N34D - Nerd Rantings

My IT Girl (aka sumchick) hacking the toner!

These cartridges cost $145 each, but she found the hidden refill spot!

First, cut away a small section of the plastic.

Second, fill it!

Ok, so I was trying to find good internet connection speed tests, and they all just kinda stink past 5mbit.

Then I found www.speedtest.net works great, and I can actually validate my connections.

Take a look:

Ok, I was talking to a few nerd friends, and the consensus point that was brought up is:

"If you breadboard a project every time, there are a few staple items in every project, the pic, the crystal, and the programming header."

Now there are a few more, but those above are the common among every single one of my pic projects.

But I still don't get the Arduino. As with most every eval/dev kit I have, the pins are sometimes reserved for this or that, or not broken out the way I want them.

So, my friends asked why I don't just throw together a simple bare bones project PCB. Well, I said, because I still have to connect it to a breadboard for the rest of the circuit.

At this point, we are trying to figure out a good way to do this, and bring the pins out in a fashion that allows me to connect to a breadboard easily, or use directly off of the PCB.

So stay tuned....its in the works....now this wont be a wow project, wow as in that's amazing, just simply a tool to allow one to prototype a little faster using the compilers/programmers that they are already use too.

Again, stay tuned....

I often oversee several servers, and I try to automate allot of my tasks. In doing so, I often have a bash script that will push files out to other servers and restart them.

To make SCP and SSH work without a password you must first do this:

ssh-keygen -t dsa

Now you need to have your public key placed onto the remote server. On the remote server, you place this key in userhome .ssh/authorized_keys2 file.

I like to be able to do this with one simple command, here you go:

cat /root/.ssh/id_dsa.pub | ssh host.domain.com "cat >> /root/.ssh/authorized_keys2"

This will add the public key for the root user to the server host.domain.com

After that, SSH and SCP commands now worth without a password.

--enjoy

A couple years ago, I was hired to come in and clean up a company, from a technology standpoint. The company A just bought out company B.

Here is what I walked into. The server room was a Server Room / IT office. However, you do not ever know where the slash was? That is what is the server part and what is the IT part?

For a rack, they used a book case, and stuffed equipment in anywhere they could. Now, I totally get it, do what you can with what you have. But, when you do, don't be proud of it, it looks like crap!

What you are seeing is 2 consoles, and a butt load of Serial MUX devices.

Can you believe this company actually ran dedicated ds0 circuits between locations and rand serial data over those lines, this is high cost and low speed.

There is allot of equipment buried that you do not see. And I have to bring in more equipment. Once the new network is brought up, I need to dump as much serial devices as possible. I ditched the DS0 circuits, and rand the data over the internet. We saved over $2,000 per month doing this!! The stuff that has to stay serial, I will made accessible over the network.

The hardest part was transitioning everything live, and having as little down time as possible. This company, as well the the parent when merged had over 9 locations across the major LA area, Orange County and Arizona.

The only image image I have that shows the final product of this rebuild. Sorry for the low quality, it was taken really quick with my phone.

The first rack contained DVR's Phones, voicemail and mass storage. The mass storage was 3x 3U servers with 8x hard drives in a raid 5 system with 2x hot spares.

The second rack, with a monitor on it, is the KVM location, as well as all the public servers below it.

The third rack, was the legacy application. It was an old SCO server, and required the use of serial ports to connect to remote terminals. I connected the serial ports to a set of console servers, that allowed me to make the serial ports available over the network. Then I just ran terminal emulators on the PC side for the application.

The rack on the far right, is the communications rack, it contains all local site patch panels, all switching private and public, routers, and remote location routing.

The monitors on the wall on the far right were redeployments of old Wyse Terminals, I used these to show the various status of the network, bandwidth, etc...

Along the middle of each rack was 2x 1U PDU's as well.

Well, that's it, thank you for reading....

I was thinking today about a debate I had years ago about cigarette companies. Now I won't go into if I am for or against these companies. The discussion I had was about the trickledown effect of stopping these companies, or banning smoking altogether.

These companies are rather large and employ allot of people directly, in the thousands. So if we put an end to them, then there will be thousands of people unemployed.

Let's take it further, who else will suffer, and possibly downsize?

Drivers, the ones who deliver raw products to these companies, and the ones who deliver products related to these companies in other streams.

Cardboard manufactures, all those boxes no longer needed, those companies will have to downsize

Ink suppliers, someone has mix the ink that is used for all the printing on boxes and ads.

As you can see, there are several downstream suppliers that will lose revenue.

Ok, so what does this have to do with Energy Efficiency? Simple, if we lower our costs of electricity be reducing the demand of it, then the suppliers will no longer have the same profit levels. And I don't think that energy companies can advertise with catch slogans and bill boards. What would it say? "Use your blow-dryers, you deserve it, use an electric blanket, you deserve it."

These companies have allot of money invested in infrastructure, poles, underground wiring, towers, yards, employees, trucks, etc...

If they make less money, they will have to cut back on employment; directly and indirectly by reducing resources, and the companies that supply those resources will also have to cut back. Let us assume someone created/invented the miracle box for $100, a 1ft box that plugs into your house and supplies all the power you will ever need! Everyone would buy one! Heck, I would buy 3 or 4.

If everyone had one, then imagine all the people instantly unemployed by the power companies, and their subsidiaries.

Here is mini NOC / Telco closet.

Sadly, when the sliding doors were put in, there was not enough room to hold a 4 post rack in the correct orientation, thus, it sits sideways in the corner.

The monitors on top are all connected to a single PC and will show various network status from differnt parts of the network, as well as bandwidth graphs of all remote locations.

The left rack is used to hold:

Power Monitors that show line Voltage / Current for each circuit.

A KVM

And the seperate battery backups. One for the comunications rack, video camera system, corp servers, and location servers.

The rack in the middle is the comunication rack, it holds routers, firewalls, switches, and patch panels.

The right, is the 4 post rack, holding video servers, virtual machine servers, PCoIP servers, and raid file servers.