Enterprise SQL Software?

I just don’t understand how Microsoft considers some of their products Enterprise software. Most recent case - I have been moving mailboxes to a new Exchange server over the past few days. I moved the mailbox that the SQL Mail on the SQL servers is setup to use… and it broke SQL mail. No jobs were sending their emails anymore. I verified Outlook worked from the SQL server (don’t even get me started on the need to have a full mapi client installed on production servers) and all was well there. The SQL Mail test button also worked. But no email from the jobs that needed to send email.

So, after hours I had to restart SQL services on the production SQL servers. Now how is this Enterprise software? This is not the first time I have had SQL Mail cause issues requiring a restart of the SQL services to get email working through SQL Mail. I just don’t understand how this can be called Enterprise quality software.

Fedora Core 6 Slips

The Core 6 schedule was adjusted today. The release date has moved from October 11th to October 17th. Jesse Keating posted the following to the Fedora Announce List"

From Jesse Keating:

"We regret to announce a slip of the Fedora Core 6 release schedule. A few issues are still present that we would like to see fixed before we release.

- Possible ext3 corruption bug

- Installs with 256megs of ram stall

- Package ordering issues on multilib platforms (x86_64, ppc64)

- SELinux issue with updating kernels on ppc platforms

- iscsi based installations not functional

There are obviously other issues and bugs still open, but these are the ones that are really "blocking" the release. To give enough time to fix these issues, we've extended the release date 6 days to Tuesday, Oct 17th. Freezes are still in place (even more so now). Your extra careful testing of rawhide over the next few days would greatly be appreciated.

Keep an eye on http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Core/Schedule for any changes."

Preparing for Ohio Linux Fest

The Ohio Linux Fest is this Saturday! I have been busy preparing things as I will be working the Fedora Booth at the show as a Fedora Ambassador. We have Core 5 DVDs to handout, a Fedora Banner and T-Shirts and stickers that are supposed to arrive tomorrow! I am looking forward to the show and hope everything goes off without a hitch (or at least nothing too major). I hope to have some time to catch a presentation or two while I am there as well. It should be a good time.

The Hole Hawg

I caught this article on a mailing list I belong to (in reference to someone asking if Linux had an undelete option):

The Hole Hawg of Operating Systems

It’s a Virtual World After All

Earlier this week VMware released the 1.0 version of VMware Server. Microsoft followed with releasing Virtual PC 2004 for free. Sometimes competition really does benefit the user!

I have used Virtual PC in the past, though it has been some time ago. I much prefer VMware these days for several reasons. The biggest reason being VMware runs on either Linux or Windows Hosts and the second being that VMware does not shy away from supporting various guest operating systems. And as of today VMware is a much bigger player in the virtual machine market - it is hard to beat their ESX server for enterprise use of virtual machine products. Getting familiar with any of their products should prove useful in the long run.

I installed the VMware Server version today. First time I have run into any sort of issue with the install. With the betas I had just installed one over the top of each other and had no issues. Today it didn’t seem so happy with that. After uninstalling my older version though the install worked very well. All my VMs fired right back up and appear to be working great.

Origins!

Whew! It has been awhile since I have posted here. I have been keeping pretty busy recently and haven’t had much time to keep this place updated.

Spent the past weekend at the Origins Gaming Convention. I took it pretty easy this year and tried not to disappear for four straight days. I still managed to get some decent dealer hall time in. Noticeably missing was Wizards of the Coast. Not even a small booth this year. Frankly I think that is a major slight to their customers. Small publishers from across the continent find funds to make their way to the show, but a big time player in the RPG world can’t make it. I found that pretty lame and probably yet another reason to look at some of the smaller publishers products.

I did play several games - Ptolus (Monte Cook’s longtime world being released in August), Thieve’s World (great time, if only we can get Chris to run it… hint, hint) and an Eberron game run by Keith Baker (the author of the Eberron Campaign Setting). So lots of good times there.

Only a little over a month until Gen Con!

