August 15, 2008
mitch @ 8:46 am on August 15, 2008
My blog will probably become unlisted from Google for this, but it needs to be said.
Polyserve from HP or as its now called “HP Clustered Gateway” is the biggest pile of crap software ever.
I normally don’t like to post about work stuff on my personal blog. However, I’ve noticed that HP seems to be wanting to cover up and hide the fact that this software is the most worthless pile of crap that they have ever purchased and released.
Backing it up, worthless, you’ll get file locking issues that can’t be rectified short of taking snapshots of the volumes. When you have 12TB volumes… those snapshots aren’t THAT small.
Anyway, I really just wanted to start creating some links around to start getting the word out that Polyserve is Junk so it become googleable
Heres a link to a blog with the same info: http://polyserveisjunk.blogspot.com/
Work — No Comments
July 18, 2008
mitch @ 1:40 pm on July 18, 2008
I’m not sure what it is over the last couple months… but lately I don’t really feel into my job. Not sure if its a result of them constantly ignoring what I say or what… All I know is that I normally would have been able to digest something I really wanted to learn, but I find myself unable to concentrate on django, and well anything else I want to learn.
I’m not really sure if its because of work or school… and to be honest… either could be doing it. As I feel that both are ridiculous and neither really feel like they would reward creativity.
Why is it that school (especially IT related) is worthless? Yet everyone requires it? If theres one thing I’m going to learn about me attending school… is that I will not make it a requirement for the people I hire to attend. As just showing an aptitude for learning on your own is self sufficient in my mind.
Life· Work — No Comments
April 13, 2008
mitch @ 8:03 am on April 13, 2008
Since getting the MacBook Pro from my boss, I’ve had some time to play with it. As it turns out, I still only like to use it as much as I like to use my wife’s laptop, mostly just for checking email and web browsing. It just seems slower than my Lenovo, even with its faster procs and same amount of ram… to test I got it dual booting Ubuntu, but even that seems slow. All that I could deal with, however, I really don’t like the keyboard. Or rather the lack of an insert, and a delete and back space keys. Page Up and Page Down also seem to be missing. These keys I use alot, and they’re all very accessible on my Lenovo. So, I’ve decided, I won’t be fully switching from my Lenovo as much as my boss wants me to. The biggest reason so far that I could have used the mac was more for the 1Gb nic it has in it. At work I’ve had to do some testing of the network and I have some scripts and other applications that can fully maximize the throughput of the network, and my current hardware peaks at 100Mbit so, I didn’t see some problems that others in the building were experiencing because of it.
I had the choice to buy a laptop with a 1Gb nic in it when I bought this, it would have cost me more, but to be honest, it was a laptop, when would I EVER actually be able to utilize a gigabit nic. Well… saving to or reading from the hard drive its impossible… but reading and writing straight from ram, you can actually get around to filling a gigabit pipe.
So, I have a reason to switch, I just don’t think I will be. If anything it will give me a reason to buy a new Thinkpad T61 
Apple· Technology· Thoughts· Work — No Comments
April 3, 2008
mitch @ 8:33 am on April 3, 2008
I don’t talk about work much on my blog, mostly because I don’t feel like it is appropriate. However, there are things that I learn while at work that would be appropriate to write about. The purpose of this post is just such a situation. I currently work as a network system consultant and I’ve been doing work onsite for a company for the last 8 months or so. They move large files around, (they’re a printing company) and have also put in a huge investment into gigabit ethernet equipment everywhere. However, most of their buildings are fairly old, and the last time they were cabled was around 1998. Most things are run with your standard Category 5 cable (not even Cat5e). Now the sharp person will know immediately that Cat5 is not supposed to run gigabit. Someone forgot to tell everyone else here, because they put the swithes in place and put gigabit ethernet on the desktops as well… and they negotiated at 1 gigabit…. so it should work right? Wrong! Gigabit ethernet is *very* sensitive to the type of cable being run over it, so much so, that technically you can run it over Cat5e, but if your really shooting for gigabit to the desktop, I wouldn’t go less than Cat6 and making sure you do not run the cable closer than 3 feet from florescent light blasts, and keep it the same distance from all power runs as well. We had a situation in one of the buildings, that they’ve been fighting speed issues for months/years, and in no way did they think it was possible to get faster speeds out of Cat5 cable if I were to drop their speeds to 100Mbit full duplex. Instead of the 1Gbit it was currently negotiating at. Finally we got the ok to force everyone in the building down to 100 Full (actually the switches are HP Procurves, and they have an option to set ports to auto-100 which allows the port to negotiate between full and half duplex and speeds of 10 or 100Mbit, essentially leaving out the option for gigabit). And sure enough speed times increased 3 fold. Imagine that.
