parse out each entry in an RSS feed and make them appear to be items under the bookmark.

Big deal, right? Well, del.icio.us also creates an RSS feed of your uploaded bookmarks. So…. you create a Live Bookmark of your del.icio.us RSS feed, place it in your Firefox Bookmarks Toolbar Folder, and your bookmarks are now available as if they were stored locally! I dunno, but perhaps IE has something similar?

Now if only I could figure out a way to import all of my bookmark.html files in batch without resorting to some Perl-fu…