CentOS 4 i386 Live CD Released

The CentOS team released a live CD today. It is based on the CentOS Plus kernel and is geared to be a workstation. It contains the following highlights (stolen from the Announcement on the Mailing List):

Open Office 1.1.2

Evolution 2.0.2

Firefox 1.5.0.2

Gimp 2.0.5

k3b 0.11.14

Gaim 2.0.0

XChat 2.4.0

It also offers the following tools for system recovery:

Read / Write access to XFS, JFS, ext3, ext2, NTFS, reiserfs

LVM2 Graphical Tool

GNU Parted

QTParted

PartImage

EVMS

smb4K

chkrootkit

MemTest86

System Log Viewer

I downloaded it today and booted the ISO in a VM this evening. It of course had no issue with the VM and it does look pretty nice. It will be interesting to see how it works on a wider range of hardware. I will burn it to CD this weekend and boot some machines at work when I have time to see how it handles a wider array of hardware.

I think its a good move the CentOS team though as it will give folks a chance to try out a CentOS workstation without needing to commit to a full install.

Also it sounds like the 4.3 Server CD may be out Monday sometime for those of you waiting for that one-disk server install. Though I tend to just use the first CD of four and do a minimal install and then use yum to install whatever else I need.

VMware, AMD X2, Windows Installs

I am finally getting around to setting up a Windows test network in addition to the Windows boxes I already have. My base OS on my AMD X2 machine is Fedora Core 5 running the most recent VMware Server Beta. The other night I tried to install Windows 2000 Server and it just hung at the Starting Windows 2000 during the very initial parts of the install (before you even partition the disk). I initially thought it was a bad disk or one that wasn’t playing well with VMware.

Tonight I tried another disk. Same thing. This time I was off to Google and found that there were some hits on this in the VMware forums. Adding:

processor1.use = "FALSE "

To the .vmx file for the virtual machine fixed the problem right up. Now Windows Server is installing with no issues.

Open Source Auditing Software

We were in need of some software to help get our hardware and software inventory under control for our Windows PCs. We had a commercial application that had been partially rolled out over a year ago. Due to department turnover and a rapid release cycle our install soon fell into disarray and was out of date on top of that. With interest in getting something up and running again our help desk guy found a nice open source package called Winventory.

We took a look at it and saw it used a VBScript to pull the hardware specs and software installed on the Windows PCs using WMI. It formats all the data up into a series of SQL update statements which are submitted to a web form running on Apache with PHP and a MySQL database backend. I put it up in our test environment pretty easily, probably in about ten minutes.

From there I played with the audit file and got it to run against a test PC. A few small issues later (the biggest being not all the software found was loaded into the DB, this was corrected with a re-written function taken from the Bugs forum of the Winventory site) we had our first PC inventoried. It grabbed a large amount of information, in fact I saw very little missing. It includes a hardware section, software section, when the PC was audited and areas to add your own manual notes.

The audit can be run from a central station as long as the user running it has Admin rights on the remote machines. This is great as there is no client software to install as long as WMI is on the machine you are scanning (which is the case for 2K and XP machines). This is agreat advantage over our commercial solution which required a client which was prone to crashing on the PCs it was installed on. Each scan takes about 30 seconds on a modern PC, a little longer if the remote is an older model.

The other nice factor is that with it all being open source we can customize the software if we want. Add to the VBScript if we want more information or create our own reports to run against the DB.

So far I have been pretty impressed with the software. It looks like we will be rolling it out into production next week and saying goodbye to the maintenance renewal fee for our commercial software.

PXE Fun

I finally setup some of the PXE boot install config I wanted to. Now for all of my VMware installs (which can PXE boot) can easily be installed by a few clicks. No fumbling for CDs, just reboot, hit F12 and choose which installer to run. Currently I have Fedora Core 4, Core 5 and CentOS 4.2 ready to go, though they are interactive installs right now. I will streamline that more later.

