MavEtJu's Distorted View of the World - 2007-04

Posted on 2007-04-26 08:00:00
Tags: Moving

I had a brief touch of intimacy with Google. Well, with Google recruitment that is. After three interviews in three weeks, they decided that I wasn't good enough for them. To be honest: their loss.

What has this experience taught me? One thing is that I even more believe that phone interviews are not really working. Look at my work and internet history, look at the documents and articles I've written. And then they ask me to write down a regular expression and judge me on that.

So, now I am a mark in the "number of recruitmentments interviewed", but has Google or I gained anything from it? Not really, except for the recruitment department which is now closer to its monthly targets.

Posted on 2007-04-24 11:44:00
Tags: FreeBSD, RSS

I have reworked the implementation of the FreeBSD Multimedia Resources List. From a PHP script which parses everything when a webbrowser asks for it, I know have a Perl script which creates it once and the rest is static.

New features are tags in the articles and it also has a flexible design so it can be very easy modified for the different BSDs:

• DragonFlyBSD design
• FreeBSD design
• OpenBSD design
• NetBSD design

Unfortunately, the names of the files have changed a little bit to incorperate this:

• http://www.mavetju.org/unix/multimedia.php is now http://www.mavetju.org/unix/multimedia/freebsd/multimedia.html
• http://www.mavetju.org/unix/multimedia-rss.php is now http://www.mavetju.org/unix/multimedia/freebsd/multimedia.xml

With these new features I hope that the list will get incorperated in the websites of the varies *BSDs so that the list gets wider fame and I don't have to go from "If I only knew that this presentation was available three months ago..."

Posted on 2007-04-22 21:49:11
Tags: Computers, Network Monitoring, System Monitoring

Network and System Monitoring Primers

Recently I had a discussion with a collegue about the monitoring of our systems and network devices. I showed him what we all measure, and he wondered if it was overkill or not. I told him that somethings maybe were, but that good monitoring is the first step to knowing what happens in your network, and that knowing what happens in your network is the first step to be able to isolate problems when they arise.

So the question is: "What do you need to monitor?" The answer is easy: "Everything". That's a pretty big amount. Let reality kick in and rephrase it to: "Everything you can think off". This is too vague and misses the final goal: "Everything you assume to be the normal conditions for a system or service to run properly.".

"Everything you assume to be the normal conditions for a system or service run properly". That is quite a lot, and different for each service you provide or device you have on the network. It will make you to have to you dig into your network and servers to find out what is going on.

The rest of this story can be found at my website.

Posted on 2007-04-12 15:49:11
Tags: Happiness

Goodbye MovableType! Welcome handfull of scripts!

The website known as http://weblog.barnet.com.au/edwin/ is going to disappear. The new site for MavEtJu's Distorted View of the World is at http://www.mavetju.org/weblog/.

If you are using the RSS feed (RDF or XML), it can be continued at http://www.mavetju.org/weblog/index.rdf and http://www.mavetju.org/index.xml.

Posted on 2007-04-10 08:22:12, modified on 2007-04-22 21:45:00
Tags: Networking, SNMP

Recently we obtained a couple of new network hardware devices, to make our network saver and our life easier. But what do they run?

The first one is a Citrix VPN/SSL device. That one is easy to identify, specially if you have SNMP enabled on it:

RFC1213-MIB::sysDescr.0 = STRING: "Linux net6gateway 2.4.24 #29 SMP Wed Nov 17 16:55:58 PST 2004 i686"
RFC1213-MIB::ifDescr.2 = STRING: "eth0"

That's Linux for you!

The second one is a Tippingpoint SMS server:

RFC1213-MIB::sysDescr.0 = STRING: "Linux ips-manager 2.6.15-1.2054_FC5smp #1 SMP Tue Mar 14 16:05:46 EST 2006 i686"
RFC1213-MIB::sysObjectID.0 = OID: NET-SNMP-TC::linux

Linux too.
Later on, during troubleshooting a software on it, I found out that it is running Fedora Core 6.

But... the Tippingpoint IPS devices itself:

RFC1213-MIB::sysDescr.0 = STRING: "TippingPoint IPS"
RFC1213-MIB::ifDescr.1 = STRING: "lo0"
RFC1213-MIB::ifDescr.2 = STRING: "fxp0"

That's some kind of *BSD.
Later on, while talking to tech support, I found out that it is running VxWorks.