March 29, 2009: Liesl Goes Outlet Shopping

I slept in this morning.  I mean really slept in.  It was awesome.  We went to bed before midnight so it was an early night for us to begin with and then, because the weather has been so nice and warm, we were able to sleep for the third night in a row with the window above my side of the bed open (the window on Dominica’s side has some issues with the wood and needs to be replaced before we can use it again) and Oreo was a super snuggle dog all night too sleeping back to back with me all stretched out for maximum warmth and snuggles.  It made for a very good night’s sleep.

I didn’t get up until a quarter until ten.  Almost ten hours of sleep for me.  I feel very, very refreshed this morning.  Dominica was not nearly as refreshed as Liesl has been getting her up rather early in the mornings for the last week or so with today being no exception.  Oreo stayed in bed with me until after I had showered even.  Normally he will get out of bed between seven and eight in the morning and move himself to the nursery (which he considers to be his own room) to sleep on the air mattress (which he considers to be his own bed.)

It was around ten thirty when Oreo and I came downstairs.  The morning was spent playing with Liesl, taking out the trash, walking Oreo, trying to squeeze in time for coffee and breakfast, etc.  I also had a short conference call at eleven this morning that lasted for about half an hour.

When I took Oreo on his morning walk today he decided to chase the goose that “lives” in our front yard.  The goose was in no mood for these shenanigans today and hissed at Oreo and stood its ground and rose up with its wings out trying to look all big and threatening.  Oreo almost got himself seriously goosed but decided to leave the goose be and to carry on his merry way.  It was a nice little bit of excitement for our little Boston Terrier on a Sunday morning.

Katie arrived just after one to pick up Dominica and Liesl.  Today is Liesl’s first time going to the outlet mall.  Liesl has enjoyed her shopping trips recently to the grocery store and other places with Dominica so much that they decided to attempt a real day of shopping.  Dominica has been trying to get out to a Williams-Sonoma for quite a while now so this will be nice.  Next time that they go shopping I am hoping that they can take the KT-Mobile to Ikea in Patterson (or wherever it is in New Jersey) to pick up a couple of large bookshelves that we are going to mount in the basement to mirror the ones that we already have as we are just beginning to run out of shelf space and need places to put books as they ship down from dad’s house.

After Dominica, Liesl and Katie left to go shopping I put in some time cleaning around the house.  I find it so much easier to clean when it is just Oreo and I at home.  I got important kitchen cleaning done and moved boxes and all kinds of stuff that came from dad’s house last week so that the dining room looks more or less normal again.  I moved the kitchen table all by myself and put the wine fridge into the corner where it belongs.  Now we have space to move around and a place to put our wine that Dominica just picked up the other day.  It is so nice to start getting our real furniture and appliances again.  The house is starting to come together.

After cleaning and redding the next task was to get completely caught back up on Sheep Guarding Llama.  It is nearly impossible for me to keep up during the week so I just took an hour or two and sat down and caught back up.  Having cleaning and blogging out of the way and not hanging over my head makes it so much easier to get to work on other things.

I spent a good chunk of the afternoon working on the HP Integrity rx2600 that I have sitting by my desk.  I am having a terrible time getting into the management processor so that I can do anything.  It requires me to hit Control-Ecf but when I do nothing happens.  I tried the web portal as well as a telnet console and nothing.  So I finally gave up, after two hours or more of working on it, and called Dominica and Katie and asked them to stop somewhere to pick up a USB keyboard as the one that we have here at the house has gone missing.  Dominica’s laptop’s wireless keyboard died recently and she really needs to have a normal, wired keyboard so getting a new USB keyboard isn’t a big deal as she will use it on a daily basis.  Having wireless for your everyday keyboard and mouse is way more of a pain than it is worth.

After giving up on the server I went back upstairs and cleaned the kitchen, did the dishes and vacuumed the floors.  The house is looking pretty good by this point.

I am excited to be wearing a shirt today that I have not worn in about a year because it has been too small for me.  It is fitting just fine today, yay!

Dominica, Liesl and Katie got back from shopping at a quarter until eight this evening.  They were about shopping for more than six hours.  Liesl had a great time and Dominica said that she did really well.  Liesl got some really cool new outfits today including her first formal dress!