There are several good resources out on the Internet to help get started with this setup. I was already running DHCP from my CentOS server and only needed to add a few lines to my scope. I also needed to install a TFTP server to host the boot images on. I also already have my install flats on the server for the three OS’s mentioned above.
I tested it out on a few VMs and it appears to be working great! This should make any future testing and installs go much, much quicker.

From KDE to Gnome

About two weeks ago I made the switch from KDE to Gnome for my Linux desktops. I know, I know - I have said for a long time that I strongly favor KDE over Gnome. I think I finally decided that I really had not given it a fair shot in the past and dismissed it too quickly for a true comparison. So both machines I have running Linux desktops are now running Gnome.

Another factor in this decision was my strong use of CentOS and Fedora recently. Since both are closely related to Red Hat in one way or other - they tend towards Gnome desktops.

It is still a little early to make a final call on the switch, but let’s just say that I am not really missing KDE at this point…

DHCP Setup

Spent a few minutes tonight setting up DHCPD on my file server and moved it off of the LinkSys router. Primary motivation was a move towards PXE boot at Jeff’s World. I figure that will help with rapid setup of VMs as needed in the future. Hope to wrap up some of that config this weekend if time permits!

RAID 1 at Jeff's World

I took some time this weekend to convert the home file server over to RAID1. Initially, last fall, early winter, I had intended to setup a file server running CentOS 4.x and then use a script to copy things off to a USB drive. This weekend I decided to switch it up a bit and convert the file server to RAID1 with the more critical things being archived to DVD.

I am running with a Hitachi 160GB drive and a Maxtor 200GB drive in the file server. The drives are mirrored with the 40GB of un-mirrored space being dedicated to install flats of various Linux distros to facilitate easy installs. That should also avoid any issue of using two of the same drives that came from the same bad batch.

Now my file server for Jeff’s World is a pretty lightweight box - Celeron 400 with 512MB of RAM. When I copy large volumes of data to the box the load does jump up there, but it seems to handle it just fine. And by large volumes of data I mean GBs worth at a time. The box also runs internal DNS for the house and some other odds and ends, but for a home server it should do just fine.

There is something very satisfying about running RAID1 at home. That coupled with the DVD backups of the really important stuff should serve me well.

AT&T Routing Internet Traffic to the NSA?

I am sure many of you saw the /. articles and such about AT&T routing Internet traffic directly to the NSA. I read through, wasn't so sure of the initial sources and chose not comment on it at the time. I just saw this Wired article though with more details about what was going on.

So for those that laugh at my high interest in encryption - encyrpting my chat sessions, emails, etc. - keep on lauging. It is quickly becoming not so funny. Yeah, you're right - do they really care what I have to say? Probably not. But the issue at hand in my opinion is the principal of it. Who gave these folks the right to monitor all Internet traffic? Do we not still live in the United States? The fear mongering is once again causing Americans to put up with their rights being lessened.

Really, who's the victim here. It is the normal American. You can bet terrorists are using some sort of encryption or code to hide their communications. At any planning of any importance is certain to be guarded by such protections. It is the normal American that is the one subject to this loss of rights.

Pathetic....

VMware Server Beta 2 and Fedora Core 5

VMware released Beta 2 of their server product a day or so ago. Since I had rebuilt the machine I use to host the VMs it was a good chance to apply that update as well. My initial install of VMware Server on Fedora Core 4 was very smooth. Installing on Core 5 was not so smooth, though I think all of the issues were my fault.

When I installed Core 5 I didn’t select any of the development tools. I usually do, I just chose not to for this most recent install. So I had to get a compiler installed and a the kernel-smp-devel package. Once I had those installed it went well. It fired right up and I was able to boot my VMs from the older version with no issue.

I haven’t played enough with the Beta 2 to note any significant differences yet.

Boot Camp - Macs do Windows

Wow! Apple releases a public beta of Boot Camp which will allow you Intel Mac users to install Windows on your Apple. It features automatic partition resizing and creates a CD with drivers for Windows to work with the various Apple hardware. From the initial glance at the page on Apple's site it looks pretty slick. Not sure why you really want to run Windows, but the concept is quite cool. This should be interesting to watch.

