Ron's Blog

Almost there!

2010-04-07T16:53:00.002-05:00

Woo-hoo! The seller's bank approved the short sale, so we should be able to close on the purchase of our condo at the end of May!

Here are a couple pictures of our soon-to-be new home:

Fun with Tomato Firmware (and struggles)

2010-03-23T23:34:00.004-05:00

Since I managed to reset my dd-wrt loaded wireless router hard enough to clear the settings, it seemed like a good time to try out the Tomato Firmware for my linksys WRT54GS.

For the single access point router/wireless AP, it works great. Easy install/setup, logging to a Windows fileshare for bandwidth and spiffy graphs.

But... I flashed my second WRT54GS that I had set up for a wireless ethernet bridge and am getting nowhere with it. It is not connecting to the main AP at all, and I don't see any reason why things aren't working in the log files. As far as I can see with google searches, it either works or doesn't for folks.

And I figured it out. Problem was I had the second AP/Bridge set up for WPA/WPA2. Fixing it to WPA resolved the errors on the network interface and all was good to go

House Shopping

2010-03-15T18:04:00.002-05:00

Given Federal Housing Tax Credit: Home it seems to be a good time to buy. So Lisa and I went shopping last weekend, and saw a few places. The two that stood out to us were:

411, 406 Wacouta St, St Paul‎- more info »
For sale: $164,900
2 bed 1 bath

Union Station, St. Paul
Price: $164,900
Bedrooms: 1
Bathrooms: 1

There a few other places we're interested in looking at, including On The Park Condominiums and Lowry Building. Busy times ahead (and I'm too lazy to clean up the html, so abusing copy/paste )

Weekend Fun

2008-07-28T14:00:00.002-05:00

Quiet weekend for me. I played some pick-up hockey on Friday night, leveled my two horde chars on Saturday.

On Sunday my friend Tony came by for more netbook fun:

First we installed 1 GB DIMMs into each of the toys. 8 screws on the bottom of the netbook, 6 more under the keyboard holding the upper faceplate then two remaining that held the motherboard down. Flip the motherboard over to access the memory slot. This was a royal pain, could not have done it without this guide (and pictures!). Even still, we had to drill out one of my screws I stripped on my first break-down attempt. Running 1.5 GB RAM now, happy time!
Second I imaged some flash drives for USB booting: One with the Aspire factory image, one with flash-persistant ubuntu and a copy of Backtrack 3 on a directory in my everyday 4GB windows flash drive.

Geeky fun times...

Fun with the "netbook" laptop class

2008-07-24T09:10:00.001-05:00

I picked up an Acer Aspire One "ultraportable netbook" last week, and have been quite impressed. From Acer Aspire one UMPC launches in US :

Meant to compete with ASUS’ Eee PC, the Aspire one uses Intel’s 1.6GHz Atom CPU in all of its variations, along with an 8.9-inch, 1024×600 (WSVGA) display with integrated webcam and Intel’s Media Accelerator 950 graphics. While information and specs on the basic system were already known, Acer has revealed two other variations of its first mini laptop.
The basic one comes with 512MB of RAM memory and an 8GB solid-state drive. The flash drive’s storage space is expandable via an SD card reader. A 4-in-1 card reader lets users transfer large files to and from the nearly 2.2-pound UMPC. To keep the price low, the OS is Linpus Linux Lite, and a three-cell, roughly three-hour battery is in place. Accessories connect to the mini notebook via three USB 2.0 ports.

This hit the sweet spot for me: $380 for a 9" screen and usable keyboard weighing in at under 2.2 pounds. The Linpus Linux Lite distro is tuned for the hardware and based on Fedora 8 (making it simple to install other packages using yum). Usability was given a week-long test by my wife, and she was able to use it for her web email and flash/java games with no problems. It's available now from Newegg

I'm guessing that in a couple months something will come out that could beat it on the price/performance curve, but I'm happy with it now.

Last Week or So...