Katie was originally going to stay for dinner and a chance to watch some Coupling on Netflix but she had a headache that was getting worse by the time that they got to Peekskill so she decided to just go home and get some sleep.  So instead of ordering in dinner Dominica made something healthy that we ate while watching an episode of Murder She Wrote.

After watching one episode Dominica spent an hour or more on the phone and I went down to the basement to get some work done.  I did a ton of blog writing today and am really happy with my progress.  I also finally got access to the rx2600 console and posted some information about it on SGL so that other people would not have to go through the same headaches that I just did.  Hopefully the information is searchable and useful to some people.  There are very few people out there trying out HP Integrity servers these days.

I got a chance to do some serious blogging today.  It is thirty minutes until midnight as I write this and I have written almost nine thousand words today!  That is a lot of writing.  This might be by biggest blog writing day ever – not including days when I wrote a really long paper for a class which I subsequently posted to SGL.  Those don’t really count.

Dominica was on the phone until after eleven thirty giving me a lot of time to write.  After she was done talking to Francesca I came back up to the living room and we attempted to watch Murder She Wrote but everything that we tried to watch off of NetFlix would die part way through the episode which is really frustrating.  We put in a good hour or more watching half of three different episodes of shows and not getting to finish any of them.  So we switched to Hulu and watched Family Guy and went to bed around one thirty in the morning.

Accessing HP Integrity MP for Newbies ^Ecf

So you’ve bought/inherited/stolen a hot HP Integrity server… now what do you do?  For those not up on their EPIC systems, the HP Integrity line is Hewlett-Packard’s Intel Itanium 2-based server line running the EPIC IA64 architecture.  These are seriously high-end servers and not to be taken lightly.

So you acquire one.  The first thing that you may realize is that you have absolutely no way to connect to it.  Well, this can be made pretty difficult by the fact that we do not know what state your server is in.  If it is in pristine condition then the easiest thing to do will be to set the IP address via ARP since DHCP is disabled by default.

Look on the info card on the front of your server (on my rx2600 this is a card that has a tiny handle that you can pull forward.)  On this card is the unit’s MAC address.  Use this to manually set the IP address of the management system via a computer on the local subnet.  First, make sure that you have plugged in and plugged in the management console ethernet connection.  In this example we will set the management system address to 192.168.2.28:

arp -s ma-ca-dd-re-ss-00 192.168.2.28

ping 192.168.2.28

Where the MAC Address is the address of your machine (not my cleaverly written MAC address!)  If all goes well this will set your system address and you will be good to go.  If you system has already been set up for DHCP then this technique will not work.  Check your DHCP server logs to see what address was handed out to the MAC Address that you just looked up.

Now, using Windows telnet or, better yet, the amazing PuTTY tool you can connection to your new server’s management console:

telnet 192.168.2.28

Or, of course, you can connect via your web browser if you have Java installed:

http://192.168.2.28/

Now, if you have an older version of MP the username / password that you are looking for are both blank by default.  Just hit the enter key a couple of times and you should be in.  If your MP firmware has been updated then the default username and password are Admin / Admin along with a default operator of Oper / Oper.

If your system is like mine you will now be presented with some warning and a notice that you must press ^Ecf in order to access the system.  This can be a bit confusing.  Here is the long description that helps to solve the mystery of what to press: Hit Control-e, then release completely.  Then press c.  Then press f.  This is a three key “sequence” not a “chord.”  Only the first character in the sequence is “controlled”.

If this wasn’t confusing enough, after hitting this three key sequence you then need to hit Control-b in order to be dropped to the Management Process system.

If all goes well, you will be dropped to the MP> command parser so that you can begin to use your system.  I include this all here because my first experience with an HP Integrity rx2600 was a bit daunting and everyone online seemed to assume a rather extensive amount of access to documentation, cabling, HP resources and mind reading capacity.

Good luck and welcome to the world of the HP Integrity server!

March 28, 2009: Oreo Feints

Went to bed on the early side and slept in a little this morning.  It was great.  Didn’t get up until almost nine!  It makes it feel almost like a real weekend.  Almost.

Tony called me from Toronto at ten to get started on the AIX patching and upgrade work that we are doing together this morning.  I was originally expecting him to call at eleven so that caught me off guard a little.  It was a good thing that he called so early as it ended up taking several hours to do the patching and I would have been working all afternoon had we not started when we did.