Linkage: http://www.apple.com/macosx/bootcamp/

Fedora Core 5 - New PC

I took the plunge tonight and installed Core 5 on the new PC. I had kept the new machine pretty light on the data because I knew I wanted to get Core 5 on it shortly after it was released. Tonight was the night. I shuffled what data I did have (mainly VMs and some ISOs) off to my /storage partition and fired off the install from the DVD.

The install process took some time. Longer than the Core 4 install did anyways, though I did install a few more things this time around (like OpenOffice). So it really isn’t too fair to dwell on that since my package selections were different. My brief stint with Gnome in the VM easily convinced me to stick with KDE, so that is what I installed this time around. Something about Gnome just doesn’t click with me. ::shrug::

Initial configuration was a piece of cake. All my hardware was detected and worked on the first boot with no issues. It is always nice when that happens. I always have to think back to my very first Linux install so long ago when it took me 6 hours just to get a GUI working! Linux has some a long ways in that regards and Fedora is no exception.

I have only had a chance to hit a few websites, hop on IRC and kick off a yum update, but Core 5 feels a little snappier. Who knows maybe its just the newness.

Well more thoughts and such as the next couple of weeks go by.

Microsoft Beat to the Punch. Again.

For the second time this year Microsoft has failed to release a patch for a vulnerability that has public exploits already made available. This time the flaw is browser related. Exploits are already floating around out there, but Microsoft is still “testing” their patch and the last I saw not planning on releasing before April’s Black Tuesday. And this time there are two unofficial patches that beat Microsoft to the punch. One from eEye and one from Determina.

I know Microsoft says that big corporations only want patches released once a month, but I think that methodology fails to work anymore. People are still releasing their working exploit code into the wild before Microsoft will release their patches. I say Microsoft should release their patches as soon as they have been sufficiently tested. Companies can easily decide to only patch once a month if that is how often they are afforded scheduled downtime, that is their decision to make. Other, faster moving companies, would rather protect their users as soon as a patch is available. Especially when exploit code is already circulating about the Internet.

Fedora Core 5

I installed Fedora Core 5 this weekend at home. The first run was in a VM. The install was very smooth and no issues to speak of during the install. The new Fedora logo is used in the distribution this time around as well as a bit of a bubble theme.

This time around I went with a Gnome only desktop despite my usual preference for KDE. I am already thinking I should have gone with KDE, there is something about Gnome that just doesn’t suit me. I think it must go back to my years of having used KDE.

I haven’t installed it on either of my other two main Linux machines. I think this coming up weekend I might put it on the new PC. I have purposely been keeping the new PC pretty lean in light of this Fedora release, so it shouldn’t take too much. The laptop has some data I need to shuffle off before I undertake putting Core 5 on it. That and since it is slower than the main machine will make the install take a little longer.

More Core 5 updates as I get it up and running on a machine I use on a regular basis.

The Jerry Taylor saga continues

Jerry Taylor the city manager for Tuttle, OK can't let it go. Now he's sent an email to the Register asking them to make the flood of emails stop! Read all about it here.

And don't miss the Wikipedia Entry.

22 Years of Computer Experience

I first saw word of this on the #centos. A city manager for Tuttle, OK accused Johnny Hughes of CentOS fame of hacking their city sites. His proof? A default Apache post-installation page included in CentOS installations when the website is unconfigured. That's right, the default post-installation web page for Apache. Email after email with Johnny Hughes being more polite than I ever could be with the city manager (who claimed "22 years in computer systems engineering and operation").

Read some of the stories yourself:

The Emails (CentOS site)

The Register

Unbelievable....

VMware Impressions Continued

I have been making some heavy use of VMware in a corporate test environment and at home in my own test environment. I have used VMware in the past for various small tasks, but due to low powered machines I wasn’t able to utilize it as much as I would have liked. For testing it has proven awesome.

