Author: weed

Let’s get some good ole barnson.org discussion going! Let’s discuss gun control. I know Matt & Ben have strong, differing views on this, so we should be able to get some good discourse going….

My views are that I agree that in a perfect world. they’re be no reason for guns, guns are primarily used to kill people, and we should get rid of guns. If you want to hunt, use a bow and arrow or muzzle-loader and give the prey a chance. However, we don’t live in a perfect world. We live in an amazing country where w’eve achieved an amazing level of safety and prosperity (on average, there are third-world conditions in many places in the US, but they don’t vote, so they don’t matter, right?). So people tend to forget about the bad people out there, both in our neighborhoods and in Washington DC. But the difference between our great society here in the US and regression into a Mad Max situation is slimmer than most realize. And when civilization breaks down, guns become necessary for protection, simply because they’ve been let out of Pandora’s box. The other guys *will* have them, so we need them too. You can’t unlearn technology, and the making of guns is easy now (you can do it by 3D printer!).

Or government is trending towards taking more and more power and worrying less and less about us little people, so I *do* believe we should own guns to hedge against a power grab one day. And anyone who thinks an armed populace can’t withstand the US military isn’t paying attention to Afghanistan.

As long as they can’t prevent criminals from owning gins (which they can’t) and as long as we have cronies in the government (we do), we need gins to protect ourselves from those who would use them against us. Matt has provided stats that show that places where guns are encouraged, crime falls, and where guns are banned, crime rises. Living in a fantasy world doesn’t make you safer.

Ben posted an interesting link on Facebook to a NY Times editorial piece: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/24/opinion/sunday/24sun4.html?_r=1&ref=todayspaper

Basically, roughly 60% of the deficit from 2001 on was caused by Bush’s tax cuts and the wars in Afghanistan/Iraq. The rest is the stimulus, TARP, medicare-drug relief, and non-defense discretionary spending.

If you read the histories of any empire, the hardest things to do is raise money for wars. Empires flourish when economic growth drives them, not conquest.

I’ve never been a fan of either war, especially Iraq, where we had no reason to be. Afghanistan I understand to a point, but 10 years is severely stretching that point. If this data is accurate, then there’s some justification, at least economically, for my point of view.

As for the tax cuts, I’d like the break-down as to who receives them (categorized by income, meaning are the rich reaping the most benefits of the tax cuts?) I am by no means poor, but think some of the tax incentives have been helping in promoting alternative energies (like solar and geothermal, which are stating to work).

My steps to fix the deficit

The government needs to help create more NON-governmental jobs. More jobs means more people paying taxes.

Don’t let people making over $250,000 year use tax credits/breaks. Fix loopholes that allow GE to not pay any taxes in a year.

Get out of Afghanistan/Iraq. If we need to make a point, make it quickly the get out. Protracted occupation doesn’t work.

My $.02 Weed

So I have a guy who’s the IT resource in our DC office. That office has a manager who’s bristling at our deployment of Sharepoint, but it’s also has basic internet connectivity issues that the ISP, the LEC, and we’ve gone around and around on.

My boss, tired of hearing this manager whine about having our processes migrated to Sharepoint, send me and one of my IT peeps down to this DC office to “investigate if they’re really a problem or if they’re just whining.” And we went.

Back to the IT resource. We’ll start with the positives…he’s a nice guy. And….did I mention he’s a nice guy? The downsides…he has no short term memory, he’s scared of the manager because they ask him for justification when he wants to do things, and he incompetent as an IT guy. But other than that, he’s a nice guy.

Case in point: The first 1 1/2 hours of our trip I spent fixing his laptop. See, Windows 7 was sharing his media files to others running Windows 7. Obviously this isn’t secure so he decided to fix it. He *tells* me that he removed access to the Users group from the C: drive on his laptop. Which is dumb, but shouldn’t be THAT hard to fix. Log in as an admin, seize ownership, and reset permissions to default. If he set any custom permissions, I hope he wrote them down, but I got other things to do.

But that doesn’t work. I can’t even get to the Advanced view of the Security dialogs for the C: drive. I get an error loading the access control dialog because it’s not accessible. Part of the problem is UAC, so I figure I’ll need to remove the laptop from the domain so I can disable UAC and log in as the local admin to get it to work.

So I remove it from the domain, and my wonderful IT changed the password for the local admin and can’t remember it. So I get the linux administrator password reset tool and blank it out so I can log in. Still can’t get to the Advanced Security pages, but I can run cacls from the command line to see that he did NOT remove the Users group from the C: drive, he explicit DENIED Full Control access to the Users group on the C: drive.

For this of you who don’t deal with NTFS permissions (and be happy you don’t), most of the time permissions are set on a least access required policy. Meaning I give the bare minimum permissions required for functionality, and only add the least amount necessary as requirements change. So if I don’t want someone to have access to a folder, I just omit them from permissions, I don’t deny them access. Deny permission in NTFS is a sledghammer that trumps all other permissions. If I Deny you, then no matter what other permissions may give you access, you’re not getting access.

So…since everyone is automatically a member of the Users group, and he Denied access to the Users groups, by the associative property (relative property, identity preoperty? I forget…) of IT stupidity, EVERYONE was denied access to his ENTIRE hard drive.

But Windows is smart enough to never totally lock out the local Administrator, so I was able to use TAKEOWN and icacls to sieze ownership and grant myself permissions, and then I rest all the default permissions on the drive.

I’ll vent about how he didn’t have the network switches or the router or the firewall plugged into the malfunctioning UPS another day.