I am volunteering to do weekend AIX work at the office because AIX is notably missing from my resume (I have it but not nearly as much of it as I would like to have) and because it makes me more rounded and more valuable at work.  I did some AIX work when I was an IT Manager at IBM back in 2000 and 2001 but it has been a while and it will be very nice to work in the huge environment that we have where I am working now.  I am really thankful to have easy access to so many mentors.  It makes learning so much easier.

We worked for almost three hours on the patching.  It would have gone far quicker if I was not training but we wanted to step through the entire process line by line looking at the commands, in case there was anything new to me which there was, and looking at what the corporate standards are for our environment, doing the patching and doing detailed verification and documentation of the process afterwards.  In the future this should go much, much faster although there are some pretty significant time-intensive steps in the AIX upgrade process that we do such as breaking mirrors and re-syncing once the upgrade is complete, disk cloning for safety, several reboots, etc.  Each reboot takes about ten minutes which seems like hardly anything until you realize that you reboot three times or more per several.  So that is over half an hour per server of just waiting for the servers to come online.

After my AIX work was over I was able to go ahead and do my usual Linux weekend upgrade work which took another hour or two.  It was a rather long Saturday or work but it was not too bad.  I enjoyed the chance to work on AIX.  That makes for a nice change of pace.

Dominica gave me an incredible scare this morning.  While I was on the phone working suddenly she screamed through the house that I had to come quickly as it was an emergency.  She didn’t tell me where she was or what was wrong.  So I threw off my telephone headset and ran through the house looking for her or any signs of carnage.

It turned out that she had taken Oreo for a walk and he had started to vomit in the front yard and, while vomiting, had feinted and gone over on his side as if he had had a heart attack.  She left him laying in the yard and ran in screaming for me thinking that he was dead or nearly so.

By the time that I got outside Oreo was up and somewhat weak but not nearly enough to make one panic.  It took a bit to find out from Dominica what had happened.  She was nearly hysterical with panic.  After a few minutes it occurred to me that this chain of events sounded familiar and then I remembered that Oreo used to have this problem, years ago, and that the vet had told us that this was not uncommon in Boston Terriers and that the feinting is caused by a pinched nerve in the neck that gets aggravated when he vomits.  Within fifteen or twenty minutes he was perfectly fine and was acting as if nothing had happened at all.  Boy did he and Dominica manage to scare me, though.  Talk about panic.  I thought that something had happened to Liesl and that Oreo had run away and been hit by a car while Dominica was trying to save Liesl or something.

Dominica got Hex on DVD through NetFlix that she really has been wanting to watch for years so we watched that spread out throughout the day.  It isn’t my type of show.  I really do not enjoy all of the pop-culture voodoo/witchcraft/demon shows that are so popular these days but this is a little better than average – but only barely.  I don’t understand the draw to watch shows like this.  Not really entertaining.  And not well thought out either.  All of the people so obsessed with this stuff don’t even take the time to look up the references that they use so it is just a bunch of “buzz words” thrown together to make it sound like something real but is, in fact, just garbage.  It would be more entertaining, I think, if the people making the shows cared at all about them.  But it is television and that just doesn’t happen.  There isn’t any money in making good shows.

I spent most of the afternoon and evening working on building a FreeBSD 7.1 server on which I am going to run OpenVPN for SSL-based remote VPN access.  I have not installed FreeBSD since, if I remember correctly, the 5.x series.  It has definitely been a while.  I like FreeBSD but just never get a chance to really work with it so this is going to be fun.

After Hex we watched the remaining episodes of News Radio that have been available on NetFlix Play Instantly and are not going to be available for much longer (along with several BBC shows they disappear on April 1st.)  So we are rushing to watch shows that we really want to see before they are no longer available.

Tomorrow Dominica, Katie and Liesl are going out to go shopping at the outlet mall at Woodbury Commons so Oreo and I are going to have the house to ourselves for much of the day.  As much as I miss Liesl when she leaves I do enjoy getting several hours to myself to putter about the house being actually productive.  There is more than enough work around the house to keep me busy no matter how long they decide to stay out shopping.

Our next two weekends are going to be busy.  One week from today Dominica and I are going to Frankfort for Stephanie’s bridal shower on Saturday afternoon.  Because of the timing of the shower and because of my Saturday morning work we will have to drive to Frankfort on Friday evening between when my evening deployments end and when I have to do my hardware checkouts in the wee hours of the morning.  That is going to be a really long day.  Then I will be working from the laptop on Saturday morning.

