Maybe I should make this bit
change every so often?
E & I are both incredibly happy to welcome Violet into this crazy world.
I’ve got 10 days off from work to get to know her (and maybe squeeze in a BCMSN exam…) – so far everything’s going great.
Introducing Violet DL Card
I’m back teaching again, something that makes me very happy. Got a couple of Cisco courses, and we’re getting to the end of semester. In class last Thursday, the conversation took a turn towards cupcakes.
Before you know it, behold:
The collision of sugar and segments. Packets and piping. Cisco and Cupcakes.
And now, should probably get back to CCNP prep!
So, I finally sat and passed my CCNA exam, and now almost a month later, I’ve finally posted about it here!
The biggest take away for me from the whole process was how much easier it was to focus and study once I’d booked the exam in. It was hard work, sure, but once I’d taken away the option of doing it later, or doing some other exam first perhaps, everything happened a lot quicker.
Having said all that, it was certainly my intention to start studying for the next exam straight after I did the CCNA. Obviously not having learned from experience, I have taken until pretty much right now to actually decide what that next exam should be. Should I start my CCNP? Do CCNA Security? Knock out a couple of Sun exams? All perfectly valid options, and by having options I was thinking about them, and not getting any study done. So, as of 20 minutes ago, I’ve booked in for my CCNA Security exam for late September.
Now that I’ve got my date, I know what I need to do between now and then. Looking forward to the challenge!
We’ve got a script that parses install logs for each Solaris client looking for errors and then generating a summary report of what happened and what went wrong. It works well, but until recently, it’s been quite limited as it only flagged variations of the words Error and Warning. That was ok originally, but the install scripts got more complicated and it’s now been out grown.
After seeing a few variations on “cannot”, including “can not”, “can’t” and “could not” and “couldn’t” showing up in the logs, I thought it’d be interesting to audit some of the common unix commands we use in the scripts and see what sort of words they use to describe errors. It turned out to be quite a long list.
These are all taken from Solaris 10 10/08 clients. Where relevant I’ve kept them case sensitive.
The thing about most unix commands is that they’re generally not very chatty. There’s a good chance if they’re producing any sort of output at all, it’s probably an error of some description. With that in mind, it’s quite possible there’s a much more elegant way of writing the parse scripts.
So it’s fairly public knowledge now that Ellen & I are expecting our first kid later this year.
Not particularly much else to write about it at this early stage (13 weeks).
Looking forward to being able to write & post a whole lot more down the track though 
This morning I set out to do something fairly simple. I’ve got a directory full of JumpStart log files (generated as a client is JumpStarted) and I want to purge everything older than six months.
Should be a simple one liner cron job right? You’re right, it is. But I had to discover what it wasn’t before I could reach that conclusion.
Here’s my directory structure:
/export/home/loguser/clienthostname-timestamp/ and inside each clienthostname-timestamp directory is a bunch of log files, some with unique names.
I wanted to use logadm to rotate the old logs right out of existance. After a lot of discovering all sorts of things logadm could do for me, it turns out that just deleting a directory full of files isn’t one of them. Delete the contents of a file? No problem. Delete the file itself? Not a chance. Bummer.
In the end, find is going to do exactly what I want:
find /export/home/loguser -type d -mtime +180 -exec rm -rf {} \;
That’s all good and simple and I’m happy with that solution. But if I knew I could just do that, why did I burn so much time trying to get logadm to play nice?
I wanted to use what seemed to be the right tool for the job. From the logadm man page:
logadm - manage endlessly growing log files
It sounds right, and more importantly, whoever comes after me looking for why log files seem to be disappearing is probably going to start their search there. Log files… think logadm. Unfortunately, it’s not going to be quite that simple for them and I’m keenly aware that “them” could very well be me.
I spent a few minutes flicking back through my photo archives, both locally and on Flickr. Inevitably I was disappointed about how I had far less photos that I had thought.
It’s disappointing, because I try to take a lot of photos. Not of anything special or monumentous. I just want to take pics of what I see when I’m out and about. I try to take my camera with me as much as possible. I even bought an awesome little camera to take around with me so I couldn’t use the “don’t feel like schlepping around the dSLR” excuse. It’s true, I do take my G10 pretty much everywhere. But there’s a new and unexpected problem. Me. I’m going places, I’m taking my camera. I’m not taking photos.
It’s Resistance and it’s kicking my ass and it’s doing it because I’m letting it.
Enough.
Making pictures is something I need to do so it’s time I stop finding excuses and just do it.
Right now.
What better follow up to shooting the Mont 24Hr than to get out the very next weekend and shoot the 24Hr Solo Champs.
These crazy girls and guys slogged it out around Mt. Majura in sunshine during the day and rain during the night.
I’m pretty sure I managed to get a shot of everyone competing which I was pretty happy about. Of course this is much easier to do when it’s the same folks going around the track and not swapping out for team mates like in the Mont.
My next personal challenge is to not only shoot the riders, fun as that is, but also spend a lot more time around Event HQ finding willing subjects in the support crews. Action shots are certainly gratifying, but looking over the results of the last two weekends, there is a void in my coverage. The off track happenings are missing and my album is much poorer for it.
Here’s some highlights, and as always contact me with your rider number if you’d like to see any pics I have of you.
Last weekend I had a fantastic time shooting the Mont 24 hour Mountain Bike event at Sparrow Hill, just out of Canberra.
It was obvious that everyone was having a great time – despite the grueling physical challenge people were putting themselves through.
Highlights in this slideshow below, plus check the details in the set here to see if I have a shot of you or someone you know!
Just received the regular email newsletter from Kiva, and saw they have included some interesting stats.
In 42 months, 472765 users have provided $66,854,835 in loan capital.
Two things struck me as pretty cool. Firstly, nearly $67 million in about three and a half years is pretty amazing.
But even better than that is that it was raised by less than half a million people – probably even less than that as they only specified Kiva users, not actually lenders. So your average Kiva user has put up about $40/year. Not really a lot to make a huge difference is it? I used to easily spend that on Starbucks on any given week.
So I’m left thinking two things. Firstly, it’s about time I put up another $25 for a loan. Secondly, I’d like to challenge you to chip in $25. Remember, this isn’t even a donation. It’s a loan that gets paid back, so there’s a very very good chance you’ll still get to spend that $25 on whatever the hell you want. Or you can recycle it and lend it to someone else.
What else did you have in mind to make the world a better place today?