Category: General

XBMC = love!

Posted on by DizkoDan

I was reading some tech crap last week, and I came across this article about turning your old xbox into a media center. It reminded me that I had wanted to do this for some time, but never got around to it. I decided it would be a fun project, and it would be cool to have in time for the party, so I can stream mp3z from my server to my stereo. I didn’t really follow this guide, I just searched around for the things I wanted to do, and ended up with bits and pieces from everywhere.

Since the Action Replay is pretty much non-existent now, I opted to create my own USB adapter. To do this, I took a USB extender, and cut off the female end, then took an xbox controller and cut off the connector. I then stripped the cables on both, and twisted them together. My first attempt failed miserably, because I cut the controller cable too close to the adapter, so I didn’t have enough room to splice the wires together. So I had to go out and buy another used controller (I didn’t want to kill my other one). I also picked up a copy of Splinter Cell for like $1.50 (needed to “crash” the xbox). Then I took my trusty titanium cruzer USB stick and plugged it into my xbox.

Ghetto USB - XBOX Adapter

I decided to use the awesome Auto Installer Deluxe, to get everything setup on the xbox. Doing the softmod was stupid simple. Basically you grab a couple of “game saves” for Splinter Cell, and copy them to your xbox via the handy little USB adapter. Boot Splinter Cell up, and load one of the “saves”. Then you boot AID, and it has a nice graphical menu that walks you through installing what you want. I opted to use XBMC as my dashboard, cuz it’s just awesome. After a few minutes, I had a fully operational xbox media center.

I had no trouble connecting to my samba shares. So now I have mp3z, videos, and all kinds of other cool toys to play with, I even finally ordered another Harmony 880 to use in the living room (we’ve had one in our room for a couple years), since we have way too many remotes and devices. It makes me happy to put this thing to good use again, cuz it’s been collecting dust for over a year since I got my xbox 360.

Migrations, Painting, and other fun stuff!

Posted on by DizkoDan

It’s been a busy week. I spent most of last week working on getting setup for that big Debian customer. Not only do I have to get a deployment setup for their 40 servers, but I also had to get the Data Center ready for this customer. We previously had about 15 of our blade enclosures on a different network. So I had to recable, and reconfigure all of the switches before I can build any servers over there. Got that all done. Got a working Debian image setup, and even got NIC bonding working on it, in addition to getting some of our standard stuff configured.

In the evenings Weds, Thurs, & Fri, I pressure washed the fence to prep it for painting. We weren’t planning on painting it ourselves, but after I got some quotes, there was no way I was paying. So we went to the ho depot, bought 10 gallons of fence paint, and started painting on Saturday.

After the problems last week, I rescheduled the serve-you.net migration for Saturday night. This time it went a lot better. I ran into a mail problem, and spent 2 hours trying to figure it out. Then all of the sudden I look back at something I thought I checked, and realized permissions were wrong on a file. The first thing I looked at when the problem occurred! After that, it was just random little issues. I finally got to sleep at about 7:00am.

Sunday, I woke up around noon, and got back to the painting. Steph had some dog event in DC, so she didn’t get home until like 6:00, but she helped me finish up the section I was working on. It’s a very time consuming process, so we only got a little bit done this weekend. If anyone wants to help, there will be cold beer and paint for all this weekend!

Time flies when you work 10 – 12 hours a day

Posted on by DizkoDan

I seriously can’t believe it’s already mid September. I have been working a lot of crazy long days (more than usual) lately. It’s not that I’m required to do so, I just find myself still working at 6 or 7 PM most days. It’s a bug I have. I know that me working late doesn’t make the work go away, but for some reason I continue to do it.

Saturday, had coffee, did a little shopping, then came home and watched football on and off all day. Went out for chinese, then came home and forced myself to sit through the VT vs. LSU game. Sad, sad game. The only good that came of it was Glennon getting the boot, and Tryod getting to step in. There is hope VT fans!

On Sunday, we went out to Alexandria to see Tony & Dawn’s new house, then have dinner in Old Town at Austin Grill. Food was great, so was the company. We walked around Old Town a bit, and caught up. It’s been way too long since we’ve hung out. Definitely gonna try to make it a more regular thing.

Monday evening I decided to take off early (read: on time), went to Bungalow Billiards with Tony & Ivan for $1 Coronitas & pool. We had a good time, then came back to my place to watch the first half of the Monday Night Football game.

