Last night I stumbled across a little issue I hadn’t noticed before. We’re in the process of deploying a new connection to our office for improved bandwidth, and reliability. Currently I have moved half of our servers to using the new line, and a handful are still using the old line. Last night about 0200, our main line (the old one) went offline. I was alerted to the problem by Nagios, which I have running on my personal server. I was a little baffled as to why the internal monitoring server wasn’t notifying me of any issues, seeing as it had been moved to the new line.

A few weeks ago, I wrote a quick comment on home users and backups. Today, over on Slashdot, a “Home User” posted the simple question “How do I backup”.

Well, I was supposed to be attending a Microsoft seminar tomorrow. I think it was titled “Microsoft Momentum”. Basically covers upcoming technologies from Microsoft. I originally hadn’t been interested, but one of the guys at work dropped me on it and told me to go along. Can’t hurt to see what scary things are coming up. Looks like I’m going to have to cancel as our corporate office prepares to shut down on Wednesday due to a tropical storm. This means the service center has kicked up an all day conference tomorrow to ensure we’re ready to migrate services to the DR if needed. Of course, my office is in Dallas, the main office is in Florida, so this is likely to be an ongoing “thing”.

This is pretty nifty. Interesting painting styles for your room.

The other day I got a little curious about the popularity of my blog. I’m pretty sure, or at least was, that I am probably the only one that reads it. That was until a few days ago when somebody posted a comment on one of my posts about promoting a domain controller. This inspired me to look at who is looking at what.

I did a little looking around, and stumbled across wp-slimstat. Setup is very easy (pretty much self contained), and it just “goes”. It provides handy links to search queries from search engines, for example, my blog actually appears 7th in the google search for “cannot dcpromo a 2003 server to a 2000 domain”. That impresses me, simply because it means my name appears on page 1 of a google search (that doesn’t count searching for my name). Searching for “innodb table full” places me second on google. Not too bad ;)

If you don’t track what your blog does, you should, you might be pleasantly surprised.

The other day I mentioned that it was a sad day, and here is why. My coconspirator in “network terrorism”, as he calls it, is heading homewards. This is great news for him and his fiance, and I wish them all the best of luck, going to be a little quieter back here, and a little sad.

Meanwhile, I’m here sketching out network diagrams so I can slice and dice the network up for improved security, this time taking into account the pix does something I didn’t expect it to do, I guess I should have called upon Denise to help me.

Oh well, good luck Bill.

It’s about 9:30pm, and I had a random thought. Well not entirely random as it was inspired by something I was doing. Cheese and Onion sandwiches. I was making them. Why did this make me reminisce? Because I used to make them for my dad for work, and me for school (right around the same time at night too). Loaded with cheese, and depending on how lazy I was feeling, either chopped onion, or whole slices of onion. I’d carefully wrap them in foil, or clingfilm, and enjoy them the next day. Depending on how I made them, and how well I’d wrapped them, they’d also be known as “exploding sandwiches” as my dad would open them, and they’d fly everywhere. I’d either not hear anything, or laughing as he’d bite into one of them, and wear most of it…. sighs

Most IT staff already know that most users do not backup their work, that’s what we get paid for. A small survey suggests that most users don’t back up their photos too. That’s fairly obvious from my seat, most home users don’t even backup their computer, why’d they even think to do their pictures. I admit I don’t backup the RAW files from my camera, but all my images are uploaded to my server, so I have 2 copies. I am considering getting a second computer with lots of HDD space to allow for a third backup. I’m thinking of building a mini NAS.

This is where services like Flickr come in handy, or GMail.

The BBC has an article on some artwork that responds to the viewers mood. This is a good example of technology at work, and a possible sign of what we might be able to do with robots. I think the possibilities are endless, and world domination is on its way… right?

For those that keep getting confused over the differences in KBps and kbps (there is a big difference), this is pretty handy.