Lance’s Ramblings

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!

Recently my boss has wanted to make some more sites for our company. He mainly only knows ASP and didn’t want to spend time learning something new. So I suggested we give Mono a try so we could possibly get our sites away from IIS. (ick, i know). It’s been a rough ride but I finally got most of the pieces working together. I decided to try the newest mono version out there (1.1.6) along with the newest version of mod_mono (1.0.8). I had to do a bump in my overlay for mod_mono but everything seems to be working so far.

The biggest hurdle was making a mysql connector work with the version of mysql we were running (4.1.11). Apparently the built-in connector (ByteFX) doesn’t support anything above 4.0.x. Another hurdle was the fact that the official connector from MySql was based on Windows (though, it was written in .Net). To my surprise, when I unpacked the source zip file, the project had a nant build file in it! After some work, I finally got the darn thing to build so I gave the new connector a try. It worked and there was much rejoicing. Once I clean up the process of building the connector, expect an official mysql connector ebuild for dot-net in the future.

Aside from Mono being spawned from a Microsoft product, I think it has a lot of potential. The biggest complaint I have thus far is their lack of adequate documentation on mod_mono and getting everything working with ASP dot-net. Maybe if I get time I can write a short document on how to get this all working so you don’t have to go through the same headaches as I did.

Hopefully I can finally get my company to using more open source alternatives through using Mono!

Well, this has certainly been an exciting week for me in the job hunt adventure. It started out with an email from Kansas State University on monday saying that the search committee had looked at my resume and was wondering if I was still interested in the UNIX System Administrator position. So of course I replied that night..

Then yesterday I got another email asking to setup an interview next week. WOOHOO! I decided to have it on Monday since I was planning on a trip there anyways this weekend… so we’ll see how it goes. I’m really nervous about the whole thing since I feel like they may ask questions where I may not know how to answer, or will answer in the wrong way.

Wish me luck!

Recently, I got around to finally getting cactid into portage for those cacti lovers out there. Its a great alternative to the php based snmp poller with a significant improvement on speed. If you use cacti, please give cacti-cactid a try!


echo "net-anaylyzer/cacti-cactid ~x86" >> /etc/portage/package.keywords
emerge cacti-cactid


Let me know if you have any issues.

As you all may or may not know, Gentoo has recently switched from using ezmlm as our mailing list software to something new and different called mlmmj. Its taken us quite a while to doing some extensive testing and debugging of the software to get where we’re at today. I would like to thank Andrea Barisani (lcars) for all the hard work he’s done to make this happen. We’re currently fully on the new system and on new hardware thanks to lcars!

With that being said, a lot of folks (particularly Gentoo developers) keep asking who is in charge of mailing lists now. Just for the record, Andrea (lcars) is now the main person in charge of mailings lists. If you’d like to see some stats that this server is doing, please feel free to check it out. Also, we’ve updated our mailing list page to reflect how you deal with interacting with mlmmj.

Please let Andrea know if you have any suggestions or requests that are related to our mailing lists!

Woohoo! Today was the big day for my oldest sister Diane to have her C Section Now I have a new niece! Here’s the scoop:

Brenna Rose Ward
7lbs 2.6oz, 19″ long
Born April 19th, 2005 at 8:32AM CDT

Brenna and Diane are doing great so far! Neither had any major issues during the procedure. The only issue they had was the fact that the surgical room was very cold, so the baby took a few hours to warm back up. Mason (her older brother) was so cute this morning when he got to see her for the first time. He was being so careful around her, and even gave her a kiss on the forehead! sooo cute

Anyways, that was my excitement for today

My trip so far has been simply awesome. Hanging out with Charity, the OSL/Gentoo folks have all be a great time. I’ll post more detailed info later, but for now I wanted to show everyone some pictures of the Oregon beaches I saw! Check it out! I forgot to get my camera out for Kveton’s BBQ, but I’ll try and remember to take more pictures in the next few days.

Well, the day has finally arrived. I’m only hours away from making my trip out to Oregon to visit some of my friends out there. I’m so excited! I’ll get to hang out with Corey Shields, Scott Kveton, Alex Polvi, Deedra Waters, and many others! It’ll be great to see the folks that I’ve already met, and meet some of the folks I haven’t met yet.

Probably the most excited part of the trip is going to be meeting Charity for the first time. I’ve been talking with her for the past few months and its been amazing. I don’t think I’ve ever met a person quite like her! She’s hilarious, smart, beautiful, and so much more. I can’t wait to see her!

My flight leaves at 10:15AM CST, then goes to Denver for about a 45min layover. From there I go straight to Portland. Hopefully I should arrive there around 2PM PST and have no troubles picking up my rental car. I plan on being in Oregon till Tuesday when I return home.

Wish me luck!

Thanks to Albert Hopkins (marduk) packages.gentoo.org is now on a new server located at OSL. The site should respond faster now because the database is now housed on OSL’s main database server that we use for bugzilla and the forums. In other news (though most people already know), I did get an SSL enabled version of bugzilla going a few days back. It’ll be nice to finally login to a session and not worry about things getting sniffed!

Well, as beejay noted earlier we are very close to releasing 2005.0 to the masses. I can’t wait to try out the stages and livecds! It seems like the releng team has been working extremely hard to make this release the best ever, lets hope it is! I started staging the release last night and will continue today. What this means is that all the data will be on the mirrors, just won’t be viewable to the public until the release date. (So don’t go rushing to your local mirror asking for a copy, just be PATIENT) This helps on the load for mirrors so they aren’t getting hammered because they’re still grabbing our stuff while our users are hammering their system.

In other news I haven’t been able to do much Gentoo work this week because of crazy stuff going on at work. I hope to try out Brian Herring’s mirror-dist script sometime this weekend. I’m also looking forward to possibly offering diff’d portage snapshots as a precursor to diff distfiles.