The Life of a Sysadmin

Just doin' my part.

Since Shaw has apparently started to filter port 25, I've temporarily set up shop on linode.com. Gotta say I'm pretty happy so far; it's a neat setup, the Debian install took minutes, the price is right, and I get reverse DNS. Nice!

Shaw's timing could not have been worse; I found out a week before Clara, Arlo and I are heading off to Ontario. (That's the day after tomorrow, for those playing the home game.) However, Debian makes it damned easy, and anyway there were only 8 sites -- not all that much, all told, especially since no one had any terribly special requirements. I'm even more sold than I was before on Debian as a server distro.

So tired -- this was meant to be a longer entry, but I don't have the jam right now.

Last week, when I figured I'd have to move servers, I figured I had three options:

• Regular hosting: no go, since I wanted flexibility and shell access.
• Colocation: too expensive.
• Virtual machine: "But the one in the middle was just right!"

This Ask Slashdot gave me lots of suggestions, and after puttering around for a while I narrowed it down to either JohnCompanies or Linode. They both had lots of good references, both in the article and elsewhere, but in the end the lower cost of Linode got me.

I ordered the 384 plan — 384MB RAM, 12GB disk space — and within a couple hours I was set up. Static IP (coming from cable, that's ver' nice), reverse DNS however you like (w00t!), and more transfer than I figure I'll use in a year (seriously).

The Debian install took, like, four minutes, tops. It was maybe an afternoon's work to figure out all the packages I needed (including stopping an accidental upgrade to -testing). Big shout out to rsync and ssh, without whom yadda yadda. All in all, dead dead simple.

The one thing that maybe should've been a bit more prominent in Linode's advertising is their use of the IO limiter patch for UML. I found out about this in passing after I'd signed up but before I'd had a chance to log in. (There are a few details about it here, and you can read the patch here.) In fairness, though, I've run up against the limit in untarring big-ass home directories, but not since.

Anyhow…pretty damned satisfied with Linode so far. Their web management panel is slick, the console access is lovely to have, and I've no complaints about performance yet. I'll probably just stick with them for a few months, as I hope to switch ISPs once I get back from vacation…but I think it'll be very tempting to stay with them.

I'm back from vacation, and a relaxing time it was. We got to enjoy the hospitality of a lot of family in Ontario, and sysadmin duties were pretty minimal. Hell, I didn't even check Slashdot the whole time.

I upgraded my dad's laptop to the newest version of Ubuntu, and got him a new wireless card that'll work in Linux (though with a restricted driver) as an early Father's Day gift. (If I had been able to buy him an old Orinoco somewhere, I'd've done that instead…as it is, I'll have to cringe under the wrath of my inner RMS. :-)

I also showed him how to FTP a new Wordpress theme to the server, and I have to say I'm impressed with how easy Gnome/Nautilus makes it for him. I'm starting to understand the appeal of a nice GUI, though I'm still sticking to my xterms for now.

As a bit of reciprocation, my dad gave me a 2GB SD card for the new camera we've got — which was nice, because the old 256MB card was filling up very quickly.

I was happy to get back to work and find that, really, there wasn't that much to clean up. Coworkers had filled in nicely for me, and the worst that had cropped up was an SQL bug in a new credit card payment form; it was failing to update the second of two places that indicate someone has paid. (Yes, redundant, but to be fixed next year.) I'm a bit irritated by this, as the bug was an SQL statement, passed to PEAR's Db module, that said:

...set updated_by="foo form" form" ...

Yes, this is my typo, but why did PHP not report this error? What happened, and why wasn't it being caught?

Anyhow. Now that I'm back, relaxed, forced by funding to put off Big Website Rewrites 'til next year and mostly done with this year's web work, I'm finally able to contemplate upgrading our Big Server(tm) to Solaris 10. That will be a bear of a job, but it'll be nice to get it done.

On the home front, I'll be switching to Uniserve's ADSL shortly. They do allow servers, and offer static IPs for a small charge; that'll be nice. We used them at my last job, and the service was fine as logn as you didn't have to contact tech support.

Surprisingly, they also have this clause in the TOS:

65. UNISERVE shall have the right, without notice, to insert advertising
data into the Internet browser used by a UNSERVE customer, and
transferred to a UNISERVE customer over UNISERVE's network, so long as
this does not involve UNISERVE establishing the identity of the
customer to whom such data is sent.