Still working on that stupid Debian build. After I got things working last week, I find out that now people want to have some input on how I deploy this. I’m like WTF? I asked the day that I heard about this deal, to get requirements. Not one fucking person spoke up with anything productive. 2 weeks later they want to talk about “standards”. So I have to start from scratch. On top of all this, I can’t even start builds until I get this massive re cabling project done in one of our Data Centers. I finally got the approval on the contracting quote, but of course the contractors are slammed this week. Might have to do a Saturday babysitting session. Once I get all the cabling done, I have to reconfigure & migrate 14 enclosure switches over to our other network. Fun stuff.

Friday night, is migration night for serve-you.net. I’m really not looking forward to it, but I’m ready to get it out of the way. Especially since I’m paying for both of these servers right now, which really isn’t cheap.

I love Red Hat

Posted on by DizkoDan

Yesterday afternoon I found out we signed yet another customer wanting a non-standard OS. These guys want Fedora. While it pissed me off that they once again dropped this on my plate, without consulting me first, I wasn’t too worried, as I knew I could make Fedora work with my current kickstart server easily. How easy? Within an hour of being told this customer was signed, I had the iso’s downloaded, extracted to my kickstart server, kickstart config built, and a working deployment to one of my blades! The only thing that didn’t work right off was the Proliant Support Pack, which is to be expected, since I think HP hard codes OS versions in the installer. It was a nice break from the Debian nonsense and a small victory of sorts for me.

As for Debian, I finally had a successful install on a blade this morning. I got the Proliant Support Pack .deb’s from HP installed, and I even got the Altiris agent installed. Believe it or not, the server actually checked into altiris, and I can manage it. This is huge! So I made an image of the server from altiris, and deployed it to another blade. Unfortunately there’s issues there that I need to figure out. But I’m pretty happy I finally got an successful install.

On a side note, while looking into the Fedaora PSP install failure, I figured out something that I’ve been looking for since April.

We are Virginia Tech

Posted on by DizkoDan

So I’m talking to a friend at about noon on Friday, and I ask him what his plans are for the first Virginia Tech game of the season tomorrow, He’s like, we’re heading down to Blacksburg at 3:00 today. I tell him he sucks, and he’s like: I got a couple extra tickets, you wanna go? Of course I do! So I drop what I’m doing at work, head home grab my toothbrush and shit, and headed out to his place to hitch a ride down there.

We got into Blacksburg at about 7:00PM, and went to a friend’s house down there where we would all crash. Once we unloaded the van, we all went downtown to get some dinner at The Cellar. After a few pitchers of beer, we headed back to the house and partied into the morning with everyone coming in for the game. After a few hours of sleep, we all got up around 7:00AM and packed up the 2 vehicles we were taking to the game.

One of the guys we always tailgate with works for a company that does business with Wes Worsham, so he hooks him up with tickets, and parking passes whenever he can. So we had an awesome tailgate spot just outside of the stadium. We setup, had some food and some morning cocktails. I’m not really sure how or when it started, but it’s been a tradition before every game with this group to play “the big beer game”. Basically, everyone buys the biggest nastiest cans of beer they can find. Usually it’s a lot of crazy high alcohol content malt liquor’s. You get a few decent beers, and the loser is Zima. This time, someone found the most foul shit I have ever seen “Budweiser Chelada”, which is Bud & Clamato juice. The game in a nutshell is, you pick a card from a deck, and whoever has the highest card picks first, then the next highest and so on. The loser gets the zima. I lucked out this time, and ended up with a fosters. After the big beer game, it was time to head in for all the festivities.

This was a very big game, not because of who the opponent was (who gives a shit about ECU?), but because it’s the first game since the horrible events of 4.16.2007, A day that we will never forget. The ceremony was very emotional. Many tears were shed, but I felt a sense of a new beginning. The school is so strong, and so is the entire community. I’m honored to have been there.

The game itself was less than stellar. Sean Glennon threw an interception on the first VT possession. It never got much better either. We won, but it wasn’t pretty. The spread for the game was something like 27 points. We won 17-7. In the end though, a win is still listed as a win. It will be interesting next week at LSU.

After the game, we headed back out to our tailgate and fired up the grill. Much food was consumed. Much beer was consumed. Many bodies were sun burned. It was a great afternoon. We packed things up around 6:00PM and headed back out to our friend’s house. We grilled up some burgers, then continued to drink through the night. Watched the USC game and finally crashed at like 2:00AM. We got up pretty early this morning and hit the road around 10:00AM. I got back into town around 2:00. Steph and I just got back from having chinese food, and watching Superbad. I enjoyed it a lot.

Tomorrow I’m going to attempt to finish mulching the yard. Now I think I’m going to go shower and relax in bed.

www.flickr.com

This is a Flickr badge showing photos in a set called VT vs ECU. Make your own badge here.