The weekend after that we are going to Waverly, New York to see Dominica family.  I believe that that is Saturday as wel.  In conjunction with one of those two trips we are planning to go back home to dad’s house for a few days so that we can pick up the BMW for the summer months and get the tires switched on the Mazda so that we are not driving on our winter snow tires in good weather unnecessarily.  That will give us a chance to get two carloads of stuff from his house in one trip as well which will be nice.  Now if only we had space to store all of the stuff as it comes down we would be in really good shape.

I got all of the CDs converted to MP3 that were shipped down in the latest load of stuff from dad’s so they can return now to go into archival storage.  I am making pretty good progress on the DVDs as well.  I try to do one or two per day although there are constant technical challenges with DVDs that make me have to re-encode the same DVD over and over again rather frequently.  It is rather a bit of work.  More than one would expect.

March 27, 2009: No, Not Spice World!

[Editor’s note: The title of this blog post is in reference to the abysmal 1997 excuse for popular British entertainment and not to the Austin, Texas based small business inventory and helpdesk conference of the same name.]

I woke up at just around seven this morning and got right to work.  It was pretty early but I was awake and able to be productive so I got right into it.  It was nice because I got a ton of work done before I normally even start working.

Nothing much to mention today.  It was a pretty normal day.  Work, work, work.  It is Friday so my schedule is always pretty much the same on Fridays.  I had a number of phone calls today like I always do.  I don’t know what has changed recently causing everyone to call me constantly but it is driving me crazy.  So much time is wasted trying to get the people on the phone to just email me the information that I need since I have to have it written down for accuracy and in a tangible format for auditing.  Calling me on the phone just delays any work that these people want me to do and makes it more likely for me to make a mistake while doing it both because I am distracted by the people talking about nothing relevant on the phone and because I get backed up with work and have to do multiple things at the same time to keep up.

Important rule of thumb when working with a system administrator – DO NOT CALL THEM.  There is no reason to be calling you system admin especially when there is a significant issue like an outage.  That is the very last time that you want to be cripplying their ability to work efficiently and to think clearly.  I constantly have application managers who want to be on the phone when something is horribly wrong and their constant intervention, nagging and misdirection could easily be classified as active corporate sabotage.  They know that they have nothing valuable to add to the situation but activively keep people who need to work from working.  Why?  I have no idea.  Clearly these are people who didn’t get to be managers by knowing what they were doing or they would never let this happen.

I am working tomorrow even though there is a production freeze in place currently.  I am doing some AIX training which should be fun.  Starting that in the morning and doing my usual weekend patching work immediately afterwards.

Dominica ran out to take of some errands quickly early on this evening.  She hit the post office to get our taxes sent out since they needed to go with delivery verification and all of that good stuff.  She also managed to his a wine store so we have a little wine in the house again which is awesome.  We have pretty much been running on empty since having moved to Peekskill.  She just got three bottles but that is more than we have had in almost half a year.  Hopefully sometime this summer we will be able to make a run to the Finger Lakes and hit a bunch of the wineries and stock up.  One good trip should get us through the rest of the year if we plan it well.

This evening I spent some time working on setting up an OpenVPN server.  I am trying to come up with a good design that is relatively easy to manage and will work well for “roaming” users.  OpenVPN is not a simple system to set up so my first attempt is to set up a packages OpenVPN system such as Endian or Untangle although they are both pretty limited and don’t really seem to have all of the features that I would like to have while having many features that I do not need at all.

I read some stuff that basically said that Untangle was not going to meet my needs at all so I looked seriously into Endian.  I even did several installs of it attempting to get it to work correctly but, in the end, the answer was pretty much that because of the way that both Endian and Untangle base everything that they do around their routing engine and because they significantly modify the underlying operating environment so that it is far more difficult to modify than a stock UNIX operating system that neither were going to work at all as my OpenVPN system would be completely behind the existing firewall and not activing as a firewall itself.  I am very surprised by how difficult it is to find a simple virtual appliance of OpenVPN.  Why is no one making this – at least not a free version.  This seems like it would be an extremely popular system to have.