In a previous life at an ISP, we started putting in machines run by a company called Adzilla. They were, as far as I could tell, proxy servers that replaced the ads on, say, CNN's website with ones for local businesses. I thought it was scummy, but couldn't persuade the bosses of this. I'm fairly certain this is the same thing, and probably the same company too. I still don't like it, but Uniserve is the best option I've got right now. And at least they admit they're doing this.

I bought a T60 for my boss a while back, and have just finished putting in another memory module. Man, I knew this was the lower end of their laptops, but I had no idea it would feel so cheap.

To get at the memory, you take out a few screws on the back, then lift off the palm guard below the keyboard. It's flimsy plastic, and it's hard to get back in the right place - doubly so, since it feels like instead of clicking into place it's going to break. And you need to remove the ribbon that connects the touch pad and fingerprint reader in order to fully remove it; when putting it back in, it looks like it's going to get crimped. That can't be right.

I had been considering getting one of these, despite having fallen in love with my other boss' Dell D420. But this just makes me think that the extra money for the D420 would be worth it. Of course, I haven't had to crack that one open yet…

It's kinda cool when you're wearing this shirt, and someone who turns out to be the director of IT strategy jokes with you about it.

I tried ripping a CD recently on my desktop machine running Debian testing. grip seemed to hang, and I kept getting this error message in the logs:

hdc: write_intr: wrong transfer direction!

Google didn't turn up much that helped, except to suggest a simpler test case (cdparanoia -d /dev/hdc 1-1). Data CDs seemed to work just fine.

Finally tried upgrading the kernel package, from kernel-image-2.6.8-2-386 (the default kernel after installation) to linux-image-2.6.18-4-686, and that did the trick nicely.

Wout's back! This time, he's got an entry about running functions under sudo. Not only is this going into my .bashrc, but I've got some reading to do about command and Bash's getopts. (I had looked at getopts in Bash before, but I remember the example code being pretty Byzantine; it was enough to put me off using getopts in Bash at all. This looks much more reasonable.)

Incidentally, I'm writing this on the Linode node/machine/whatever, and there's noticeable lag. The CPU graph on the member's page says there's medium load; web server performance seems to be quite fine, so I'm not sure it's bandwidth. I mention it because this is the first time that's happened; so far, I've been very happy with Linode performance.

While trying to figure out how to get a colour printer to print colour (HP: why the hell would you turn off colour in the PPD for your colour printer? Huh?), I came across this very cool post from Martin Paul, the guy who wrote pca, the best damn Sun patching tool I've come across.

Turns out you can take a new version of printer firmware for your HP printer and print the damned thing to your printer to update it. In particular, he mentions the 79.00FE problem that has plagued me for a while; I'll have to give it a try.

Oh, and the PPD thing -- for the record, there's a new HP 4700dn in town. I'm adding it to Solaris 10, which once you figure out how to do it is relatively simple:

lpadmin -p NewPrinter -p /dev/null -m netstandard_foomatic
lpadmin -p NewPrinter -I PostScript -n /path/to/ppdfile
lpadmin -p NewPrinter -D "HP 666 in Room 212"
lpadmin -p NewPrinter -o dest=newprinter:9100 -o protocol=tcp -o timeout=5
cd /etc/lp/fd
for i in *fd ; do name=`basename $i .fd` ; lpfilter -f NewPrinter -F
$i ; done
accept NewPrinter
enable NewPrinter

Simple, that is, if HP haven't gone and stuck a stanza like this into the PPD on the CD:

*%
*% Print Color as Gray
*% Chose NOT to use Adobe's *ColorModel keyword because color on or
off is simpler
*%

*OpenUI *ColorModel/Print Color as Gray:  Boolean
*OrderDependency: 20 AnySetup *ColorModel
*DefaultColorModel: CMYK
*ColorModel CMYK/Off: "<</ProcessColorModel /DeviceCMYK>> setpagedevice"
*ColorModel Gray/On: "<</ProcessColorModel /DeviceGray>> setpagedevice"
*?ColorModel: "
  save
    currentpagedevice /ProcessColorModel get
      /DeviceGray eq {(True)}{(False)}ifelse = flush
  restore
"
*End
*CloseUI: *ColorModel

Took a while to track that down. Yes, I could've used one of the other PPDs on the machine — pretty generic colour Postscript, really — but then they didn't know about the duplexer. And I have to admit this makes it easy to set up a b&w-only queue.