At work I have been able to roll out some testing servers for development in no time at all - without the need to add new hardware or rebuild a box from scratch. I also needed to test something where the server would have a second disk. It was only a matter of minutes before I had a VM rebooted with a new disk to continue my test. No hardware swapping, just add a new virtual disk and set it up in Windows. Nice.

This weekend I have been playing a lot with Grub, Lilo and software RAID under Linux. The snapshot feature has been a *huge* time saver. Re-installing boot loaders, removing disks and using the snapshot to roll back to a good config. It has definitely sped up my testing process at home for some things I am working on. There is no way I could have gone through as many configurations as quickly as I did this weekend with a more traditional hardware setup.

Jeff's World Cabled

With the help of a friend this past weekend I finally finished getting the home network punched down. When we built the house a few buddies came down to help run cable to several of the rooms. Sixteen network drops in total.

It took getting a new computer to finally get me moving on finishing the project! The new computer sits upstairs in the dinette area, right where I had put drops with that in mind. Since I have been running VMs on the new machine it was really easy to over burden the wireless NIC I had in there to get me by.

So we have everything wired up now. My friend loaned me a GB switch, so once I get a GB NIC for my file server in the basement I can get some wicked fast transfers between the new machine and the server in the basement. It’s nice to finally have that project wrapped up!

VM Rootkits?

There was an interesting article on Slashdot yesterday about Virtual Machine based root kits. Apparently some Microsoft and University of Michigan security researchers have figured out a way to hijack your OS and get it to run on top of a VM. This can be done through any number of unpatched exploits (either existing or future). Suddenly you are running your OS on a VM layer which can be doing any number of things your current scanning software has little chance of detecting. Worth a read and some insight as to what the future may hold for security professionals.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 Update 3

Looks like Red Hat released Update 3 to RHEL4 today. Here is a list of errata in this update:

https://rhn.redhat.com/errata/rhel4es-errata.html

If CentOS follows true, they should be pusing CentOS 4.3 out in the next two weeks or so. Looks like I will have a few servers to update at work in the near future.

Replacement RAM

My replacement RAM has arrived and I am up and running on 2GB now! We’ll see how it runs later this weekend, I have remote installation stuff to hack around on in the VMs which will have me running several of them at once while doing some intalls of nfs and/or http running on the main host machine.

Remote Linux Install Hacking

First, it’s way too late for me…. I am certain to regret this in the morning, but every so often you hit a groove and you just have to stay up learn a little something new. Tonight? linux vnc

I am working on some remote installation procedures on my home network for an upcoming project I am working on. Part of this meant looking closer at the ‘linux vnc’ option. Pretty nice option! Enable VNC for your Linux install by using linux vnc on your boot line. Now you have to add some more options to that to make sure you reach the point where the VNC Server kicks on, because if you are remote you really don’t want any prompting before that point.

Tweak a little on your grub.conf and point it to a http install location and you have a complete remote install solution. I’ll write more up on this later, but when I am tired tomorrow I wanted to remind myself of what exactly I was playing with last night!

VMware Setup - Stage One

One of this things I did this past weekend was to get VMware Server setup and running on the new PC. The install went pretty smooth and I was quickly adding generic VMs. I started out setting up several different distros of Linux installs, including Fedora Core 4, SUSE and Debian. I need to grab my CentOS disks at work tomorrow and get that up and running as well. They all installed with minimal issues and should provide a great framework to really getting my test environment up and running. I will probably start getting some Windows stuff setup next weekend so I can have some of that to test with as well.

Once the replacement RAM is here I should have a pretty versatile test network to work with. Certainly a nice change over the old PI and PII boxes with low amounts of RAM I used to use!

Half-Price Books Find

I was out at Half-Price Books today browsing around at computer games, RPG games and computer books. I came across Volume Two of the Linux Server Hacks book from O’Reilly. Just released in December of 2005! I snapped that up at 50% off. I always pick up a few useful tricks out of the hacks books and this one looks to be of similar caliber.

