Category: Linux

Out with the old…

Posted on by DizkoDan

So for the past month or so, I have been actively pursuing a new job. I love Rackspace, and they have been good to me, but I felt it was time for me to move on and put my talents to better use. I had been contacted by a few people about potential jobs, and my resume is all over the place. A couple of weeks ago, a recruiter contacted me about a Linux sysadmin position that I might be interested in. I gave them a call thinking that they were gonna offer me some windoze admin job with a little unix/linux. Instead, it turned out to be damn near exactly what I was looking for. We finally got an interview setup for yesterday afternoon, so I went in on my few hours of sleep for the week, and had a nice long 2 hour interview with some of the other admins, and the director. They were all awesome, and I wanted to stay and talk with them even longer. They told me they were in a hurry to fill the position, and would decide soon. I got home from work at about 8:30 this morning, and they called me at about 10:00 and said congratulations! I received and faxed back my offer, and sent off my resignation letter this morning.

I am beyond ecstatic! I have been extremely stressed out at work over the past couple months. The hours were really beginning to tear into my time with Steph. So I will finally be back on a “normal” schedule, get an ass-ton more money, and do what I’m actually good at. I can’t wait to start!

Posted on by DizkoDan

It’s been a good weekend. Friday night before I went to work, I decided to get a new server for stvlive & the rest of our personal sites. I had been in contact with someone who wanted to get rid of his server he was leasing at a company called cyberwurx. They have an excellent reputation, and the price he got on the server was fantastic. So I accepted the offer at about 7:30pm. He wrote me back, and told me he passed my info on to cyberwurx to get the ball rolling.

I expected not to hear from them until Monday. I got an email from them about 10 minutes later telling me that they would go ahead and rekick the server for me right away, and gave me the info I needed to register with them. So I sign up, get all my login info for their support stuff, and go shower. When I came back down, there was an email saying my server was online, and giving me my IP’s and passwords. So I got started configuring stuff Friday night at work.

Saturday afternoon we woke up, and went out to dinner with Kevin & his wife. It’s always nice to go out with friends. We don’t get to enough After dinner we came back, and I got back to work on the new server. By about 3:00am I had everything up and running on the server, and decided to do a final rsync of the data, and switch the DNS over. Everything works great, except a couple of minor things I need to work out.

Sunday afternoon we woke up, and drove to Columbia to have dinner with Steph’s family. It’s been a few months since we all went out, so it was really nice to see them. Food was good too! Been working on some fine tuning of things since we got back (minus a dunkin donuts run at about 3:00am). Now I’m doin some updates on my desktop, and goin to bed.

When the grass is cut the snakes will show

Posted on by DizkoDan

Note to self.. Mail server is cursed.

Just a few weeks ago, I had to completely rebuild my mail server due to a hozed HD. Things were running smooth, and I had managed to get all kinds of shit working that I had been meaning to for a while. Fast forward to Monday night.

Got to work at about 10:30pm and tried to ssh into my mail server. Immediately it returned a connection terminated. So I had Steph go look at the console, and sure enough, it had a kernel panic. She rebooted it, and it did it again. Rebooted again, seemed to be okay. I start investigating the panics, and come to the conclusion that it’s probably bad RAM or the swap partition iz fux0red. As I’m looking around, I get some dma errors (a sign of a dying HD). So when I got home in the morning, I brought the server down to test the RAM. All tested fine. The HD however, told me to go take a flying fuck!

So I spent several hours attempting to clone the drive, but it was too far gone, and kept crashing on me. Finally at about 5:00pm I gave up and went to sleep. I woke up at about 3:00am and started a clean install. Luckily I was able to mount the old HD, and copy the maildir’s, and important configs, so everything seems to be in order now.

Covad got dispatched out again today. Even after I tried to explain to the dispatcher that my DSL was up, just not at the right speed. So when the d00d showed up this morning, I was like go away, and fix my shit at the DSLAM! With any luck this will be closed out today.

Aside from that, I’m working on a migration process to move serve-you.net to a new datacenter. Meanwhile Steph seems to be dying from ebola or some shit.

I should be asleep

Posted on by DizkoDan

I’m on hour 24 of my day. I had no intentions of staying up this long, but shit keeps coming up.


