Lance’s Ramblings

As some of you may have noticed, I’ve been a little distanced from Gentoo lately. Between work keeping me busy, and me finding more things to do in my free time, its been harder to be motivated. I think a part of me just needed a break from all the hoopla of Gentoo and step back to get a new look on things. I’ve been continuing to maintain our infrastructure as much as I can to ensure that none of the developers have problems. Gladly, we’ve done a decent job (knock on wood) of keeping most of our services up in the last few months. Its always nice as an administrator to have stuff actually working as aspected for once.

I keep hoping I’ll find time to fit Gentoo into where I work now, but it seems as though I spend more time putting out fires there than finding ways of using the power of Gentoo there. For me, the biggest thing I’d like to be able to use is portage as a solaris package mechanism. We have a homegrown set of scripts that work pretty well, but its not nearly as flexible as portage. I’m glad to see other folks inside of Gentoo working on prefix support (no matter what other un-named people will say about it). I should probably find some free time and play with it some.

Anyways, just thought I’d finally update a few things from the Gentoo side of things!

Ok, so apparently I’m terrible at this blog update thing. I guess its too easy for me to find more important things to do during my day than rant online about something. Anyways, life has been doing ok I guess. Work is keeping me busy and I’m learning lots of cool stuff. Its nice being back on campus, though I feel older as each month passes on.

Kansas is really starting to show its true weather pattern: Cold, Hot, Cool, Warm, COLD, HOT. I can’t wait for spring to really start rolling in with thunderstorms and what not :-). Anyways, its getting late and I should be in bed by now.

Well, it has seem like ages since I’ve done anything to my blog. Anyways, I have some excellent news for the folks that like using our viewcvs to access our source. I’m in the final stages of implementing the new viewcvs layout with some of our svn modules included! Most of our developers have already known about the test site, but this is the first chance I’ve been able to make a public ‘announcement’ per say about it.

Please take a look at it and give me any feedback!

So, one of the regular KSU folks on irc was in town from California this weekend and he loves to play raquetball. I’ve always wanted to play him (even though I know he’d kick my ass). We actaully got five people to show up to the rec after work yesterday, it was awesome! I was having a blast till midway through my second game against Jim. I was going over the ball on the right side near the wall when my left ankle decided to giveway and roll. I heard two distinctive “POP! POP” sounds and then I felt pain. I knew right then that I had really done something bad to my left ankle.

I sat down outside the court and tried to calm myself down. For some strange reason, I tend to get almost in shock when something big like this happens to me. It took probably 20 minutes for me to calm down enough to try and get up and walk out. I decided to not go to the ER that night and see how it pans out over night.

Morning came and things didn’t seem to be better and I decided to head to the ER and get it xrayed. Luckily things came back that it wasn’t broken, but they put my ankle in a splint anyways to keep it supported.

Needless to say.. the start of this weekend wasn’t the best but hopefully I’ll be back up to par by the time I head out to LWE.

Well, I certainly have been doing a terrible job on keeping my blog up-to-date lately. I apologize for my lack of info! Things have certainly been changing lately for me. For one, I started my new job at K-State being a UNIX Administrator for their enterprise systems at the beginning of June. So far I love the job and am enjoying almost every minute of it. Its certainly the challenge in my career I was looking for (plus the pay increase was nice ).

Also, I’ve had some other recent great things happen in my personal life that I may not have told some folks about. The week I moved back to Manhattan, Kansas I met a girl in the area that was a special ed teacher. We went on a few dates and things went really well. Now we’re seeing each other and life is so great. Its so weird knowing I have someone else I can spend my time with. So for all of those folks out there I know online… this is why I’ve been a little more ‘MIA’ lately. We’re trying to take things slow, but things look promising so far!

In other news, I’ve finally moved into my own apartment. Its sweet!!! Its even bigger than my house is by square footage (1250sqft). I’m moving the last of my stuff from Hiawatha next weekend. Sadly, I’ve had no bites on my house so far. Would be nice to get that chapter done so I dont’ have to spend money/worry about it anymore. Anyways, its getting late and I should head to bed.

Man, its been a while since I’ve put something on my blog! Well, things have certainly been busy for me in the last month or so. For one, I quit my job at RHS and my last day was on May 26th. It was definately sad to leave working there, but I was also glad. After that, I went on a trip to Denver, Colorado with a group of old college friends. We stayed there 5 days and had a blast! I need to upload my pictures at some point. After I returned from that trip, I helped dad by hauling corn via a semi truck to an elevator about 40 miles from our house. Its always fun driving a big semi rig :). During this whole time I was packing and packing stuff up in my house. Finally got it all done (thanks to my mom helping!) Tuesday afternoon. Then we started the trek down the Manahattan and got me moved in with a long time friend Susan.

The rest of the week I’ve just been settling in, getting more things unpacked, and just relaxing. I start my new job on Monday and things should start to get a little more busy for me. Well, thats all for now, more later!

Hey all, I know its been a while since I’ve posted to the planet. I’ve been pretty busy lately with a lot of personal stuff going on. The big thing lately is that I accepted a new job at Kansas State University being a UNIX System Administrator for their Enterprise Server Technologies group. I’m really excited about this opportunity of getting to dedicate most of my work on the *nix side of things. I’m also looking forward to moving back to my alma mater! (Go Wildcats!)

Anyways, onto Gentoo related stuff. Lately I’ve been working on totally revamping how our web nodes update and function. We’ve been using cfengine to do most of the hard work, but I’ve found for parts of it, its just not the right tool. So I’ve created a few scripts to be run under cron to make things a bit more predictable. I’m hoping to get this whole process implemented on our nodes in the next few weeks. Of course, that depends on how much time I have between moving and my new job.

One of the areas I’ve been trying to improve is our viewcvs implementation. I noticed the ebuild had been neglected for a while, so I decided to help manage it and make a new 1.0 branch snapshot of it. I also have been working on making the look more like our website and other sites. Take a look at the snapshot!

Please let me know what you think! I’m still working on the css styles and the template, but I like what I see so far

So I had an interesting call last night from the folks at Amazon. Apparently they wanted to setup a phone interview with me for a UNIX sys admin position they had open. I was thinking in my mind: “DOH!” as I had just accepted a position at K-State for a similiar position. Right now I’m wanting to work in a university, but it would have been fun to interview with Amazon anyways. Wonder how far I could have gone and where I’d end up there. But oh well! I kindly told the lady that I had accepted a position already and wasn’t looking for a job anymore.

In other news, I’m putting my house on the market to be sold. Had an older couple look at it last night, but I don’t think they are that interested. This is a new experience for me and I hope I come out on top selling my place.

Well, back to work …

Recently, folks have been making their own southpark characters so I figured I’d join in the fun.

If you’d like to make your own, check it out here!

I’m sure most of you all are getting annoyed at most of these recent virus emails (especially if you aren’t able to use clamav or something similar). Thanks to lcars, I’ve got a crude simple procmail rule you can use that will catch most of these.


:0
* ^Content-type: (multipart/mixed|multipart/report)
{
:0 B
*^Content-Disposition: (attachment|inline)
*filename=".*\.(ocx|vbs|wsf|shs|exe|com|bat|chm|pif|vbe|hta|scr|zip)"
{
:0
.viruses/
}
}


If you still want to get those attachments but just axe these viruses, you can probably add another rule that matches the first line of the attachment. This is far from perfect, but its definately gotten my mailbox under control. Infrastructure is considering getting clamav on our dev box, so look for that in the near future. We’ll only be using it if the load on the box isn’t too bad from it.

Cheers!