Wikis as Documentation Tools

Within the last week I implemented a Wiki as a documentation tool for our department. Right now I am the main one dumping content into it. I see it was being a central place for server config information, tips and tricks on various services we have running and even up to and includng contact information for various vendors. I have a fair amount of it documented already - just in a myriad of text files, word docs, spreadsheets and my mail client’s address book. This should allow us to have all of that in one place for others in the department to look at when needed.

For our case I was trying to decide between MoinMoin and MediaWiki. MoinMoin is Python based, while MediaWiki is your more typical LAMP (Linux, Apache MySQL and PHP) app. I was tempted to go the MoinMoin route as it does get good reviews and it would have been an excuse to get more familiar with Python. But… many of our open source apps currently in use are of the LAMP model. So in trying to keep things grouped together where the expertise is, I chose MediaWiki for our documentation Wiki.

Currently I try to update a little bit in the Wiki three times a week. I have also been using it as a scratch pad of sorts while troubleshooting various issues. Sometimes having those notes from troubleshooting prove quite worthwhile.

It will be interesting to see how well it works for us over time.

Mac OS X Security

Looks like Apple's Mac OS X has caught the attention of security researchers (being generous with that term). Within the past week there have been three reports of security threats and or flaws for the OS:

Feb. 16 - OS X Trojan Appears

Feb. 17 - Second OS X worm appears

Feb. 21 - Critical browsing flaw found in Max OS X

The first one appears to be a work of social engineering rather than exploiting an actual flaw. The second one apparently takes advantage of an old Bluetooth flaw and the most recent (and most serious it would seem) is the browsing flaw in Safari, OS X's default browser.

Looks like it is time to pay closer attention to the settings on the iBook at this point beyond the normal safety precautions.

Quake 4

The Quake 4 Demo is up and running on my new computer now. Of course I am running Fedora Core 4 as my OS and this was my first attempt at getting a “real” game up and running on the OS. I went with Quake 4 as they cared enough to actually make a Linux Demo. The install was painless (after I got the Nvidia drivers installed which was also pretty easy).

Upon launching it for the first time I received a video related error. That was due to the color depth being set wrong, quick mod to xorg.conf and that was working. Then on to sound problems. Video ran fine, but the voices and sounds in the game were off, sort of garbled. Adding ‘+set s_driver oss’ to the end of the quake command to launch the game clered that right up.

After that everything ran great! Lots of fun to be had fragging my way through the Demo levels!

I think I will try out the Unreal Tournament 2004 demo and look into seeing if I can get CounterStrike to run on Linux. If I can get CS to run, I think that will be the game I settle down on, but I would really like to get it to run under Linux. Not sure if that is possible yet.

Well…. Off to do some more fragging! W00t!

Posting from the New Computer

I am now posting from the new computer. Fastest Fedora install I’ve done yet! Looks like I have some RAM to return, as 1GB of my 2GBs was bad. Can’t complain much though about “limping” along on only 1GB of RAM! Everything seems to be running well for now, we’ll see if this first few days brings me any surprises.

I still have some things to tweak out, get the video card doing something better than 800×600 and make sure some of the other things are working under Fedora okay. I am running with a wireless card right now as I still need a patch panel to punch down the drops I have in my house. Ended up using ndiswrapper to get it up and running, but that only took a few minutes.

For the most part this is a temporary install. I think Fedora Core 5 is being released in March sometime and I will probably rebuild a little more seriously then. For now its just playing with some things here and there.

Beep Code Quiz

Q. You install an Asus A8N5X motherboard (Award Bios) with AMD dual core processor, 2 GBs of RAM and a PCI Express 16 GeForce 6600GT. On power up you receive one long beep, followed by two short beeps. What’s wrong?

The Linux Clock Versus VMware

I've been making use of VMs for test environment use for the past several months. One of these VMs is a CentOS Linux server. In this particular VM the system clock of the Linux box advances at a rather brisk pace. I think last week it thought it was already the end of March, this after I had just set the clock correctly a few weeks ago. NTPD is running in this instance but even it can't seem to keep control of the racing clock.

