Another Word for Nerd

A. needed a laptop to take with her on her upcoming trip home to visit family and friends for a month. The only thing I could come up with was an old PII-266 Dell Latitude system with 2M video RAM (meaning 16bit color, but at 1024×768), 128M memory, a CD-ROM that barely works, and a 4G hard drive.

Installing Windows XP, all available updates, doing system tweaks to improve what performance I could get, and installing Putty, PIRCH98, and Mozilla Firefox took three and a half hours. This was with no problems along the way - the system is just that slow.

Fortunately the Xircom “RealPort” Ethernet card I got off eBay about six months ago works just fine in it, and drivers for the card come with XP SP2. She’ll have to find a modem of some sort in TN, as the modem card that came with the laptop is missing its dongle.

I need to find a better beater laptop, like an old Thinkpad - those things are pretty much bulletproof. Anybody have one sitting in a closet?

My copies of tiger (through the Mac OS X Up-To-Date Program) for both Mac Minis (mine at home and the one at work). I bought this iMac G5 back in November, so I had to buy a normal retail copy for it.

After getting the Ultra 60 setup with Solaris Express 4/05, I’m now in love with Solaris Zones.

root@bradford:/> zoneadm list -vc
  ID NAME             STATUS         PATH
   0 global           running        /
   1 bradford2        running        /zone/bradford2
   3 bradford3        running        /zone/bradford3

The global zone is using DNS. The “bradford2″ zone is using NIS, and the “bradford3″ zone is using LDAP authentication. I’ll be setting up a “bradford4″ zone to run a LDAP-to-NIS gateway (PADL’s ypldapd) in for final testing before I put it in a production environment.

This is so nice - no more stacks of machines! If I need another “system”, I just create another zone and fire it up.

I wonder if I can have the global zone running Solaris Express and another zone doing OpenSolaris compiles and tests…

This wins the award for the strangest Google text ad I’ve seen so far:

Sun Ultra 60 UPA/PCI (2 X UltraSPARC-II 450MHz), No Keyboard
OpenBoot 3.31, 2048 MB memory installed, Serial #11203763.
Ethernet address 8:0:20:aa:f4:b3, Host ID: 80aaf4b3.

It will be my OpenSolaris and LDAP test box, and possibly a Directory Server work environment.

login as: bradford
bradford@xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx’s password:
[bradford@localhost ~]$

It only took … three days to get LDAP authentication and automounting working properly?
Authentication was no problem, automounting was the huge pain in the ass.

I took some pictures on my way to work this morning.

About a month ago, I wrote about losing a book on improving your memory. I searched for it for almost three days, and finally gave up.

Tonight, I was standing in my living room, glanced over at the bookshelves, and there it was sitting on top of the copy of the Key Map for Houston that I got a few months ago for $5 at an office surplus store.

I have no idea how I looked right past it at least five or six times…

(for those that are wondering, some online vendors shipped early by accident!)

I started my career as an “IT Professional”. April 19th, 1995, in addition to being the date of the OKC bombing, was also my first day at Internet Oklahoma (aka ioNET.net), the largest Internet Service Provider (at the time) in the state.

It was quite a first day, with the entire staff doing what we could to get bombing information and news coverage online - the Internet was in its “baby phase” as a news medium at the time. We later won awards for our “new media” coverage.

Ten years ago, I started my first day as the only tech support person at an ISP. Today, I showed up to work for my job as a Senior Systems Administrator for a large oil and gas services company.

It has been quite an interesting ten years.