Technology

Static IP Bliss

by

I finally took the plunge. I finally forked over the extra money to my cable company for a static IP address. Granted I have had the same ip since I moved in, but my provider (RCN) blocks web and SMTP ports. That means I couldn’t host a website or a mail server. With my static ip (and RCN having $20 a month from me) I can (according to tech support) host stuff on my server now. I am kind of pissed that I have to pay since I was able to do this with Time Warner for free in the past. Granted I am not sure if TW actually allowed it but it was technically possible to do. I could have gotten a port redirector service to allow me to host my site with port 80 being blocked but RCN did offer me this pay for an IP option. I cut back on my cell phone since I haven’t been using it so the cost to me is a wash.

I have just configured my router for the static VPN tunnels that I have. Stupid changes were needed on the Pix’s on the other end to get it to work, but after about 10 minutes on each tunnel I was up and running again. With 2 configuration changes on my router I was able to get a demo page up on apache. Seems to be working now. All I have to do is take the virtual machine I am running my site on, back it up and move it home. Hopefully everything comes up ok. Once I move the site to my home machine I can begin to work on a linux only version of the site.

Once the site is moved I can really test and see if RCN’s claims are accurate about their ip service. More news on that later.

Lazy Saturday

by

I hung out at home yesterday. I watched a bunch of TV off my Tivo, and finished installing Mac OS 10.4 on my mini’s. I am almost done on that front. I moved my iTunes music collection to my work mini before I went to bed.

I didn’t do as much cleaning of my apartment as I would have hopped. Maybe tomorrow.

Today I am planning on going to John’s for some Halo on the Xbox. Not sure what time I am leaving. I should probably get showered and dressed now just to be sure I am ready. More later.

Police Disturbance

by

After picking up my copy of Mac OS 10.4 (see last post) I was off to my office to pic up my Mini there so I could install the new OS over the weekend. As I got out of the subway at union square I was greeted with more crazyness. Some sort of bike protest was planned (i think) and the cops were out in force to deter the people from doing it. It was the second time in 2 months that I saw that many Police bikes in one place.

Photo 042905 012-1

I got my mini from work and then met up with Cari, Jack, & Rajive for drinks around the corner from work. Jay & Gretchen meet up with us and J, G, Cari, & I went to dinner. It was a nice end to a very interesting day.

OS Tiger (10.4)

by

I told myself I would wait, or I didn’t need it. But when Apple finally released tiger, I decided I wanted to go get it. I didn’t realize that it wasn’t available until 6pm Friday. I thought it would be available Friday. Turns out it was available just around the time I was done dropping the rental car off and able to go down to SOHO to the Apple store.

Photo_042905_007

I got to the store and I told myself I should flee right now. The place was mobbed. There was a line around the corner and halfway down the block to get in. This was probably like 6:30PM. I figured I would get on line and see how long it would take. I could always leave.

I am glad I stayed. it was weird. There were tons of people. A guy in a tiger suit (sorry no photo’s). People with video camera’s. It was an interesting spectacle. People kept walking by going I wonder what is going on at the apple store that had such a line. By waiting on line I think I may have become one of “those” Mac people.

Photo_042905_011 Photo_042905_008

Thankfully I didn’t listen to myself and I stayed on line. After less than 15 minutes I was in the store, grabbed my copy of Tiger and was on my way to the line. A store employee “suggested” I go upstairs because of less of a line as he moved me towards the stairs. I am glad I listened. it was crowded upstairs but I got on line and only 1 other person was in front of me. With less than 30 minutes passed from the time I got on line, I was on my way out of the store. Not bad. I didn’t linger to look at the warez since it was crowded.

,

Busy Day

by

Today was at times very busy and very easy going. What do I mean? We finished our work upstate early, so we decided to head home. But as we were doing that others had problems that were ongoing. Jay and I decided to hit the Walmart on the way home. I needed food.

After loading up on food and a new watch we headed home. When we rent cars and go upstate we usually fill up with gas at the last gas station in New Jersey on the palisades parkway. Well it was closed for construction. We had no choice but to get fuel in the city. Have you seen many gas stations in Manhattan? I haven’t either.

