13 steps

Vacation’s all over, and it royally sucked.
Seeing as the Malaysia thing p00fed last minute it was impossible to plan anything else seeing as everyone was busy working or on vacation themselves.

So aside from one nice day at the beach in Belgium on the 31st I spent most of the time doing useful crap like rearranging my appartment and finally getting rid of a lot of stuff I never had the time for.

Last week was the first week back at work, and it was horrible. Zandweter left for his holiday on tuesday and ofcourse immediately Murphy’s law kicked in as the 1 system I know jack about because he always maintains it started acting up and disconnecting users at random. Not fun seeing as it’s the main ERP.
So after a week of that shit and plenty of overtime I’m already in need of vacation again (or maybe still seeing as I didn’t go anywhere).

Bres and me did have a good day at the beach in Zeeland yesterday, luckily the weather cleared up nicely doing the day and we even got some sun. Just in time, because at night we had to drive back through a freak storm. 500km in a day (several detours as usual), not too shabby.
If it had rained during the day we might have gone to Paris or Berlin, but we’ll save that for the next time. I must say it’s quite relaxing to go nuts on the weekend and go out and about like that.

This is the end of the first week of 3 weeks of vacation in total, and I haven’t done much thusfar, hehe. My continued lack of sleep seems to have caught up to me or waited for this moment to bite me in the ass and I spent much of the week comatose. Except for Commie coming over the past few days, going out for dinner yesterday evening in a sunny tourist setting kickstarted the vacation vibe for real. Spent today reading William Gibson’s Count Zero from cover to cover. I love his way of telling a story. Page 2 and you’re already lost with the characters in a crazy and chaotic world which looks like sci-fi at first but has frightening similarities with present day upon closer inspection.
Last weekend was fun as well, spent 2 evenings out and about in town with Bresnjev and a few others. Relaxing, enjoying a few beers and live music.
We further discussed some plans for future endeavours, cruisin’ Europe on the weekends from time to time. Ofcourse money is still an issue, but we’ll figure it out somehow. Carpe diem and all that, we all seem to have grown tired of life getting in the way of living.

#I’ve seen the moon
And the first sunrise
I’ll leave it to the memories
And kiss the wind goodbye#

edit: well, no Malaysia after all… time to figure out what to do the next 2 weeks.

‘nough said.

In other news, 2 weeks of training over! Woohoo. It really was a bit much.
The Linux week kicked butt but the MCSA course was a bit of a let down. 5 sysadmins, all of which had a shitload more experience than me, but some I wouldn’t let near a comp of mine, they were that ehm… slow. Also, the ‘microsoft’ way of training isn’t really my cup of tea. I prefer my course material to be extremely to the point, concise and consistent. M$’s book left us debating what the hell they meant half the time. I’m still glad I went though, picked up enough things to improve things at work for the next several months, and ofcourse I have 4 more courses before the end of the year…

ps. Thanks again CommS for your hospitality.

The vacation plans are still not 100% set in stone, so… to be continued.

Tomorrow the third and final Linux training starts, the one that got cancelled in April because of the server crash.
It was scheduled to start last week but when I showed up there last wednesday they told me it was rescheduled… I was not happy after driving 2 hours to get there. So now it’s the entire next week. And to add joy the first MCSA course also got rescheduled… it’s the entire week after next week. So that’s 2 solid weeks of training, ugh.
Needless to say I won’t be around much, I’ll be in veggie mode and/or afk at least.
So that’ll make July w00sh by even faster than it already is, which may be a good thing all things considered. Work and training seem to eat up most of my time, and my personal life seems to be going down the drain further and further due to various reasons, most of which beyond my control. I’m still twitching to go on vacation, but lacking the money to go to Malaysia with Commie so I have to find something else to do next month during those 2 weeks I took off from work, preferably somewhere along the Mediterranean.
Meh.

Nothing surprising there.
Funny stuff though, they queried Altavista for things like “AmigaOS rules” (ofcourse) and “OsX sucks” to come up with this meter.
Yep yep, Windows and Linux suck. Harsh but true… sorta anyway, they both have their merits.

In a totally random moment I decided to post this pic of the view I have for a rather large part of my waking moments, my workspace:

I could have dumped this in the gallery but I figured it was more blog material given my recent comp/OS posts in here (not to mention my rants about work ; )
3 screens, left one belongs to my testmachine, here running the Suse 9.2 proxy/firewall which has already gone live. I reinstalled it yesterday and it’s now running the latest preview release of Ubuntu, which is a GREAT distro for every Linux lover who wants to play with the latest versions of any and all software. Make sure you don’t get the preview release but a stable one unless you absolutely know what you’re doing as things seem to be broken quite a bit (as is to be expected in a beta release). But Gnome 2.10 and KDE 3.4 are very yummy.
Moving on…. the central screen is my main box, running XP (with an OsX flavored theme ofcourse). It’s a pain in the butt and I use it as little as possible, Outlook still makes me vomit and I’m still twitching for Lotus Domino every now and again.
And finally on the right is the screen which is hooked up to 4 of the servers via a KVM switch.

