Dale Miller

Yes, it’s Riverfest time again in Little Rock. Once again I’m working on a wireless network for the park. We haven’t put up as many WAPs this year, but I think we have pretty good coverage. We may add a couple more tomorrow, just because we can.

The real difference this year is the heat. It has been HOT out here today..

Some pictures to follow…

I didn’t get enough sleep last night, so when my alarm went off this morning it woke me from a dream. I was watching Stargate SG1 during ratings week. They were short on off-world teams so they had Hooters waitresses going into the field rather than air force. Okay, it was a strange dream.

How can rebates be made even more annoying? By not sending me checks, but instead sending VISA debit cards for a specified amount. I got my two rebates from Cingular in the mail yesterday in the form of plastic cards, one worth $30 and the other $50. It’s certainly spendable, but a bit annoying. I have to remember how much is on each and only spend that much from that card. I don’t like having to say “charge $9.73 from this card and I’ll pay the rest from my Mastercard”. Ah well, at least they did process the rebate, which is better than I have had happen in the past.

There are lightning bugs in my yard. :)

Today has been a scorcher. I woke up at my usual time, decided that I was feeling poorly, and went back to sleep. By sometime around 10:00 I was feeling better and headed outside to get the mowing done. I cut all of the yard that I didn’t get last week. That’s a good thing. Of course it would have been far more comfortable if I had gotten out earlier before it was quite so hot. But the yard has been tamed for at least a couple of weeks.

Things at work are still interesting. I had a call early this morning that faculty/staff accounts were locked out again. I didn’t trace down the machine that was responsible, just unlocked accounts. This afternoon I started receiving pages that the mail system queue was backing up. When I went to take a look, I discovered that another machine had been compromised. This time it appeared to be a linux system that was sending several tens of thousands of spam messages. I short-circuited it at the mail system, but it will still have to be dealt with on Monday. I’m also expecting that a bit of cleanup will have to be done.

Yep, that’s my weekend. Exciting, isn’t it?

What a day this has been.

About 3 minutes after I got to the office I had a message that one of our servers was unresponsive. Sure enough, it was dead. I walked over to the machine room to find it scrolling a fairly cryptic message on the console. Something to the effect of “hardware failure — cpu halted”. Nothing more useful. I power cycled it and it started back up. That was the easiest fix of the day. I figured as long as I was across campus I would move a few machines from our primary (and nearly overloaded) UPS to one of our new secondary units. A bit of scrambling, shuffling cables, and blessing multiple power supplies later, I had reduced to load on the main UPS to 93%. That’s far from good, but it’s a lot better than 98%.

I headed back over to the office to discover that most of the users in the faculty/staff active directory domain were locked out. It seems that a workstation in the student center had some piece of malware that was doing a brute-force attack against AD. I identified the culprit machine, had Tim shut off the switch port, and wrote a quick script to unlock all the Active Directory accounts. It’s a good thing I did — I would need it later.

An hour or so later I was still getting calls about locked-out accounts. A bit more digging uncovered another infected machine. This one over in ETAS. We shut down this one as well, and all was well (with that issue) until after lunch. Then it was time to discover that one of the air conditioners in the computer room was failing and the company we had been using for maintenance for the last couple of decades didn’t want to do business with us anymore (I won’t even get into that). The upside of that is that I think we are now going to have UALR physical plant do our air conditioning maintenance. Hopefully they will decide that it’s worthwhile to finally replace those units. In the meantime, they rolled in a couple of point-source chillers. I’m not sure how much good they will do, since they didn’t have a good place to exhaust the heat, but at least the main database server is running cooler now.

After lunch I started replacing firmware on the I/O boards we are using in the parking gates. After a few fits and starts I had that working, and moved on to the next issue — NRPE checks from Nagios. We had one machine behind an F5 networks BigIP box. NRPE just didn’t want to connect. It appears that BigIP doesn’t truly route traffic to boxes behind it. It masquerades unless a service is defined as a passthru (then, of course, the IP address of the service changes, introducing a different set of problems). A bit of tcpdumping later we resolved that issue, just in time for my phone to start ringing again. More locked-out accounts. Yes, you guessed it, yet a third infected machine. Knowing what to look for made this one easier to find. Tim shut off its access, I unlocked all the accounts again, and decided it was time to go home.

That would have been enough by itself, but there were yet even more problems that I don’t even remember now. I could stand to have a quiet day tomorrow, but I’m not expecting one. I just don’t like getting to the point that I want to swat the phone when it rings.

I was all fired up at the beginning of the week. I was going to come into the office, get lots of stuff done, go home and clean up around the house and just generally be upbeat and productive.

It’s not working out that way. Although I have been mildly productive at the office, it’s been things that I don’t really need to get done. I have some code I really need to sit down and bang out. It’s not hard, I just don’t feel like working on it. I think I’ll find another low-priority task to work on instead. :)

I really don’t like tedious meetings. We have a project that only peripherally involves me, but I have to attend the meetings. I have just sat through more than an hour of meandering that should have been done in 15 minutes.

I’m ready to do something useful.

I spent much of Saturday morning in bed. It felt good. :) Then I convinced myself to mow part of the yard, burn the brush pile that’s been sitting near the street for over a year, and somewhat clean up the house. All-in-all, a reasonably productive day. Saturday night Jamie and Mary came to visit. It’s highly unusual for me to have visitors, so I’m always somewhat at a loss. We ended up playing a game of Trivial Pursuit and calling it a night. I could get used to having attractive women visit me, but it would be nicer if they didn’t have husbands and boyfriends waiting for them. Oh well, I should enjoy their company while I can.

Today I have accomplished pretty much nothing. I finished the book I was reading, watched several episodes of Stargate SG1, and generally been lazy. On the positive side — I haven’t driven anywhere since Friday night, and thus haven’t spent money.

The work week is over. I had a rather good week overall. Code was written, terminal servers were interfaced, office was straightened, phone calls were answered, tasks were completed. I don’t have anything pressing looming over my head for next week, and it feels good.

Dinner at Sufficient Grounds sounded like a good idea. I could stand for them to have a “no crying kids” section, but even that hasn’t been too terrible (but a few more minutes may change my mind).