Bill O'Neill

BarCamp Atlanta 2008

Bill O'Neill — Sat, 18 Oct 2008 02:23:32 +0000

Tonight and tomorrow I’m attending BarCamp Atlanta which is a user generated conference. The basic premise is that in order to attend, you need to be prepared to present a 30 minute session on a topic of your choosing. I’ll be talking about hacking consumer products with alternative firmware i.e. upgrading your linksys router with OpenWRT or installing Debian on a Buffalo Linkstation.

My next few posts will be my notes from the sessions I’ve attended.

Updated 11/17:

So much for posting session notes! My wife called in the middle of the conference saying she needed to go to the hospital for kidney stones. Now that that crisis is over, I reviewed my draft notes and realized they weren’t that great to begin with. But I’ve converted my presentation into PDF slides available here: BarCamp Atlanta 2008

Bud Light and Clamato Juice

Bill O'Neill — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 21:20:52 +0000

I found this in our local Kroger the other night. I can’t imagine anyone wanting to drink this stuff!

OpenDNS and VPN issues

Bill O'Neill — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 15:49:08 +0000

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

Bill O'Neill — Mon, 22 Jan 2007 01:26:30 +0000

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

Getting to Know You Quiz

Bill O'Neill — Mon, 22 Jan 2007 00:26:51 +0000

Passed on to me by my friend Taz

What is your occupation?: Systems Administrator/Configuration Engineer
What color are your socks right now?: Not wearing socks
What are you listening to right now?: Watching Alias
What was the last thing that you ate?: A TV dinner (the wife is out of town so I’m eating like a batchelor)
Can you drive a stick shift?: Sure- took my driving test in a stick-shift van!
If you were a crayon, what color would you be?: Burnt Sienna
Who was the last person you spoke to on the phone?: My wife as she was about to board an airplane to head home.
Do you like the person who sent this to you?: Yes
How old are you today?: 34
Favorite Drinks?: Coffee, beer (dark or hoppy), and Riesling wine
What is your favorite sport to watch?: Indoor lacrosse
Have you ever dyed your hair?: Sadly yes!
Do you have any Pets?: A dog named Indy
What is your favorite food?: Bacon cheeseburgers
What was the last movie you watched?: Something About Mary. It happened to be on TV in the background so I don’t know if that counts.
What was your favorite toy as a child?: A children’s carpenter set from my Aunt Gina. Ironically, I don’t have any carpentry skills around the house.
What is your favorite fall or spring?: Fall. The smell of leaves and sound of lawnmowers in the distance remind me of growing up.
Hugs or kisses?: Hugs. But I’m not really a touchy-feely kind of guy.
Cherries or Blueberries?: Cherries. Especially Black Cherry soda or yogurt.
Do you want your friends to email you back?: Nah- since I’m being lazy and posting it to my blog.
Who is most likely to respond?: No one. I haven’t publicized my blog at all.
Who is least likely to respond?: See above…
Living arrangements?: House in the burbs
When was the last time you cried?: When I got married. And no, it wasn’t tears over lost batchelorhood!
What is on the floor of your closet?: Old shoes that really should be thrown out.
Who is the friend you have had the longest that you are sending this to?: None- doing the lazy web thing.
What did you do last night?: Upgraded my home server, caught up on the Tivo backlog.
Favorite smells?: Fresh coffee, laundry coming out of the dryer, the smell right before a rainstorm.
What are you afraid of?: Drowning
Plain, cheese or spicy hamburgers?: Cheese with bacon
Favorite dog breed?: Mutts
Number of keys of your key ring?: 2
How many years at your current job?: 1 year 3 months.
Favorite day of the week?: Friday. Especially Friday night.
How many states have you lived in?: Other than my consulting gigs, 2- Pennsylvania and Georgia.
Favorite holidays?: Labor Day. That was when my Dad, my sister, and I would vacation in the Poconos at the cabin my grandfather built.

More Sysadmin Truths

Bill O'Neill — Sun, 21 Jan 2007 23:29:08 +0000

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?)

Bill O'Neill — Sun, 21 Jan 2007 23:06:04 +0000

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

Bill O'Neill — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 22:55:21 +0000

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.

Catchy National Anthems

Bill O'Neill — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 00:13:25 +0000

Wrigley’s gum advertisers accidentally used China’s national anthem as background music because they thought it was “catchy”.

I can sympathize. My best friend and I would fight over which country to represent when playing Summer Games on the Commodore 64 solely because we wanted the best song to play during the medal ceremony. It’s been a while but I wouldn’t be surprised if the Chinese national anthem was one of our favorites!
NPR : Wrong Anthem, By Gum

[tags]funny, music[/tags]

Clearing the Attention Light on a HP Lxxxx Class Server

Bill O'Neill — Tue, 22 Nov 2005 16:51:19 +0000

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.