I have been meaning to look into it, but as this is a test environment it is often put on the backburner. Today, while catching up on one of my CentOS mailing lists I stumbled across the issue. Looks like the 2.6 kernel is not officialy supported by some versions of VMware. Here is the informative part from the email post that helped shed some light (credit to Aleksandar Milivojevic):

In current versions of VMware (for example ESX 2.5.x), 2.6 kernels are not yet officially supported. What you described is one of the problems with 2.6 kernels and VMware. Add "clock=pit" kernel option (in grub.conf or lilo.conf, whichever boot loader you use), don't use NTP to sync time, install vmware-tools onto each guest and enable time synchronization in them (by default it is off). It should keep time in your guests under some controll. The problem is mostly because 2.6 kernels are much stricter in watching the frequency source selected for clock, and they also increased the frequncy of interrupts requested from it from 100Hz to 1000Hz (one global + one per CPU, or something like that). This frequency is compile time kernel option (it is hard coded into the kernel, can't be changed once kernel is compiled). Furthermore, frequency of interrupts increases with number of processor cores (so if each of your guests is configured with two virtual CPUs, it's 3000 interrupts per second per 2.6 guest, compared to only 300 per 2.4 guest). With many guest running on bussy box, VMware might not be able to generate all needed virtual interrupts for 2.6 guest operating systems, and you get clock problems you are having. There's a code in clock code in 2.6 kernel that attempts to correct for missed/skipped interrupts. However under VMware it tends to overcorrect and your clock starts gaining time fast, like you described. This is classic problem you'll encounter with current versions of VMware and guests running 2.6 kernel. It should be corrected in Vmware ESX 3.x (which should also have official support for 2.6 kernels).

Looks like I still have a little more reading to do, but I love it when I happen to stumble across a solution to an issue I am experiencing at work. Looks like once again my time spent on mailing lists pays off!

New Computer Shipped

The new PC shipped last night from Memphis, TN. It is looking like it might actually make it here tomorrow! I am reserving judgement for now, but if everything shows up in good shape I am going to have some very high praises for a certain online retailer….

CORRECTION - The Case shipped on Monday night. The rest of the parts shipped last night. Still happy with the turn-around as it looks like I will have all of the parts by this weekend.

LiveJournal Security Issues

I was asked what security issues prompted me to go back to hosting my own blog. This /. article is the one that got me thinking. Now I fully understand software has its flaws, but it seems that the high profile blogging sites are becoming more and more of a target for various flaws. Last fall it was myspace falling victim to a cross-site scripting worm. So with that I chose to move back to hosting my own blog again.

The blogging softare I use is certainly not immune to security issues. But with it on my server it is something I control a little more easily. We will see how it goes.

New Computer...

I am a geek with an old computer. The fastest desktop machine I own at home is a Celeron 400MHz. Yep. You heard it right, a Celeron 400MHz built in 1999. I really don’t game much, even less these days since the PC doesn’t even meet half the minimum requirements of current day games. Most of the work I do is done from a terminal prompt.

But the time has come. A new PC has been ordered! It should be a pretty nice machine. I have been a long time Intel fan, but in looking at the processors out there now it seems AMD has deservedly surpassed Intel. I went with one of the dual core offerings, the 3800+ to be exact. Coupled with an ASUS motherboard and 2GBs of RAM it should do what I need to. I am looking forward to its arrival now! 24 to 48 hours to process the order and then 3 day shipping to get it here.

First Post!

Well… I have once again bounced blogs. First it was Movable Type several years ago and then a brief stint on LiveJournal. LiveJournal wasn’t bad, but with some of the recent security flaws in the past month or so I decided it was time to move back to something I had a little more control over. So welcome to the new home! With this change I also plan on my focus shifting back to the tech side of things with some gaming bits sprinkled in here and there for variety.

Oh, and don’t worry about the theme. I don’t think it is going to last too long before it wears on me…