Cricalix.Net

Photography, for me, is a hobby verging on a passion; with most of my pleasure coming from shooting at gigs.  I get to hear good music, and I get to hone my skills - not a bad life really. I’m also a system administrator, with the ability to write code in a variety of languages, and for over a year now, I’ve been designing and poking at a dream gallery system that would give the subjects of my photos a measure of control on the distribution of those photos.

This entry isn’t to announce that I’ve managed to do that; it’s the complete opposite.

I’ve found that Zenfolio has come on a long way since I looked at it a year ago.  The Zenfolio service offers custom theming, order fulfillment, password protection, digital licensing and more.  I could, in time, write my own code to do this, but I’m coming to the realisation that I just don’t have the energy, nor skill, to write my dream system.  I could probably get my programming up to the skill level required to do it properly, but the time I’d spend doing that could be spent listening to live music or processing photos from a gig so that I can attempt to earn a little pocket money from them.

I think I’ll take the live music and pocket money.  I get plenty of chances to excercise my coding streak at work.

Recently upgraded one of our HP servers to VMware vSphere 4.0, and found that we couldn’t see the hardware status from the vCenter client.  All it would print was “Hardware monitoring service not responding, the host is not powered on”, despite the host certainly being powered on.  A VMware Communities posting suggested that it was either firewall related (nope), or that removing the host and re-adding it might work.  Turns out there was a third option - just disconnect and reconnect the ESX host.

So simple, and now I have full visibility of the fans and temperatures on the host server.

Got tired of the green cable that ran from the back of the router downstairs, up over the back of a hanging picture, wrapped around a light fixture, then around a banister, then draped across the floor of the landing upstairs.

Went looking for some Powerline carrier modules, and settled on the Belkin 200 Mbps model (though I paid less than that link).  The pair arrived today, and took all of 2 minutes to hook up.  No hiccups at all, no software required (there is software, but I can’t think what it might do that would be useful to me).

Now all I need is a 2-way or 3-way power block for downstairs so I can remove the long extension cable, and then the additional phone cabling and it’ll look a lot neater.

On a good day, I learn something new.

Today can thus be classified as a good day, even if it did involve a bug that caused a Catalyst 5500 core switch to crash, taking out our entire network.

Cisco support wiki on said bug.

I’ve been bitten by the ‘how much electricity am I using?’ bug recently - prompted by looking at my 6-monthly statement from my current electricity supplier.  $work happens to have a utilities component to it, so I asked if I could borrow one of our in-the-house whole-house electricity monitors to see if an offer for electricity service made any sense (vs my current supply).

The hookup is fairly easy - insert two batteries into the device, open the meter cabinet outside, and clamp an inductance sensor around the live tail going to the consumer unit.  Then power up the inside metering device, pair the two devices up, and get an instant reading as to how much juice the house is consuming.

So, what did I find out?

(more…)

One of the recent fun challenges at work has been to get the developer R61i laptops running CentOS 5.1 to talk to our wireless AP (or their home AP). I’ve gone through 3 different drivers in an effort to get it working, and it’s come down to the one I really didn’t want to use - NDISwrapper. Unfortunately, even NDISwrapper doesn’t work properly.

(more…)

In the current job, I’m dealing with Microsoft-based administrator more than I ever have before. I don’t mind too much, it gives me a few more skills, and another bullet point or three on the resume. Today, however, Exchange has been driving me batty.

We have Exchange 2003 - it’s not bad once it’s had all of the service packs applied. We also, until today, managed our meeting rooms on a bit of paper. This morning, the request came through to investigate the use of Exchange as a meeting room management tool; shouldn’t be too hard to do really, and it isn’t.

1. Create a new Active Directory user, and stick it in a service account OU.
2. Assign the user a rather long password, it’s only going to be used on occasion.
3. Create a mail profile for Outlook, and log in to the meeting room account.
4. Configure the account to automatically accept meetings and cancellations, and also provide conflict detection. Oh, don’t forget the rights for Authors and Editors (create/edit own and edit all respectively).
5. Log back in to a regular Exchange account, and schedule a meeting, with the meeting room as an invited attendee.
6. Remember to throw the flag that says the meeting room user is actually a resource. Every. Single. Time.

It’s step 6 that gets me - why can’t I tell Active Directory, and thus Exchange, that I want a new object of type resource, rather than new object of type user? Why do I have to remember to change that flag for that user every time?

Argh.