I woke up yesterday at about 4:00pm, showered and brought my car the the dealer for an oil change & inspection. To my surprise, it failed state inspection, cuz my tires are starting to show thread all around. So I came home, and ordered 4 new ones from tirerack.com, and had them shipped to the dealer. They should be there by tomorrow or Friday, so I’ll drop my car off and have them mount em n shit, then reinspect it.

After that, we went to get a nice meal at pf changs. It always amazes me how cheap that place is. After dinner, I decided that it was time to rebuild my computer. It has been freezing up in X way too frequently, and it has been doing this through several versions of XFree & nvidia drivers, so a clean install had to be done.

I decided that I’m gonna take a journey into the darkside (ie, Debian). As most people who know me are aware, I HATE Debian for several reasons. Mainly the asshole zealots. But the development branches piss me off, amongst other things. But apt is great, and the stability of a Debian machine is hard to beat.

I recently checked out a relatively new Debian based distro called Libranet, and it was quite slick. One of the only distros out there that I could see using daily. So I figured what the hell,… if I don’t like it, I can wipe it and do a clean install of whatever te fuck else I want anyway. Install was smooth, after updataing just about every package on the system, I now have a nice bloody desktop.

While doing this, I had to take Stephs car to get it’s inspection and emissions done. I got there at like 11:30, and the dude was already gone for lunch till 1:00. So I went to BK and got a vegiburger, then picked up a magazine and sat in the car and read for an hour. Finally at 1:45 I was on my way home.

After that I came back here to work on my computer again, and the doorbell rings. To my surprise, it’s Verizon (completely unannounced). The guy sits out back on the phone with Covad for a while and says, our loop is fine, it’s Covad’s problem. I’m like WTF? So I say whatever, and let him go on his way. I came up here, and checked the router. Sure enough it’s trying to link. I powercycle it, and it links up! However, it’s not performing quite as fast as it should be. Since I haven’t heard back from Covad yet, I can only assume that they are looking into it. So with any luck this might actually fucking work!

been awhile eh?

Posted on by DizkoDan

So I’ve been kind of in a daze for the past couple months. Working nights makes you lose all concept of time. I have always liked working nights, but it’s one of those things that you never really get used to. I never know what day it is, not that I really care though. Things have been going pretty well. The job has been great. Rackspace kicks much ass!

Took my RHCE exam yesterday, got the results this morning, and I passed! It was actually harder than I expected, and walked out yesterday not sure if I passed. The sad thing is, the 2 things I knew would give me problems did. If I wasn’t such a lazy turd, I probably could have worked on them a bit more before the exam, and would have completely aced it.

Other than that, a lot of the same old, same old.

How you doin?

Posted on by DizkoDan

Okay, you ever do something and forget to do one simple thing, and it completely hozez the whole thing? I do, I do! Last night I was repartitioning some space on the www server. This should be a relatively simple task since I was completely wiping out a 5g partition, then creating new partitions on it to move existing ones to.

So I unmount the partition, use fdisk, wipe out the existing partition, and create 3 new ones. Then rebooted (this would be where I fucked up). I forgot to format the partitions, so when linux is booting up, fsck starts spewing out the errors. Now had I realized right away what I had forgotten, this would have been easily recoverable. But I did not.

I look in fdisk, and see that there are a bunch of errors on the partitions, one of which was (what I though) an old partition that should have been removed. So I hit “d” fdisk says pick a partition (1-10) I hit “5” then “w” to save the table, then exit out of fdisk. It is now that I realize that I had forgotten to format before, so I format my 3 new partitions, and reboot.

Linux starts booting, and fsck gives me another error about a partition that should have been “swap”. I go into fstab and realize that something got fucked up some how, and hda7 and hda8 some how switched. I fixed this and rebooted.

Linux boots fine this time. I log in, and type in an alias that I use, and get an error. I immediately knew what happened. /home was gone! somehow, the partitions had all gotten switched around, and /home ended up getting formatted. DOH!

Luckily, unless my users were doing so without my knowledge, there was nothing terribly important on this partition. I lost a lot of misc. stuff that I kept in my home dir, but nothing I can’t live without. Thank god /www /usr & /var are all on another disk.

Oh well, shit happens! This is how I learn all the stuff I know. Make a dreadful mistake, don’t ever do it again.