My $.02 Weed

It’s been too long since I’ve been too loud Since I’ve showed you how to rock the crowd Movin’ the masses with my lyrical wordplay Wasting your day setting your iPod to replay My songs over and over and over some more I invade your ears like you’re an aural whore My name is Weed, the microphone’s my bitch Never smoked up but the names’s no glitch I’m hardy, I’m everywhere and I can’t be tamed I can’t be blamed because I can’t be shamed Claiming the crown of lyrical genius Living the funkiest life, maybe not the cleanest The Funk & me, nothing comes between us Except when your girl needs to polish my *radio edit* A lyrical master but a musical Muggle Weed to music like a cactus to snuggle Which is why MC Heb’s my ace in the hole If Weed is the heart, then Heb is the soul Working his bass like Bob Villa works tools He’s pure grain while your crew is O’Douls Fools step up and are quickly mastered Like level 54 on the Robotron blaster So here’s some funk on the Barnson domain You may not have been warned, but please don’t complain There’s no preparation for the DSFT invasion No need to be scared, no need for evasion We make you feel good no matter your affiliation A much better ending than the book of Revelation

Weed’s out

P.S. MC Heb, the gauntlet has been dropped…

So Dell contacted us a few weeks back and told us they would love to remote into our MD3000i Storage Array (hereby referring to as the “SAN”) and update its firmware.

Sure, we told Dell. Love to have ya!

So some scheduling took place, and emails were sent notifying of downtimes, and backups were made, and they day came and Dell updated our firmware.

And ye old SAN box would no longer respond to pings. So our ESX hosts could find their precious VMs, and for those of you who’ve never had a ESX host lose its VMs, that’s BAD.

So the troubleshooting began. The SAN are on their own VLAN. The ESX hosts connect to a LAG on the switch that trunks to said VLAN. ESX hosts can happily ping each other, so the VLAN is set up correct. If I plugged a laptop, configured on the same subnet as the SAN, into the one of the network cables plugged into the SAN, it could ping the ESX hosts. So the network cables weren’t bad.

So we called Dell support, and we got a lively one . I could tell from the beginning of the call he wasn’t going to be our savior that night, so I continued troubleshooting while he placed us on hold to “check with someone else” (read: smoke some more chronic). I changed the ip addresses of the iSCSI hosts to something else and back. I disabled the iSCSI controllers and re-enabled them. I rebooted the array. I turned off the VLAN tagging on the iSCSI ports.

Voila, the answer! I had set the switch ports where the SAN attached to untagged VLAN access mode. Apparently, if you set the SAN to set a VLAN tag on its traffic, it would work before the firmware upgrade, but not after. Afterwards, you either have to turn off the VLAN tagging on the SAN, or set the switch port mode to tagged. Otherwise network no worky.

If anyone out there knows which way is the correct behavior, I’d love to know. We were using a PC Dell 6248 as our switch.

Anyway, we figured it out before our wonderful Dell tech, so we sent him on our way, rescanned our iSCSi HBAs on our ESX hosts, restarted the VMs, and were back in business.

My $.02 Weed

So the Wife o’Weed has received an iPhone 3G. I’m sure I’ll answer this question as I play with it, but why would I need to jailbreak it? What apps or features would I need that Apple doesn’t allow?

Any advice or recommendations are welcome

Thanks Weed

So I’m doing laundry this weekend, and I’m washing to whites. I grab the Clorox bleach and put it in. While this may be the 100th or 1000th time I’ve done this, for some reason I notice the “kills 99.9% of known germs” on the label.

I’m hoping this is a legalese because they don’t want to claim 100% and then find something impervious to bleach and get sued. I mean, there isn’t anything that can withstand a nice dosing of Clorox, is there? Is there a tenth of a percent of germs, viruses, bacteria, fungii, whatever that can take a bleach bath and laugh it off? I’m the most anti-OCS person you can meet, I utilize the 5-second rule very liberally, but I admit I’m scared of a micro-organism that can shake off Clorox and still target my immune system. I can see Plankton from SpongeBob gargling some bleach, swallowing it, then going all Popeye on my intestines. “EUGENE!!!”

My $.02 Weed

Say Congratulations to the new IT Manager at Tiny-But-Growing-Corp!

I feel dumber already 😉

Weed

This song is over 2 years old, but I wonder how many of you saw the video. I keep watching it every so often just because of its wonderful homage to Spinal Tap. It’s hilarious.

For today’s Blast From The Past, I give you the video to Korn’s Twisted Transistor.

Note: Sysadmins may free to embed YouTube link directly into post if possible

So I had to shut down one of my ESX 3.5 virtual machines today, to remove a virtual NIC that wasn’t necessary anymore. When I went to start it up, I get an internal error. So I look in the logs, and see that ESX is claiming my license has expired. Well, it hasn’t, so off to the VMWare site I go.

Go to the knowledge base site, but it’s down for maintenance. Figures, just when I need it, it’s not working. This should have been an ominous sign, but it didn’t click at the time.

So next I go to the forums, where I find this gem.

Long story short, everyone who’s running the 3.5 U2 version of ESX Server cannot start or VMotion a virtual machine because the licensing bugs out on August 12th. Seriously, August 11th, you’re fine, August 12th, no VMs will power on.

Sounds to me like someone put a literal time bomb in the ESX code. And by the link above, it has blown up quite well.

The workaround isn’t that bad, but this is still quite the black eye for VMWare, which was bought recently by EMC and seems to be suffering from “I’ve been bought by the big multi-corp (EMC, Symantec, MS) and now can’t be quick, nimble, or bug-free anymore because of corporate beaurocracy”.

Hopefully UltraMegaCorp doesn’t feel any pain from this, as they might have some 24/7-type servers that can’t go down.

My $.02 Weed