Another Word for Nerd

After a delay of 2-3 months, I was finally allowed to order a new work laptop to replace my four-year-old Thinkpad A20p (P3-733).

I ended up getting our “standard configuration” - a HP Compaq nc6220 with extra memory. Pentium-M 740 (1.73Ghz), 1G total RAM, 40G HD, CDRW/DVDROM, 802.11b/g and Bluetooth built-in, and a 14.1″ 1024×768 screen (I don’t need anything bigger or higher-resolution for VPNing from home).

So far, I’m *really* happy with it, and it feels more solid (and is, of course, faster) than the old Thinkpad. I’ll probably end up finding another 256M of RAM for the A20P and put Linux on it.

When you get called into the office at 4am to fix a downed mail server, the best way to keep warm in the data center is to stand behind the 7′ rack of HP DL360s.

As if all the email spam I get wasn’t enough, now I’m getting voicemail spam.

Friday: Arrive at work at 8:30am. Finally leave work at 11:15pm that night. It was the first stage of migrating around 600 machines from NIS name services to LDAP.
Saturday: Get up at 10:30, conference call, and work from home till 8pm, when I had to go to the office to fix a problem (didn’t have the right tools here at the house). Finally got done around 9:15pm.
Sunday: Slept until 10am, got up, conference call, things are going smoothly. Cleaned house, did laundry, changed sheets, changed the cat litter, all that fun stuff. It’s almost 10pm and I’m just *now* starting to relax for the weekend. Oh wait, the weekend’s over!

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…

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.

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.

Not much to write about lately. Swamped with a NIS-to-LDAP migration project at work, as well as a SMTP infrastructure project at the same time.

About six months ago, I came to a great conclusion. That conclusion was, my organizational skills suck, and not being properly organized was hurting my productivity in a big way. I’d slacked along for years, getting by, but now it was time to do something about it.

For consulting work, I’m now using Alex King’s Tasks software to manage work requests and system administration duties. In effect, I’m using it as a pseudo-trouble ticket system. This has made my clients much happier, as things don’t “fall through the cracks” anymore when I have a lot of little pending “to do” items. I’ve been drooling over using Basecamp, but it’s $24/month versus the one-time cost of $30 for Tasks.

In my personal life, a lot of my clutter at home was solved by (yeah, I know, its funny) moving. When I moved from Austin to Houston, I took a good long hard look at my posessions, and threw or gave away everything that I owned that wasn’t sentimental or used on a regular basis. Instead of moving into a new home and trying to make everything fit, we moved into a mostly-empty home and bought the furniture we needed and put the few things that aren’t in “active duty” in the closets. As a result, we have plenty of storage space for things, and no “packrat clutter” filling up the garage. I’ve had to resist the urge to bring more older hardware home, but I look at it and think “I really won’t use this for more than a week or two; therefore I don’t need it.”

When it comes to my career, I’m looking at a few methods to “get my shit together” at the office. Moving from Austin to Houston and then from one office to another in Houston over the past three months did a good job of cleaning out cruft from the contents of my office. I’m currently working my way through David Allen’s Getting Things Done, and implementing some of the methods he describes. Time will tell if I can stick to it and actually Get Things Done.

Tonight I went to Office Depot and picked up a small binder/notebook and some index cards; over the next week I’ll give the Hipster PDA a try. I’ve been using a Moleskine journal for notes during meetings for the past two months, but I had the “Large” version and it just seemed unwieldy and awkward to carry around. If the index card thing doesn’t work out, I might try picking up a 3-pack of the pocket notebooks, but damn, the Moleskine stuff is expensive (and the small versions not available at the local Borders bookstore).

One thing I’m lusting after is a Fisher Space Pen, but Office Depot doesn’t carry them.