The Lone Sysadmin

• YouTube – Hillary Clinton’s New Video Game: 3AM Call of Duty
  “Because it takes a village to take a village.” LOL.
• Slow Cooker Carnitas – Allrecipes
  I love cooking in my crock pot.
  (tags: recipes)

Popularity: 3% [?]

I just upgraded to WordPress 2.5. Went very well, with the exception that the Popularity Contest plugin causes a fatal error and won’t load. The interface changes take some getting used to, mainly because things moved. It’s nicer overall. I’m looking forward to using the new media/gallery features.

The Automattic Subversion repository doesn’t didn’t have a 2.5 tag, so, being impatient me, I jumped to the development trunk. The Popularity Contest issues might be because of that (it was listed as compatible with 2.5), so I’ll try it again after they get a 2.5 tag out there.

To the Wordpress 2.5 team I say: awesome job folks!

Update: http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/tags/2.5/ exists now. Yay!

Popularity: 3% [?]

• Google Street View Car Driver
  Heh, we get to see the driver of the Google Street View car, talking to a Excelsior Springs, MO cop. I’m stoked that Madison is in the Street View now.
• What’s A Vacation?
  I usually do the “spend time away” and “go dark weekend” when I need a break.
• Blinkenlights.nl
  “Ever wanted to see Star Wars in Telnet?” Holy crap, this is cool.

Popularity: 4% [?]

If you’re a Dell sort of person you’ll be happy to know that version 5.4.0 of the Dell OpenManage Server Update Utility DVD works under VMware ESX 3.5. Older versions didn’t work, which made firmware management more difficult.

I don’t currently run the OpenManage suite of tools[0]. Instead, I copy the SUU DVD contents to an NFS share, and I have a shell script which handles the mounting & unmounting, and updating my servers. I’m glad that the whole process works on ESX now, too.

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[0] I might, in the future, especially as things like ESX 3i remove the OS.

Popularity: 13% [?]

The Emergency Power Off (EPO) switch in a data center I was in last week. Appropriately labeled, in my opinion. My favorite is actually the old-school pushbutton light switches, though. The lamp next to the switch glows red when they’re off, which makes it easy to find the switch in the dark.

Popularity: 6% [?]

I just used the lostcreations “Add Port Groups” plugin to add 15 VLANs to six new ESX servers. Holy crap, that’s slick. Adding port groups is the thing I dread the most about new ESX hosts since it’s typo-prone and generally annoying.

This is the sort of thing I want to see built into management consoles like VirtualCenter: cluster configuration options. Beyond adding port groups, it’s rescanning HBAs, or configuring NTP, firewalls, licensing, DNS, advanced settings, everything. If I can do it to one machine I want to be able to do it to ten of them simultaneously.

It’d even be nice if I could add a host and tell it to pick up the configuration from the rest of the cluster. Especially if things like Distributed Power Management take off. How will a sleeping machine know what changed when it wakes up again?

Popularity: 7% [?]

• Rick Rolled to child porn = you’re a pedophile, says FBI
  This is total BS. I’m not arguing for child porn or anything, I’m just arguing for common sense. We have too many cops in the U.S. and they’re all trained to see everybody as a criminal.
• jwz – new lampshadey robot overlords will smother you in your sleep.
  This is art I like — a lamp that knits its own lampshade. Reminds me of the AI in Gibson’s “Count Zero” that built Cornell-like boxes.
• John Sequeira’s Weblog
  “I saw some married people in the cafe the other day and something seemed wrong.” If you read Paul Graham’s essay “You Weren’t Meant to Have a Boss” this is a great parody.
• Cool Tool: StrechCordz Short Resistance Training Belt
  We used to use rubber tubing when I was a swimmer. The belt is a nice touch.

Popularity: 3% [?]

I just read this post over at SearchServerVirtualization.com[0]. All I have to say is that I will rejoice when version numbering is the biggest issue facing us in the virtualization community.

I was going to say more[1] but isn’t there some rule that if you can’t say something nice don’t say anything at all?

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[0] I didn’t want to link to it, but I couldn’t see a way around it.

[1] Those that know me should feel free to speculate. :-)

Popularity: 5% [?]