Technology· Work — No Comments
November 19, 2007
mitch @ 5:58 pm on November 19, 2007
At my current place of employement, gigabit is deployed everywhere. I’d rather not get into the details as to why it is, but it goes without saying that its not really needed *everywhere*. None the less, I had cacti up and graphing for a couple months, before I thought I’d really like to see cacti graph a fully utilized gigabit port. Well, it turns out that the default configuration of the ucd/net snmp network interface ports on cacti will not graph a gigabit port. It will appear to work, but seems to wrap around at about 120Mbit. The reason is, cacti by default uses 32bit counters for this setting. It has a drop down under the network interfaces when creating graphs on a device, to use 64-bit counters. This is required for gigabit ports (if you want to get a true representation for the graph). I will see if I can grab some screen shots of this when I get back to work.
But overall, I love cacti and even after looking at similar tools, I much prefer cacti over anything else.
Open Source· Technology· Work — No Comments
April 18, 2006
mitch @ 2:35 pm on April 18, 2006
For the last couple years I’ve been wanting to move my career towards network and systems architecture, which I think of it as “Infrastructure Architecture”, and I’m just starting to figure out what type of a background do I need to beable to carry such a title. I get fairly bored when studing routers and switches to be honest, which is why I really haven’t wanted to learn or study them very closely before. However, now that I have a much better understanding of my likes and dislikes, and even some (alteast perceived) understanding of the direction of the computer industry in general. Instead of learning more of the unix’s I’m focusing more on network related technologies and sticking with Linux as the network OS. So my next move will be Cisco certifications. First up will be the CCNA which I’ve studied alot already and having some experience with cisco routers and switches so far its alot easier to remember than when I was studying originally… not sure if its because back then I really wanted my RHCE more than anything else or if I was more into becomming a Sys Admin than a Network Admin/Engineer. Either way, its making this time around alot easier 
Next up after that will be what I’m really interested in which would be the CCDA, or the Cisco Certified Design Associate. Since, like I already said, actually administering routers and switches is somewhat of a bore to me, but networks in general I find very interesting. Designing them is definately intriguing. Hopefully that gets me off on the track I really want, and maybe I’ll even go for the CCDP after that. And somewhere in the middle of all of this will be some VoIP. Anyway, thats the current plan thought I’d lay it all out for myself just because I can.
Life· Technology· Thoughts· Work — No Comments
January 21, 2006
mitch @ 5:48 pm on January 21, 2006
I normally don’t write much about work because of the legal issues that may arise from it. However, this I do believe atleast deserves mention. As I said, I don’t talk about where I work at all so, knowing which company I’m leaving and which I’m going to is not going to be part of this entry. I will say however, that I’ve worked for the last 5 and a half years at my previous employer, and my final day will be Monday, January 23rd. I’ve learned alot over that time, and I’ve gained alot of real world experience doing stuff that I’ve always tinkered with on my own. I have left for another Linux Systems Administration job, which some of the duties will be the same, others will be entirely new. Hopefully I’ll be able to write about a few of them here and there as long as they won’t really conflick with the interests of the company. I am leaving alot of what I knew, people mostly. And while I am sad to depart, I feel it is for the best. I fell into the mantra of “over worked and underpaid” category, which finalized my descision to leave as a company reorg along with buget cutbacks were in the works. I hope that will be all, as there was also rumor of layoffs down the road. I mean you can only cut back so much right? That was a bit of a joke on my part… and while I can’t get into specifics, I do hope that those that possibly will get layed off are able to find work again as this whole process has really made me think about such things, and its a horrible (but in some cases a necessity) thing. Anyway, just to log this for future reference and posterity, there you have it.
