Destroi!

Ah, no…sorry…you shall be DESTROIED!

Destory!

I shall destory you! Prepare to be be destoried!

happy 1234567890 day

Oh yes, for indeed that is the time…in the wonderful land of *nix.

r:B

(up)dating amanda

Just updated one of our servers from OpenSUSE 10.1 to 11.1 and found that amanda – updated from 2.4.5 to 2.5.2 – was unhappy. How unhappy?

Well, first of all, the server wouldn’t recognise the tape drive but that was sorted by just toggling of the power switch on the drive chassis.

Then it seemed the /dev/nst device files were set exclusively to root:root rather than the group disk so the amanda user couldn’t address the tape at all. Changed the group ownership and that seemed to do it…

Then it complained about the permissions on /var/lib/.amandahosts being too lax – thanks for the heads up! – but complied once I’d tightened them to 600.

It seems to work now…remarkably simple all things considered

r:B

numbers don’t lie…generally

I spotted a curious thing in The Independent yesterday.

It probably shows that I’ve spent too much of my life as a sysop or sysadmin of one form or another but, in one of those graphics they always seem to have for the hard-of-reading, the numbers seemed to spell out the real facts in that annoying, pseudo-haxor (sic) vernacular known as “leet” – sorry, erm, “1337″…

Sterling lost...c0z 1t 1z n0T 1337 3n0u9H!

R::B

PowerSHELL? PowerSELL!

Dammit! I got lured in by a book on the O’Reilly site and had to go investigate “Powershell!”. (I think you’re supposed to shout it!)

Powershell is Microsoft’s new enhanced scripting shell which they claim “helps IT professionals achieve greater control and productivity” and is presumably better than their VB script.

I don’t really have an immediate use for it but thought it might be worth looking at for those mundane user support tasks that have to be done but, truth be told, bore the pants off me.  I should’ve known better…

The introductory tutorial explains how familiar tasks can be undertaken with “Powershell!”

Imagine my surprise when I discovered that to change the current directory, instead of writing

cd c:\stuff

I can now write

set-location c:\stuff

Amazing! Instead of typing two characters for the ‘change directory’ command, I can now type twelve. Now that’s progress!

Needless to say, I immediately gave up and went back to proper shell scripting…

R::B

Hello world!

Imagine my horror…

One of the daily cron jobs that mirrors some data from sites  in the US  and other parts of Europe was throwing a wobbly. Nothing major, just mission critical.

Unfortunately some twit had gone and changed the year on us and there wasn’t a corresponding local directory for the mirror script to dump the data into…

That’d be my fault then, eh?

So I created the relevant directories and, feeling conscientious, added some for next year too.  Excellent…should make for some fun in 2011!

R::B