Die Hard Reloaded

The bane of a real sysadmin. I will do anything for uptime. #xkcd #sysadminday #humor pic.twitter.com/SlZ6XQXdm3

— nixCraft (@nixcraft) July 24, 2014

Ping "emoji"

I'm so short-sighted... I never thought about emojis for server names.

NMAP totally chokes on scanning machines when the hostname is just emojis. 💩💩 pic.twitter.com/IITtxse462

— Jerry Gamblin (@JGamblin) June 18, 2016

Packet Pushers: From Engineer to Manager

The guys from Packet Pushers have @AmyEngineer on to talk about going from a technical role to a management position.

Some funny (paraphrased) quotes/thoughts:

You can't just wait for a maintenance window and patch people. 

It's hard to google error messages for people. 

Work-arounds can be tough.

Network Training

I did some on-line network training and learned about a very powerful tool.

Telnet Star Wars

So there was the Star Wars traceroute... now you can see A New Hope in ASCII via telnet. Telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl.

Fiber for Newbies

I'm going to stick this reddit guide to fiber right here, so I can find it later.

Tech Challenge of the Day

I'm trying to learn some Linux, so I've got Ubuntu installed on an old Dell Mini 10v. That seems to be working well.

The problem is trying to get SSH access over the internet to it. I've got a Comcast/Xfinity SMCD3GNV (Cable modem, wireless access point, router, phone) along with the Asus RT-N66U wireless router. The SMCD3GNV has the public IP on the WAN interface and a LAN interface IP of 10.0.0.1. I can login to it and make changes.

My RT-N66U gets a 10.0.0.2 address from the SMCD3GNV on its WAN port. I've got it configured to have the 192.168.1.1 address on the LAN interface. My clients connect to the RT-N66U - including the Ubuntu box.

I've done some research and apparently I want my SMCD3GNV to be in bridge mode. I called Comcast and they said they put it in bridge mode. I'm not convinced it is actually in bridge mode. When they put it in bridge mode, the WiFi light should stay off according to one article I read. Unfortunately, it occasionally blinks and the admin web page has an icon that is green, but the mouse-over says "Status: Not Connected ; 0 computers connected."

I've tried all sorts of tom-foolery with the port forwarding, DMZ, static addresses, etc. I've tried to take the Asus out the mix by plugging the Ubuntu box into the SMCD3GNV and enable port forwarding to it. Still no joy.

Per this post, if you go into debug mode and enter this: $("#pageForm1").show(); at the console, you can see the Bridge Mode button.

I was going to work on it some more last night, but the storms knocked our cable out. It just was not meant to be. Maybe today or tomorrow or the next day...

My Friends

This week my friends have included:

fixboot
Two XP machines suddenly lost their minds. A little Recovery Console magic got them going again:

"Use this command to write the new Windows boot sector code on the system partition. In the command syntax, drive name is the drive letter where the boot sector will be written. This command fixes damage in the Windows boot sector. This command overrides the default setting, which writes to the system boot partition. The fixboot command is supported only on x86-based computers."

netstat -a
A computer that should be a good machine would take an incredibly long time to open Excel, Word, and Reader files. If you were in the application and did a File | Open everything was quick. Netstat allowed me see that the computer was trying to connect to a server that had been retired. It was just spinning its wheels until it timed out. I ended up adding the old server name to DNS and pointing it to the new server.

Hiren's BootCD
A great general purpose boot disc with lots of tools, but I used it for NTPWEdit 0.3 to reset a customer's password on an XP box. Download here.

Microsoft Program Install and Uninstall Fixit troubleshooter

A client had tried re-installing a tool on his laptop, but it wouldn't complete successfully. It kept throwing an "Error 1706. No valid source could be found for product VeriFire Tools. The Windows Installer cannot continue."  I ran the Fixit troubleshooter from here to clean-up the broken installs. (I had to run it four times as the software showed up four times and each one needed to be removed.)

Lots of other good stuff recently, too... playing with Server 2012, Exchange 2010, a Juniper firewall, a MondoPad, Trend cloud anti-virus, etc.

Xircom PE3 & Combo Card

I just read Gough's Tech Flashback: Intel EtherExpress PRO/100 Mobile Adapter. I installed a few of those back in the day. He nails it here:

"The connector itself is very small and has securing latches which “click” into place to engage with the card. It’s also very thin and protrudes from the card a significant distance. As a result, these things were a pain in the ass to use, as they can easily be carelessly yanked from the card at an angle, causing the connector to crack or be damaged."