By the end of the evening I decided that working with Endian was not going to cut it and that my only good choice was going to be building a standard UNIX virtual machine and then installing OpenVPN myself onto it and working from there.  More work than I was hoping to have to do but it appears that I have no choice so that is the route that I have to take.  I did decide that given the type of project that this is it is a perfect opportunity to build a FreeBSD system rather than a Red Hat Linux system to try it out.  It is a really isolated system so having it be on BSD and unlike my other systems should not be a problem at all.

While I was working this evening Dominica put on the horrific movie SpiceWorld with the pathetic Spice Girls.  What a horrible movie.  I have not seen it since I saw it in the theatre with Nate and Emily back in 1997.  Hard to believe that it has been a dozen years since anyone knew who the Spice Girls were.  They totally faded into obscurity except for Slutty Spice or whatever her name (really, who can tell them apart?) was who has now become the poster child for vacuous pointlessness and has become a national embarrassment to the British people (and now to America since she moved here but at least she lives in LA where we send people like that – its nice to have a special place for everyone, I suppose.)

We didn’t stay up too late as I have to work in the morning.  So we went to bed around eleven thirty or so.  Liesl has been going to bed earlier and earlier and getting up earlier and earlier recently.  This is a worrisome trend as it means that she may start sleeping during the day and not at night soon.  She used to fall asleep around one in the morning and has slowly worked herself to falling asleep just after eight in the evening!  She is starting to get Dominica up quite early in the morning.

March 26, 2009: Tax Day for the Millers

I was pretty tired when the alarm went off at six twenty this morning.  But I got up and got right to work.  Luckily today, like yesterday, was a really slow day and I was able to keep up with things just fine.  Unfortunately I had to wake dad up early as he sleeps in the basement where I work so he was not able to get any extra rest even though he is going to be driving all day today.

Dad spent the morning packing while I worked for the office. Dominica got right up and got to work on her classes. She started Perl programming yesterday and dad said that she seemed to really be having a good time learning it.  This morning was another class in Perl programming and she was up early and working on it before nine!

We all tried to go out to breakfast at ten thirty but I spent a bit of the morning on a conference call.  We finally snuck away at eleven in the hopes that dad could be on the road home before noon but no sooner did we all drive out to Pastel’s then I was paged back to the house to get back onto the conference call!

So I drove back as quickly as I could and was on the phone for a full hour.  Then I drove back, now after noon, and ate my lunch rather than breakfast while dad and Dominica (and Liesl) waited for me.  What a pain.

So dad didn’t get on the road until almost one.  Then it was back to work for me.

Dominica took the entire afternoon and worked on our taxes.  What a pain.  It must have been three or four hours of filling out paperwork and hunting down papers that we need.  In the end we have just about everything except for some claims that we need to come up with yet and some paperwork that has to be printed out from online or something like that.  All of this and it is just the paperwork to prepare to send to the CPA!

I am really disgusted by the difficulty in paying taxes in the US.  I’m not really upset about the amount of taxes that we pay.  Yes, I think that it is too high but I can live with it.  But I definitely think that paying taxes should be simple.  Very, very simple.  There should be no surprises, no gotchas, just a simple means of honestly paying your taxes.  As someone who isn’t trying to not pay his taxes I am really offended that the government makes it pretty much impossible for me to know if I am paying what I am supposed to even when I use a CPA.  There is no way for me to be sure that I am not doing something wrong.  It just isn’t possible.  The government doesn’t even set a clear guideline to determine in what state I live let alone how much I owe!

The one really awful thing is that we are absolutely sure that we paid our taxes ahead this year (sending in pre-payment forms during the year) but we are unable to locate any documentation of this.  There appears to be no cancelled checks on my bank account.  So we don’t really know what happened.  Did they get “lost” in the mail like so many things did in Newark?  Did the IRS just not cash them?  Did I lose them between writing them and the mailbox?  I have no way to know.  It is really awful.  So now we have no idea what is going to happen or how you deal with this situation.

At very least the initial tax paperwork has been filled out and things can move forward.  I find the burden and stress of doing taxes to be crippling.  I just can’t get anything done because it is so stressful.

After work we had dinner and watched the final episode of Grace and Favour and then I stayed home with Oreo while Dominica and Liesl went to Stop and Shop to get groceries.  Dominica had to go tonight because we have ten percent off coupons that expire if we do not use them promptly.  So she stocked up.

Liesl loves going grocery shopping.  Dominica wears her in a Moby wrap and Liesl is wide awake checking out all of the stuff going on in the grocery store.  She especially loves looking at the vegetables.