Okay folks, I just discovered that I broke my the email forward that was giving me my lonesysadmin.net email (I hadn’t chmoded my .forward file to 600). So now that I’ve found it I can comment on your comments! Normally I’d reply in email but I’m going to do it in public here, something different for a Friday afternoon.
Jeff, about my IPMI how-to: I’m glad you found it useful. Sorry it hasn’t been updated recently, I have just figured out how to get Dell PowerEdge x950s to work right so hopefully that can get posted next week. Be careful about what you tell the server to do. Any “chassis off” commands seem to shut the BMC off, too, which defeats the whole purpose of remote management… This is definitely a case where having a machine to test with is crucial.
Jon, on naming servers: machines named QUIT and EXIT would rock. I did some consulting at a place a long time ago where someone had put QUIT into DNS because nslookup would take something like 10 seconds to return if you typed ‘quit’ instead of ‘exit’. (BTW, Jon is one of my customers and likes naming schemes like LEFT and RIGHT, ON and OFF, UP and DOWN, etc. Fine by me. RFC 1178 be damned!).
Pooya, on my dilemma of T2000 vs. 2950: I need to post a followup with what I’ve learned. I haven’t actually used a T2000 before, just “normal” Suns. One reason your compile might have been slow is disk I/O. The disk options on a T2000 are fairly limited in contrast to Dells, and you cannot get 15K 2.5″ SAS disks for them. The boxes are great for big & parallel CPU chores, but better options for I/O would be nice.
Andy, on maintenance window dumbness: the dude in question was a project manager. I actually had an eerily similar conversation recently with another tech, though. Something is wrong when people don’t understand why they are doing something, in this case enforcing a maintenance window.
Ian, on why I don’t like certain blogs: smart aleck. 🙂 Thanks for reading, though!
apbfupaqwi, on about half of my posts, commenting “Hello! Good Site! Thanks you!”: I’m glad you like my site. I should write a tutorial on using spam bots, because you didn’t figure out that for link spam you have to use a working link and not random characters. Your point about me writing a script to disable comments on old posts is well taken!
Jake, on deleting accounts: I really try to make it so that anything a user works on that needs to persist after they leave is done with a service account (they log in as themselves and “sudo su” to the other account). If they have any data left over in their own home directory I find someone who will take responsibility for it. That usually means I drop a tarball in someone else’s home directory and it sits there instead…
And if you’re looking for some quick entertainment check out the new Team Fortress 2 trailer. It’s like No One Lives Forever meets Quake. The rocket jumping ballet at the end is worth it.