2008-07-24T09:09:00.000-05:00

Been on what feels like a mad pace for the last couple weeks:

Reinstalling servers for work. Working on two servers at a team, each of the servers has 8+ network cables and 13 network ports. On recabling this made for some fun, as the OS installation changed the order of the network ports from the pre-rebuild state.
Server installation means running of the team hardening scripts. Seems that I picked the wrong revision of the scripts, and all devices in the /dev tree were deleted. This brought me on a voyage of discovery for me:

For recreating most of the devices under solaris, "devfsadm -C" works nicely. This is similar to a reconfiguration boot. But...
The VERITAS storage devices are not created. This is awkward, since the boot drives are VERITAS (VXFS) devices. Google found me IT Resource Center forums - VxVM /dev/vx recovery - This thread ... which was enough information that I was able to extrapolate how to to rebuild the devices...

I spent last week in Palo Alto training on Symantec Cluster Server. Then after landing Saturday afternoon at 4 PM I got to catch some sleep for the 1:30 AM change involving the failover of work's internal cluster from production to the BCP servers for a one-month switch. Things would have gone smoother if the SAN team had "put the LUN in the map group" the first time. I don't know what that means, except that it took me a couple hours of time (and manager abuse) to show that it was not my fault the cluster wasn't coming up before the SAN team could find their little oversight.
The little Acer Aspire One netbook has been running nicely.

Lisa used it when I was in class to handle her email and play web games and had no problems with it.
This evening I had a bit of fun with Backtrack. I copied the files to a USB flash drive and was able to boot from that and use the network tools to scan the area wireless networks.

I'm on call now. The sad thing is that this is the quietest day I've had in a couple weeks.

I actually logged into WoW for a little bit last night. I had my two thirty-something chars get their first ground mounts, which is now available at lvl 30 for 35g with patch 2.4. I think I might start playing on the horde side, as I haven't seen that story much at all. Though I might just switch to playing with my copy of Orange Box...

It's about time...

2008-07-24T09:08:00.001-05:00

To start posting again...

DefCon 14 Fun

2006-08-05T10:42:00.000-05:00

Well, I'm out at DefCon 14 this weekend, always a learning experience. I did catch the following talks:

Fighting Organized Cyber Crime

Thomas X. Grasso
Remote Pair Programming and Test-driven Development Using Open Source

Matt Hargett & Luis Miras
Trusted Computing: Could it be... SATAN?

Bruce Potter
Hacking Malware: Offense is the new Defense

Valsmith & Danny Quist

By that time I was done for the day, as I never got back to it after my nap. I still caught some good sessions, and quite a few of the talks I missed have their presentations on the CD that came with the registration.

Now it's time to get back to it...

Back to work...

2006-07-12T10:59:00.000-05:00

Well, it's a little late. Still I have the pictures up for my trip to Cincinnati with Lisa over the Fourth of July weekend.

I hope to get some text in there, along with the link from the front page of ronspace, but that'll have to wait for when I get the time.

Back to the blog...

2006-06-06T15:58:00.000-05:00

Well, I don't seem to have spent much time updating this. Since my last update I've left Productive Corp. and gone on to contract at Honeywell Automation and Control Systems. I'm working through Manpower, which is a new experience for me.

Still, the pay is good and the work is interesting. Happy times...

2005-04-11T10:11:00.000-05:00

Well, I'm back from LA. Didn't post much, it seems. <grin>

2005-04-01T15:58:00.000-06:00

Still grinding away here at work today. I drove over to New Brighton to meet with another company about potential subcontracting work: they had a couple of UNIX administration positions that were part-time engagements. Of course, after talking rates I found that one of these gigs was being billed to the client at only $68/hour. No wonder they've been having trouble filling the gig with competent help...

2005-03-31T13:24:00.000-06:00

Interesting day so far. I received my bags from Campmor today, and am very impressed with the High Sierra Wheeled Carry-On Backpack, though I haven't decided on the Columbia Smoke Courier Bag.