We are the Hokies.
We will prevail.
We will prevail.
We will prevail.
We are Virginia Tech.
-Nikki Giovanni 4.17.2007

This is the good part…

Posted on by DizkoDan

For all the suck that my job provides, I have to try to remember that I have it pretty good overall. It’s about 11:00am, I’m sitting at panera (aka pantera), eating a bagel, drinking coffee, and working. The better part of my work week is usually spent at home or in coffee shops. As long as I have wifi, and a cell phone connection, I can work from anywhere in the world. I go into my office maybe 2 or 3 times on a good month. I think there was a stretch a couple months back that I went in once in 2 months. I spend a bit of time in the Data Centers, but not anything regular. It’s a luxury that few people I know get to have, and I am thankful to be in the position I am in.

Yesterday turned out to be a 16 hour work day (minus a couple hours for lunch and dinner). I got everything finished that I needed to get done, so in the end it’s worth it. And being that I’m the one who dishes out work, those who failed me, are going to have some rather unpleasant tasks to deal with today.

I’m trying to plan a “business trip” out to California, so I can spend a couple of days at the corporate office, up in Santa Clara, then head down to LA where my part time boss is, then down to San Diego where my director is. Since I have family and friends in LA & San Diego, I figure I can get some time to hang out with people there, since it’s so hard to take a vacation there. I’d like to bring Steph, but she’s not keen on the idea of a “working” vacation. So maybe I’ll take 2 trips out there.

Anyhow, time to get back to doing work.

Responsibility Part Deux

Posted on by DizkoDan

I started my day as I always do around 8:00am. Sometimes it’s a little earlier, sometimes a bit later. Today, I went to the coffee shop to take care of some stuff remotely for about an hour, then I headed to one of my Data Centers to take care of some stuff before my team meeting. During my meeting, I made our priorities very clear. Told my team what we needed to get done today, and that I’d be back to complete stuff later in the afternoon. Then I went to our other Data Center to take care of some stuff there. So at about 4:30 I come back to the DC, expecting to configure 8 switches and go home. I get here, and find that the one thing that I told them absolutely had to be done today, didn’t get done; cable up a blade enclosure stack. Thus, I couldn’t configure the switches that live in these enclosures.

So lucky me, got to start cabling shit up at 4:30PM. If anyone has ever dealt with blades, you know that they are stupid simple to deal with after the enclosure is setup, cuz there’s no cables or anything to deal with. However, setting up a new stack of 4 enclosures is a pretty big ordeal. Each enclosure has 2 switches, each switch has a redundant connection to the patch, then duplicate that to the network cores. in all, you end up with 68 cables that have to be run and labeled. Time consuming to say the least. I finally got everything cabled up at 8:00PM, then took a break to meet Steph for dinner. Now I’m back in the DC configuring my switches. I should be done with this in about half an hour. Then I have to be at the other DC for a maintenance window at Midnight.

It’s times like this that I wish I could be irresponsible, and pass the buck.

Where did my weekend go?

Posted on by DizkoDan

Seriously. Can I have it back?

All in all, it was a decent weekend. I took Friday off for no reason other than the fact that I work too much, and my boss thought I should take a day. After the whole being called several times thing from 3-4 AM, I finally got back to sleep at around 7, then got up at like 9. Wen downstairs and played the search and release game on at ticket bastard until I got some good seats for the Van Halen show. Ended up with some pretty decent seats, but the shit was completely over priced. Had coffee with Steph and Benny, then decided to go have lunch with a friend I never get to hang out with. My 12:00 lunch turned out to be an all day thing, as we sat and talked tech until 5PM. After Steph got home and we ate dinner, I spent the rest of the night working on more prep work for the big migration.

Didn’t do much yesterday. We had brunch at Clydes which is always excellent, then ran some errands and came home. We got a nice console table for the foyer, which Steph has been bugging me about for a while. I have to admit it looks pretty good, and she even built the thing herself! I spent the better part of the day & night working on stuff for this site. I got things looking the way I want now, and I’ve started uploading old content. I got all the Red vs Blue videos setup on a page, as well as the GI JOE PSA’s, and I have begun uploading old HOWTO’s & Docs that I’ve written in the past. I’m pretty happy with how things are coming together. WordPress has come a long way from the last time I set it up a couple of years ago.

Today, my company had a 5 year anniversary party for us. Since we are essentially a satellite office (we are headquartered in Santa Clara, CA), we basically get a budget to do whatever the hell we want. So we rented out the Dulles Golf Center & Sports Park, and had it catered by Famous Dave’s. It was a lot of fun! We hit some balls at the batting cage, emptied a couple of buckets at the driving range, played some basketball, and ate and drank beer. Not a bad way to spend a Sunday afternoon.