It also reminded me of the Xircom PE3 Parallel Port Ethernet Adapter. If all else failed, we could always get a PC on the network with one of them. I never went anywhere without one or two in the tool bag.

(Pic from here)

We also liked the Xircom combo Ethernet and modem card. It took up both PCMCIA slots, but it eliminated the need for the dongles. Of course, this was all in the olden days before they started building all these things into the laptops.

A Technical Interview Tomorrow

So I was doing a little refresher...

[Application] All
[Presentation] People
[Session] Should
[Transport] Try
[Network] New
[Data Link] Dr
[Physical] Pepper

I've been asked about the OSI model more times than I care to think about. However, I don't ever recall using it at work. Maybe some people do.

For Star Wars Geeks

Microsoft Windows [Version 6.1.7601]
Copyright (c) 2009 Microsoft Corporation.  All rights reserved.

C:\Users\brick>tracert 216.81.59.173

Tracing route to read.more.at.beaglenetworks.net [216.81.59.173]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

  6    29 ms    22 ms    24 ms  10gigabitethernet1-3.core1.atl1.he.net [198.32.132.75]
  7    20 ms    18 ms    17 ms  216.66.0.26
  8    59 ms    55 ms    57 ms  10.26.26.22
  9   709 ms    57 ms    63 ms  Episode.IV [206.214.251.1]
 10    59 ms   261 ms    63 ms  A.NEW.HOPE [206.214.251.6]
 11    56 ms    56 ms    57 ms  It.is.a.period.of.civil.war [206.214.251.9]
 12    60 ms    59 ms    56 ms  Rebel.spaceships [206.214.251.14]
 13    59 ms    59 ms    56 ms  striking.from.a.hidden.base [206.214.251.17]
 14    59 ms    56 ms    57 ms  have.won.their.first.victory [206.214.251.22]
 15    57 ms    57 ms    59 ms  against.the.evil.Galactic.Empire [206.214.251.25]
 16    57 ms    56 ms    57 ms  During.the.battle [206.214.251.30]
 17    62 ms    58 ms    59 ms  Rebel.spies.managed [206.214.251.33]
 18    58 ms    57 ms    58 ms  to.steal.secret.plans [206.214.251.38]
 19    59 ms    59 ms    58 ms  to.the.Empires.ultimate.weapon [206.214.251.41]
 20    59 ms    58 ms    59 ms  the.DEATH.STAR [206.214.251.46]
 21    59 ms    56 ms    58 ms  an.armored.space.station [206.214.251.49]
 22    58 ms    56 ms    56 ms  with.enough.power.to [206.214.251.54]
 23    61 ms    58 ms    56 ms  destroy.an.entire.planet [206.214.251.57]
 24    61 ms    61 ms    58 ms  Pursued.by.the.Empires [206.214.251.62]
 25    58 ms    60 ms    60 ms  sinister.agents [206.214.251.65]
 26    59 ms    60 ms    60 ms  Princess.Leia.races.home [206.214.251.70]
 27    64 ms    59 ms    60 ms  aboard.her.starship [206.214.251.73]
 28    59 ms    64 ms    58 ms  custodian.of.the.stolen.plans [206.214.251.78]
 29    61 ms    58 ms    59 ms  that.can.save.her [206.214.251.81]
 30    58 ms    61 ms    59 ms  people.and.restore [206.214.251.86]

Trace complete.

IT Generalists

Scaling lessons from Google’s CIO — Cloud Computing News:

"In the question and answer period that followed, Fried elaborated on these concepts, telling someone that IT generalists are probably born, not made. He said at Google, the company looks for folks that want to keep improving their skills, and even has a program to help give those people the tools to be better engineers when they find those traits in employees. He said the Google culture is one where the general engineers who understand the system have a lot of input and power, which is a cultural shift that organizations that want to build at scale should try to implement."

We are all becoming generalists at our company. When there are so few of us, you have to learn a little bit of everything.

Cool Tool - RJ45

This is a neat idea from Platinum Tools - the RJ45 connector allows the 8 wires to pass through the end. It makes it easier to verify the order of the wires and you don't have to worry about trimming them too short or long.

How to Write Applications that Admins can Manage

A Plea to Software Vendors from Sysadmins - 10 Do's and Do Not's

I would add #11 - Don't require admin rights on the local machine to run the application.