A client asked me about complaints they've been getting from dial-up users of their site. Looking into it, I found that their "home page" was nearly 4 MB! And at over 210 KB their most commonly loaded page takes 43 seconds at 56K, right on the edge of usability IMO. I got quite a bit from from this Web Page Analyzer. And then google lead me to Alertbox, Eleganthack and Gizmodo. (OK, Gizmodo might have been a bit of a detour. <Grin>)

But now I need to get cracking. Time to get the servers built and the architecture document written!

2005-03-30T16:26:00.000-06:00

Well, my room's booked for next weeks training. A trip to LA should be fun, especially since I get to go with a buddy... And there's always Fry's...

2005-03-30T16:02:00.000-06:00

Getting back into the swing of things today. I've been investigating economical load-balancing/failover solutions, and learned a few things:

Refurbished BigIP boxes can be had at crazy cheap prices. Pretty cool...

RedHat offers their own cluster/load-balancing solution (based on their Piranha project) that looks interesting, but adding the cost of clustering software plus RHEL and it isn't cheap...

Ultra Monkey! Cool name, looks like it was originally a project by VA Linux and is now it's own open source project. I just need to figure out if anyone actually uses it. One option that looks interesting is the Streamline High Availability and Load Balancing topology. ÃÂÃÂ This allows one to run the Linux Directors and Web Servers into the same hosts. It's not scalable beyond two nodes, but would be enough to cover for Application Server hiccups.

Stuff to look into, anyways...

2005-03-29T15:19:00.000-06:00

Well, I took the exam today. I probably should have spent more time studying:

Section 4: Configure Solaris IP Filter
4.1 Configure the behavior of Solaris IP Filter using packet direction (in keywords and out keywords), and using rule processing (block keywords, pass keywords, quick keywords, and group keywords)
4.2 Configure and modify filtering on an IP address, network interface, protocol type, and port.
4.3 Configure logging in Solaris IP Filter, passed packets, blocked packets, and rule match and analyze logged information and statistics.

I spent my most of my time reviewing the Solaris 9 Network Admin guides and materials. D'oh!

2005-03-28T14:05:00.000-06:00

Study for the exam is going well. I even found some bonus study time on the drive in. After almost a year of commuting from Woodbury to downtown Minneapolis, I've found the express route. $2.50 is the one-way fare, but given how much gas costs this is still probably a win. Especially since I can buy $45 worth of fares for $40...

2005-03-27T11:48:00.000-06:00

Well, it's been a while... My plan is to be updating this blog every day, or at least several times a week.

Today I'm working on study for the Sun Solaris 10 Network Administrator certification exam. Since I hold a couple of their certs already, I applied and received a voucher for a free beta exam run.

Of course, I haven't even installed Solaris 10 yet. <grin> I've had the CDs burned for a while now, so it's time to play with VMware again. I built a Solaris 9 VMware image last summer, so wasn't too worried. And the installation went well: the only thing I didn't think of was to disable USB before the installation to reduce error message noise.

2004-08-25T16:37:00.000-05:00

Well, I haven't updated this that much lately...

I skated the Saint Paul Inline Marathon last weekend, followed up with a trip north to my Grandma's funeral. Fun, then not fun. So I'm looking forward to some rest this weekend...

Maybe I'll put up some bookshelves. <grin>

I do have my marathon results up online at ronspace now...

2004-08-01T10:06:00.000-05:00

I can't quite seem to get into the hang of updating this daily (or more often), but here's another update:

I'm enjoying Defcon 12 this weekend, and there have been some great talks. One of the best was Dan Kaminsky's talk on fun that can be had with DNS. Basically, one can use DNS to forward data (similar to http-tunneling), and Dan demonstrated both forwarding SSH and live audio streams using only DNS.

What makes this cool is two things:

DNS traffic is had to control through firewalls, and the methods describe work nicely with recursive DNS servers allowing inside/outside traffic.
Audio streaming is slick because this allows using the local DNS server as a caching server for the local network. Multi-casting on the cheap!