Life· News· Thoughts· Work — No Comments
December 16, 2005
mitch @ 2:13 pm on December 16, 2005
With some changes at work, I’ve been given a powerbook G4 17″ man is it nice. So far I love it. Just going through customizing it a bit. Changing the themes and so forth… I had to reinstall it as well, since I will be loading Linux on it to dual boot. figure its got a 111GB hard drive… why not?
Anyway, more to come, screen shots ‘n all…
News· Work — No Comments
October 30, 2005
mitch @ 11:25 pm on October 30, 2005
I’ve been back and forth between creating my own System Trending app using RRDtool, and using some other prepackaged ones like Orca and Cacti. I love the look of cacti, however it wasn’t exactly intuitive the first time I tried to use it. So I gave orca a try, and I really didn’t like the idea of having to scp off the log files, to a collecting host. I would much rather have the collecting host poll hosts its configured to watch. With that in mind… I don’t like SNMP either for a system. For appliances and network devices its great, quick and easy. Because the vendors usually have specific MIB’s that can be used. There are generic ones for systems, but I would like to extend this to track applications on the system as well, this will require custom scripts, and with SNMP, custom MIB’s as well. Which I really don’t want to mess with. Keeping the monitoring system as basic as possible, using one monitoring system to grab all of this is what I had in mind. After spending a week or so creating some custom python scrypts to perform both functions of gathering data and pulling it to a central location, and creating graphs was quite extensive, and I really would like to atleast somewhat finnish this project within the next couple weeks. Creating my own solution proved to be a bit more complicated than I would have hoped. So, going back to using an existing project I took another look at cacti. This time around it proved to be much easier to understand. Not sure if its because I took the time to learn more about rrdtool specifically or what. However, this time I was able to create some data gathering scrips for cacti to execute and an xmlrpc server that answered the requests on the other end. They seem to be working currently and I’ve only really been working on them for a couple hours over the last day or two. I *hope* to have working client scripts and gathering server written by the end of the week for most of the basic functionality. Just need to do a little more reading and playing with python and the parseconfig module(?). Should hopefully have something by this time next week. I’ll keep you updated.
Open Source· Projects· Work — No Comments
February 8, 2005
mitch @ 8:39 pm on February 8, 2005
I’ve been unsure of what to write about as of late… Blogging in general has two sides. One, is freedom of speech. The other however is where the corporate types get a little uptight about what you say. They even go as far as sueing for things such as defamation, or even lately an appartment complex is sueing http://apartmentratings.com because people have posted unfavorable reviews about the appartments. Personally I’m on the side of free speech here assuming the posts were made by actual (former?) tenants with real complaints. They have every right to share those complaints with anyone who will listen. With the use of the internet, this becomes MUCH easier, and maybe it will inspire (or force..) the service and manufacturing sectors to stop pushing crap on us, because now our opinion will be heard much easier. Personally I love sites that allow user feedback about products and services. I used them when I bought my phone which conviced me it would be ok to buy it.
Blogging can also get one into trouble with their employer(if the employer ever found out about the blog and read it that is…). I would love to write about more of my life and things going on, however this thought has kept me from actually doing it. I’m unsure about how much I would be able to say without getting into some kind of heat. I’m also sure it wouldn’t take much of it to get fired. Which is why I haven’t said much of anything about it.
This alone however, wont stop me from blogging completly. I will continue to keep sheding atleast some of my insite’s on life as I feel inspired.
Legal· Life· Thoughts· Work — No Comments
