A Day Late

I came to work this morning to find the plant I keep next to my monitor wilting. I’m not sure what the cause is. I’ve had it for nearly 5 months now and it’s been doing great. I water it once a week and that seemed to be just fine.

About 2 weeks ago I moved cubicles. I moved from a small one with no source of natural light to a larger one with a window (well…a window well, but it’s better than nothing). I was rather pleased with the transition but I’m beginning to wonder if the plant didn’t/doesn’t share my enthusiasm. It’s a little perplexing, I thought the natural light would have done it some good.

Well…I decided to give it a good dose of water this morning and try and keep it near some bright light for a few days and see if it improves. If not I may have to break down and drive to the store to get some miracle grow or something. If worse comes to worse I might have to return it to my old desk (affectionately known as “solitary”). It’s really a matter of pride, I can’t let this damn thing die! When you work in a basement it’s nice to have a little greenery around. Incidentally I also have a small bonzai tree like plant that seems to be doing just fine on the other side of my monitor. Like I said, perplexing.

I downloaded the source for mod_log_sql to log apache to the database so I could do some traffic analysis (considering I’m about the only one reading this, it wouldn’t be much). Anyway, it wasn’t long before I discovered the module wouldn’t work with Apache 2.0. Actually I didn’t realize that 2.0 was the version RedHat installed in the first place (how observant, huh?). So…now the question becomes, do I bother to download 1.3 and start configuring all over again or just forget about traffic analysis for a while.

Since I’m not really feeling that ambitious at the moment I think I’ll just leave it. Like I said, the traffic isn’t very high as it is, and browsing the access_log file should be sufficient.

I spent a lot of the Christmas break installing and configuring various packages on the system. I wanted to get mod_ssl running, so I could install a web email interface and some other admin tools on the web server, and not worry about the passwords going in clear text. It turned out to be a lot easier than I expected. I used the default Redhat mod_ssl rpm and ran “make” to create the server key and certificate (it asked for the necessary parameters). All that was left was to restart apache and it was up and running (I did modify the httpd.conf file to enter the SSLRequireSSL parameter on the directories I wanted to secure). That was it, pretty slick.

Merry Christmas!

Over the past few months I spent a little time trying to think up a domain name I could register. As much as I wanted them, holmes.com and org were both already registered. So…I tried more obscure names only to find out someone had already thought of them (my lack of creativity probably didn’t help much). Anyway, I had pretty much given up the search when I was browsing some different blogs and came across Mena Grabowski Trott’s blog called dollarshort.org (I assume in reference to the phrase “a day late and a dollar short”…or is it the other way around?). This got me thinking and I decided to try the first half of the phrase, daylate.com…to my surprise it was available so I registered it. So…now you know, it wasn’t the result of any creativity of my own (not much anyway), the credit goes to Mena.

I was just thinking, maybe my first entry was a little premature. Leading with an introduction probably would have been more appropriate. So with that in mind, here it is. I’m currently a college student at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah majoring in Computer Science. I’m in my senior year and planning on graduating this April. I just completed a course on “Distributed Systems” taught by Phil Windley. It was my introduction to “blogging” and this is my first attempt. Unfortunately I’m not much of a writer…hopefully I’ll improve with time.

I’ve also spent the last 3 years working full time as a manager of production/operations for a small department of an international organization (lest I reflect negatively on them I’d rather not say which). Basically I’m a System Admin of a couple SQL servers and an IBM iSeries database server (also known as an AS/400). Unfortunately the rest of our operations run off of some Windows 2000 Servers (before you comment, please note this was not my choice). I was fortunate enough to find an extra desktop to install RedHat on. I pass it off as my “development server” :).

At the moment I’m getting ready to struggle through my last semester. It should be a fun one considering I’ll be working full time and taking a fairly heavy load of classes. What I’m going to do after I graduate I’m not so sure. Just a tip, if you’re in the tech field and have a good job…be grateful. On the other hand, if you’re graduating and looking for a “good” tech job…I sympathize (TRUST ME!).

Well…I think that’s sufficient for now, so until I think of anything else…

I’ve been wanting to get a machine I could dedicate as a linux server for quite a while. This past week a friend contacted me about some cheap used servers (apparently from an internet company that went bankrupt, does that happen?). Anyway, I ended up with dual processors (pentium III 1ghz) on an ASUS CUV4X-D motherboard with 1gb RAM and two IBM 40gb deskstar hard drives. Not too bad, huh? I think it ought to be more than enough for what I’ll use it for.

I installed RedHat v8.0. The install went fairly smoothly except the kernel didn’t seem to like something about my motherboard. After doing some searching I discovered adding the option ‘noapic’ to the boot method would solve the problem, and it did. I decided to setup software RAID 1 across the hard drives, using diskdruid during the RedHat install program, which was actually a lot easier than I expected it to be. Up until this point I’ve always used hardware RAID, now I’m kicking myself I didn’t look into it sooner (would have saved some $$ I spent on some RAID IDE controllers). My first step was to get Apache up and running and get MovableType installed. Now that that’s done, I’m sure there will be more entries soon to come.