I was very impressed...

2004-07-22T05:34:00.000-05:00

Yes, it's way too early, and I'm in at Domino's Corporate labs on the (hopefully) final tests for the software roll-out. I missed my hockey game last night, so this better work...

2004-07-14T08:47:00.000-05:00

Well, it's been a busy time...
Last weekend I moved most of my apartment to my new home with Lisa in Woodbury. Now everything is piled up in the basement, waiting for me to unpack, stack and organize. (My bookshelves are being finished, so most of the boxes can't be unpacked yet.) When I get time...
Right now finding time is even more challenging, since I'm in Ann Arbor this week and half of next... I'm helping Domino's Pizza roll out software to their stores. I'm meeting with a friend from the last time I worked in Detroit tonight, and should be able to hook up with a couple other guys as well.
Maybe next month I'll get some rest... <grin>

2004-06-14T00:40:00.000-05:00

It's been a couple of weeks since my last posting...

I spent Sunday through Wednesday last week in Montreal! Fun time, though very busy working on another eTrust Antivirus architecture document. Flying back Wednesday afternoon got me to hockey only 10-15 minutes late.

Then Thursday I was off to Las Vegas! Lisa and I flew out here, and are staying at the Mirage... Yesterday we were married at the Las Vegas Wedding Chapel and I have the pictures online at ronspace.

2004-05-24T11:21:00.000-05:00

And now I'm back out in Omaha. This week I should only be on site Monday though Wednesday, giving me a chance to get to my Hockey School session on Wednesday night. It all depends on how the roll-out goes...

2004-05-17T15:06:00.000-05:00

I'm living the life in Omaha right now...
CA has me out working with West Corp. on a eTrust Antivirus architecture. I expect I'll be seeing what the local restaurants offer. <grin>

2004-05-10T22:02:00.000-05:00

Well, last night's hockey game was a blast. There were just ten of us from this summers beginner school class, along with one of the instructors playing on defense. So, we had two full lines and a goaltender. We were playing the Spartans, last Winters Beginners league second place team.
Well, we won. <grin> 4-2. Much fun...

2004-05-09T20:13:00.000-05:00

Well, it's a busy weekend for me. Yesterday Lisa and I drove up to Crosby to see my Grandmother and today I'm playing hockey. No hockey pictures tonight, but I do have picture of my Grandma from a trip north a couple years back. Soon I'll get hockey pictures up on Ronspace.

2004-04-29T08:14:00.000-05:00

Well, yesterday wasn't fun...

I applied security updates to a server before leaving for the evening on Tuesday, and left while it was rebooting. Not a good idea...

When I checked on the server from at home, I was unable to reach it. So I came in early yesterday morning, hoping I could get things running quickly. Turns out it was in a reboot loop with a corrupted registry.

Digging around, I found the procedure MS KB 307545: How to Recover from a Corrupted Registry That Prevents Windows XP from Starting which gave me a work-around to get things working for the day.
Then in the evening I tried running chkdsk on the C: drive, and the Windows 2000 Registry Repair Utility, but neither did the trick. I ended up checking each of the files, and it was the c:\winnt\system32\config\software registry file that was mangled. I replaced it with the old copy from c:\winnt\repair\ and had success (AD now running). I had to reinstall the Win2K components I added after initial installation, along with other applications. But I did get out of the office before 10 PM...

2004-04-25T20:16:00.000-05:00

I'm renaming my blog to http://ronspace.blogspot.com/ for fun...

2004-04-25T11:51:00.000-05:00

Well, this is my first posting using Gaim-blogger from http://gaim-blogger.sourceforge.net/ and all seems to work fine...

2004-04-25T11:41:00.000-05:00

Well, still working on getting Blogger and Gaim working together. I think I've got it working now, so may keep up-to-date...

2004-01-08T14:15:00.000-06:00

Well, everyone else has one...

So here's my blog. I'm going to play with the GAIM plugin, and see how that works...