Category: Geekery

I volunteer my time to administer the news servers at The National Capital Freenet in Ottawa, mostly because after GeoVision shut down it was my main place to read news. After the last minor crisis in the news servers (caused by the regular sysadmins adding a new modem pool and a new netblock without telling me), somebody was bitching and moaning about how the news administrator doesn’t live in Ottawa, and therefore doesn’t attend meetings and “doesn’t really know what’s going on at NCF these days”. And it was pointed out that the reason the NCF doesn’t have a news administrator who lives in Ottawa and goes to meetings is that nobody wants the job, and every time I try to quit the entire board of directors and half the members beg me to stay. So somebody asked what it would take to become a news administrator. What follows is a list I quickly wrote off the top of my head.
Continue reading “So you want to be a news admin?”

In an internal design discussion document, I wrote about whether we should prevent customers from being “dumb-asses” . I only used “dumb-asses” because I originally wrote “ass hats” and was trying to think of something milder. It didn’t occur to me after I sent it that I probably should have said something more like “stupid” or “not acting in their best interests” or something. But that’s the price you pay for reading bash.org when you’re at work.

Ok, no progress today on getting my email address and phone number listed in the corporate directory, so no internet access. But on the plus side, I can no longer log into the Lotus Notes system, so that’s one good thing that’s come out of this.

As of yesterday evening, I have a working badge. I can get in and out of work. As of this morning I have my Netpass back so I think I can smb mount folders from the Windows network. Unfortunately I still don’t have internet access (I’m borrowing somebody else’s, and he has me under strict order not to follow any links that might be blocked by our access police). Also, my company directory listing doesn’t list my phone number and email address. Not that I mind not getting any corporate voice mail messages or emails, but I’m told that’s why they can’t give me internet access.

When I got in this morning, my badge didn’t work so I couldn’t get through the turnstile. Of course over the holidays they’ve eliminated the security guard at the front door, so there is just a phone on the wall. You can’t even get into the waiting room where there are chairs and a coffee table. I called the security number, and they said gave me some jargon about how I’ve got this but not that, and I need to get my boss to straighten it out. I called my boss but he wasn’t there, so I left a voice mail telling him that I couldn’t stand around in the lobby for hours so I was going home and he could reach me on my cell phone. But on the way out to the parking lot, I spotted one of my cow orkers heading in, so I asked him to look around upstairs for somebody else who could help me. So I decided not to head home. Rohan got one of the secretaries to come down and get security to buzz me in, but not to activate my pass. I’ve got a temporary one that will work inside the building, but probably won’t work on the front door.

So I get to my desk and I can’t log in. Flipping over to a virtual console, I log in as root and find NFS errors on both bulworth and titan, which are very important servers, one for home directories and the other for ClearCase views. I try to reboot but it hang on unmounting the mvfs views from the ClearCase server. So I power cycle. After it boots, I can log in, but I can’t get to any external web pages, because whatever administrative cock-up made my badge not work has also eliminated all trace from me from the corporate directory, so my “global id” is gone, and with it my “netpass”. No global id also means I can’t get to the SMB file shares, so I can’t get stuff out of the document repository.

Oh, meanwhile I couldn’t get into my ClearCase views, so I had to reboot the system the views live on as well.

And just to make this a 100% fun day, Firefox has crashed twice while trying to write blog entries.

Right now I’m using a borrowed netpass to read some web sites (and post to my blog) and I can do some other stuff. But I’m told it will be at least 3 days before everything starts working 100%. I can see this is going to be a productive week.