Lance’s Ramblings

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!

Well, its official. I just accepted an offer from K-State for the UNIX admin position. I’m so excited/scared/nervous/pumped I don’t know what to think. I sincerely hope that I’m making the right decision by moving away and pursing this. I’m 98% sure that this is the right decision. The good thing is that I won’t be very far from home so the move will be not so bad. I’m guessing I’ll be moving down there by the first part of June and starting a few weeks after that.

Thanks for all the support from my friends on this! This is certainly an exciting time for me!