Other than that, not a whole lot else going on. I’m waiting on some new flash tutorials to be developed for my hosting site, before I send out the notification on the migration. I’m thinking I’ll probably do it in 2 weeks.

Server migration time again

Posted on by DizkoDan

Over the past month or so, I have been working on a flurry of updates, reconfigurations, migrations of services, and entire servers for my personal sites, and my hosting company. The personal stuff is always fairly painless. If something breaks, it’s not the end of the world. We lose a little ad revenue, and a few people complain that they can’t reach Stvlive, or QuizMeme. I’m a bit of a masochist in this regard, because I always seem to do 8 million projects at once when I should really be focusing on one. In all, I have done, or am in the process of doing 2 complete server migrations (move from one server to another in a completely different Data Center, new IP space, etc), migration of secondary mail & DNS services for my personal sites to a 3rd party, and massive amounts of hardening across all of my sites/servers.

Most of the personal stuff has gone well, and we even revamped some really old stuff on some of the sites, which makes me happy from an InfoSec stand point. I’m mostly content with how things are running on all of those servers, now it’s just the ongoing issues of cleaning things up that have been around since the late 90’s to make things more secure.

My hosting migration however, makes me lose sleep. I have done this a few times over the years, and it usually goes “okay”, but never without some screwup that keeps me up for hours fixing. The problem isn’t from a lack of planning, or skill. I have been doing this a long time, and I am very knowledgeable about these things. Where the problems occur is usually in the little configuration changes (read: hacks) that have been made on the servers over the years, and have been forgotten about. This server has essentially been upgraded and migrated over and over again since 2001. It’s gone through 3 different FULL RedHat releases starting with RedHat 7.1 (going on a 4th now). I can’t even count the number of Plesk versions, I’m an old school customer, so this server (in it’s original form at my house 7 years ago) started at PSA 2.5, and is getting ready to be Plesk 8.2. So as anyone with any admin experience can imagine, the number of “hacks” that would have been put into place over the years to add support for some unsupported feature, or fix a bug. The irony is, that it’s the old “hacks” that were meant to fix something in the past, that break something on the new.

At this point I have most of the behind the scenes work completed. New server is up and running, and has been (mostly) configured. DNS is going to be the biggest hurdle. The current setup is not so good. All DNS is served from the same server. This isn’t really a big deal, because it’s pretty much an all-in-one server, so if DNS goes down, chances are everything else is down too, so the DNS doesn’t really get you anywhere. However, in a migration situation, having a secondary somewhere else is extremely useful because it isn’t going to change. So when the madness happens when I change my name servers at the registry level, propagation isn’t that big of a deal, because the secondary server is still churning out results. So I want to get this server added for all the domains prior to the move.

I host over 200 domains, and unfortunately they were not all registered through me. That means that the owners of all of those domains need to log into their registrar account, and make modifications to their name servers. This is a very simple task for someone with only a little technical knowledge. All of the registrars have documentation on how to do it. The problem is, getting the domain owners to ACTUALLY MAKE THE CHANGE! I am willing to bet most of my customers don’t even know what a registrar is, let alone which one their domain is registered at. Which is going to equal me doing a shit ton of whois lookups for people to point them in the right direction. And in more than a few cases, I’ll probably just have to obtain their login info, and make the change for them. I am actually having some new flash demos made up right now to show people how to login to the various registrars, and make this change, so hopefully that will help a bit. The plus side is, most registrars don’t require an IP address for name servers, so when I actually re-IP my name servers, there shouldn’t need to be any changes on the end user side.

I’m rambling, and I’m sure this is way more information than most people who read my blog care about, but that’s what a blog is for right?

Gotta love responsibility

Posted on by DizkoDan

We had a customer who wanted some basic stuff done during a 3:00AM maintenance window today. Since my boss told me to take Friday off, I assigned this maintenance to one of my guys. I sat down with him yesterday, to make sure that he knew what he was doing, and showed him some docs I made for the issue. So I felt good about him doing it, but told him to call me if there were any problems.

3:08AM – phone rings, I explain some stuff to him
3:18AM – phone rings again, I walk him through something else
3:32AM – phone rings again, I explain something else
4:34AM – phone rings again, he tells me the jobs all failed. I’m pretty sure they are fine, but tired of trying to explain what to look at so I tell him I’m getting online to look at it myself.

So now I’m up. I guess it’s a good thing I’m not working today after all. Though I’m sure as soon as I try to sleep today, someone is gonna call me.