After dropping my groceries off at my place we headed off to find fuel. Jayson knew of a place near his house (which BTW was near the rental car return place). By now it was after 4pm on a friday in NYC. traffic was horrible. it took us 40 minutes to get to the gas station. then we had issues with it being too crowded and we were unable to get a pump on the side where our truck had the gas cap. After a fit of frustration we were going to drive into queens to find a station and then come back (we were right by the 59th street bridge anyway). knowing that would take forever we doubled back and the original gas station we went too was less crowded. 20 minutes after we originally showed up to the station, we got fuel. Another 20 minutes (to go 3 avenues and 8 blocks) we dropped off the rental car.

I was then off to the Apple store. I wanted the latest OS (10.4) and it just went on sale. See next post for details.

T-Mobile Coverage Maps

by

I have found another reason to still be happy with T-Mobile as my mobile provider. They may not be the biggest carrier in the US but they are coming up with nifty things that shouldn’t be innovative, but they are. Check out the street level coverage map. Punch in your address and it tells you how the signal strength should be. The accuracy seems correct for outside coverage. I punched up Jaysons address and it says he should have perfect coverage. he does when he is outside his place, but gets no signal in his apartment. I then punched up my companies office upstate and it accurately showed me where good signal would be and where it won’t. now I understand why there is no good signal at the train station. there is no tower nearby. Like google maps it was very fascinating to just punch up an address and see the coverage.

I don’t understand why Cingular and Verizon don’t stop treating their customers (in my opinion) like criminals and give them information like this? or allow unlocked phones, or changing price plans without signing new contracts, etc. Kudos to T-Mobile for another reason why I am still a customer even if they don’t have plans for a faster data network for a few years.

Possible Name, Server, & Mail Changes

by

Making some back end changes to this site and my other server systems. The biggest achievement was moving my mail server. Basically a cut and paste of files and registry entries from one server to the virtual server I am using to host much of my site now a days. The DNS changes to the mail happened very fast. I was happy not to have much of a lag.

On-Call This Week

by

After weeks of flying under the radar I got the joy of being “technically” on call this weekend. I mean technically since I am always on call. I get calls for problems even when I am not the person who is supposed to be called. It comes with my position. One of the worst things that can happen to me is to be sleeping and get woken up with some major systems outage. It get the same feeling I used to get when I ran on an EMS squad in college and a call would come in late at night. The only difference is being on call at work usually does not require me to go out in the cold to respond to something.

To set a good example I took the on call pager this week. Well it is not really a pager. We all have nextel’s (most with Blackberry’s), so we just route the emergency number to the Nextel of whoever is on call. Of course most of the team was happy when I got to be on call. They assume if someone calls for a non emergency I will give them a verbal beat down. They are probably correct.

Linux Is Addictive

by

For years I have been getting poked and prodded by Gus to do more with linux. Of course he would say this as he gave me a workload no 2 people could handle. Over the past few months Jayson and Danny have been getting into the act of wanting to push our linux use, personal and professional. Now I got Brian, Chris and Kai also saying we should play more with Linux.

Jayson took it upon himself to setup a web server at his house. it is an old dell box I had lying in my closet. I have yet to put any applications onto it, but he has a website, blog, wiki, and mail system running on it so far. His enthusiasm is addictive. I have been working on a virtual machine that I can host my stuff in, but I am thinking that won’t be enough. I could just host my stuff with him. That was the idea of giving him the box in the first place, but then I think what fun would that be?

I want to play with my own personal wiki. The other stuff he has done I don’t really want. The mail server sounds good, but I am not sure if I want to put mail (i rely on mail allot) on a system that I don’t fully understand yet.

What everyone doesn’t (or does) understand is that I want to learn, it is just not super simple!

Yet More Vmware Stories

by

I have spent 2 days working on fixing my active directory test virtual machines. I upgraded to vmware workstation 5.0 hoping to solve some cloning issues. if that doesn’t (didn’t) fix my issue I will use Microsoft sysprep on the virtual machines to resolve the SID problems.

I am also building myself a stable Suse 9.1 VM. The process of upgrading all the VM’s I have to work with workstation 5.0 will also take some time. The Kingston guys finally saw how I can connect to our GSX server today when I was up there. now they want one.

After some initial issues with the Suse 9.1 VM I am on my way to getting this to work. I keep hitting roadblocks with my configuration. it just shows how much I have to learn when it comes to linux.