Halfway through March again, time to smell spring.
I’m also halfway through the Novell Certified Linux Professional training having just completed the second administration course. Very interesting stuff, but a bit much to take in all at once during 5 days.
I seem to be fiddling with half a dozen operating systems at the moment, which is cool, I just get random waves of information overkill every now and again.
After having picked up the Mac a few weeks ago I’ve been playing with it a lot and I must say, I’m very impressed. It’s a lot faster than I thought an old G4/350Mhz would be and it’s almost good enough for daily use. Almost, because ofcourse I couldn’t resist diving into the BSD side of things and the poor little box is currently spending a lot of time compiling software using the incredible Fink Commander. Le Mac really does offer the best of both worlds. The standard Mac apps are all beautifully integrated in ways that make the whole end user experience a lot more enjoyable than I thought possible. The ‘it just works’ credo holds true.
And there’s a lot more freeware available than I had imagined. Some of the things I’ve installed and use at the moment include Adium, VLC, SubEthaEdit, Cyberduck, MenuMeters, Growl & TigerLaunch, and that’s not counting all the software I know from Linux.
Some things seem to be noticeably missing for reasons I can’t comprehend.
Everyone seems to be so much in love with iTunes that there’s no real Winamp port. Now ok, iTunes does run a whole lot faster on the Mac but still, I can’t stand the interface compared to Winamp. I want my damn ‘normal’ playlist! I also have yet to find anything that comes even remotely close to Grabit, my favourite Usenet binary grabber.
Still, with the amount of buzz Apple is generating at the moment and switchers crawling out of the woodworks by the thousands (or so it seems), it can’t be long before more of that kind of software surfaces. And if not I still have my linux ports, hehe.

The new version of Os X, codename Tiger is rumoured to be released in April at which time all the Macs will be bumped to 512MB standard, so anyone wishing to buy one would be wise to wait another month.

I’m not getting one because I’m broke as f00k and I got shafted with my contract renewal. A lousy $50 a month rise…. whoopdee-fucking-doodaa. That’s inflation correction, not a raise. That still leaves me about $500 short compared to what I used to make. *grumbles* In a bizarre twist of fate they have agreed to pay me a MCSA training so I’ll actually know what I’m doing with the new SBS 2003 server we just got, I’m looking forward to that. so in a few months time I’ll have done enough and had enough training to go from admin n00b to fully qualified Linux and Windows sysadmin.
Not bad. Now if I could just afford the car check up next week life would look a whole lot sunnier.

C’est la vie.

I’m starting to get to that point where that line between work and hobby fade, quite possibly for the first time in my ‘career’, which I’m starting to like.
So the money’s not all that, but I kinda like the fact that I’m driving to work wondering what I’m going to fiddle with today.

Spent a lot of time this week on a Suse box which has been setup as a proxy and firewall for the second DSL line. And it’s working beautifully. I’m using Squid for the proxy, which took quite a while to figure out. It works out of the box but seeing as I’m using 2 NIC’s to bridge between the local network and the web and I wanted to set it up in a particular way that the proxy isn’t visible from the outside, all the traffic to the box HAS to go through the proxy and I wanted to implement access control lists so the main users only have limited access whereas me and my colleague have full access plus several other more advanced thingies I won’t bore you with… it took a while. Especially seeing as the config file is a (well documented) 55 page monster.
Ntop is a beautiful script for network stats with all the details and lovely views you could possibly ask for.

So all of this fiddling is making me like Linux more and more. It may take a little more time to set it up correctly than on Windows but it sure as hell is worth the effort.
Hehe, I still have to figure out why the damn thing is able to send out mails over the net without me having configured anything for mail. No smtp, no nothing, and trust me, I’ve checked everywhere, but when I use the mail command it still manages to send it out.

Meanwhile we upgraded our fileserver last week which was chugging along on Fedora Core 1 (don’t look at me, it wasn’t my idea) and spitting out 5MB worth of errorlogs on Samba alone each day to Core 3 and it’s been running silky smooth eversince. Ofcourse I plan on moving that to Suse as well eventually but for now this’ll do.

I have my second training in about 2 weeks, I’m looking forward to that, more tips and tricks and another step closer to becoming a NCLP.

In other random news, I bought an Apple! By accident, sort of…
I’d been bidding on some for a while, always making low bids and hoping I’d get lucky. But with the busyness and financial setbacks I’d forgotten about them, until some dude mailed me saying I’d won. So I went ‘eh’ and had to scroll back through my mail to see exactly what he was referring to, at which time the ‘eh’ changed to ‘ooooh’. So I’m now the proud new owner of a G4 PowerMac. It’s an old thing, running at 350Mhz, but it’s My First Mac so I’m still pretty damn pleased with it. Thanks to Commie for picking it up for me.

Nicked from Huntress.

Ah yeah, and happy New Year!

[ mood | happy ]
[ music | Within Temptation - Angels ]

Har har, I’ve got a Gmail account. Been itching to try it out because I was rather curious to see how Google minimalism would be translated to a webmail interface, and I must say, they’ve done it again. Very slick, very lightweight and fast and with some very well executed ideas.
I love how they show your messages in threads, and the interface is impressive to say the least.

And on another note, equally minimalistic, Apple announced the new iMac today, and boy is it yummy.
Ofcourse I’d still prefer a PowerMac (hehe, aside from the fact I’m broke as a bum) but from a design point of view I think this is perfect. And ofcourse this is the only way I’d be able to squeeze an additional comp on my desk.