In a few days I will be starting my new job as a Senior Sysadmin for Facilities IT at Princeton University. I'm looking forward to the change in scenery. I leave behind a lot of friends and good memories at my last job. Despite Matt saying that I am now banned from New York I'm sure they'll see me again. Besides, if they ban me than New Jersey needs to ban all the bennies coming down from Staten Island during the summer.

My plans for launching the redesigned NJPB site in time for 1/1/09 probably won't come to fruition thanks to some distractions today. It was worth it, though.

In any event, here's to a great 2009!

We decided to keep it pretty low-key. We went out to dinner at the Lambertville Station, where, incidentally we ate for our 3 year anniversary. The food was good - perhaps not worth the 1.5 hour drive each way, but good none the less.

The highlight of the evening was getting their "100 Year Flight of Port." Basically, it's four 1.5oz glasses of 10 year, 20 year, 30 year, and 40 year port. Now, I'm not a huge fan of port, but it was definitely interesting to drink a wine that is older than you are.

Next week I am off from work on vacation. Hopefully I will be able to blog a little bit more. There's a lot of things that I've been meaning to write on here.

1. My AppleTV has turned out to be a disappointment. Even with XBMC loaded, I couldn't get my nfs shares mounted. Unplugged.

2. Since my AppleTV is unplugged, there's less of a compelling reason to keep my home "server" up all the time. All it does is export a 1TB usb drive via NFS and run an irc session in screen every great while. I can easily plug the usb drive into my Mac when I want to access that data. Unplugged.

Okay, lets plug the drive into the Mac. Shit, OSX doesn't support ext3 partitions. Oh well, there's a userland filesystem driver last updated in 2006 that I can load. This will work grea... oh, my Mac locked up when I tried to mount it. Well, I guess I can just pull the 500gb or so worth of data off, move it somewhere else (some combination of my 80gb USB drive, my 250gb USB drive, my 120gb laptop drive, and who knows, maybe even the 4GB SSD in my eee.)

Currently I have my 80GB drive and my 1TB drive mounted in Windows XP in VMware with XP kernel level drivers for ext3 working nicely, and transferring data. This may qualify as one of the most hooptie ways I've ever had to do anything.

I am sure I'll lose something important.

Oh, and I take the bus to work now instead of driving. That makes me green with nausea.

I grew up during the waning years of the USSR - back when the thought of a nuclear attack was still a concern, but much less likely. America was strong - nobody was really a threat to us, and those who were a threat (the Iran hostage crisis) weren't really something that everybody worried about. The economy was booming - except for the S&L failure, which didn't seem to affect my seven year old self or my family at all. The only thing that I noticed from that was that a former bank branch became a Chinese restaurant.

9/11 happened, and the economy slowed. I got laid off from VPI and spent the remainder of the summer and fall in an alcoholic haze with Jay, not doing much besides sending resumes, surfing Monster, and playing paintball in the woods on Fischer Boulevard behind Mugsys. There was the threat of the "next attack on American soil" which sort of hung over like a specter, but even then did not really keep me up at night. I suppose that, had I lived or worked in New York in September of 2001, or had I known anybody who died in the WTC attacks I might have felt differently.

Seven years later there's still the threat that terrorists pose. We also have Iran which may or may not be building a nuclear device which certainly would be used to attack America. The news today is that North Korea is taking the seals off their reactors and that they don't care about being labeled a state that supports terrorism. It's either a negotiating point or another vector of attack for people who don't like America.

The headlines are all screaming about the economy. Giant banks - the pillars of the American economy - are teetering near collapse. AIG was just bailed out. There's a $700B plan stalled in Congress to "rescue" the economy that is being drawn up by the same people (Republicans and Democrats) who were incompetent enough to let the country get to this point. My house has lost $50K in equity in the last year. Record numbers of houses are being foreclosed on. Record numbers of people (myself included) are one or two paychecks away from disaster. One of my friends who works construction has been out of a job for a month. There's the ever present worry that the layoff I had in 2001 will repeat itself in 2008, and I'll be scrambling to find some way to keep my head above water and pay the $1600/mo or something needed for COBRA.

My daughter is two and a half. She wakes up innocently each day, heads into the living room to play with her toys and watch cartoons. She knows nothing about the people in the world who wouldn't think twice about blowing her up with a car bomb to make a political statement. She knows nothing about the impending collapse of the economy, the lowering value of the house, or the rising prices of groceries.

I have to wonder if the world is getting more complicated (and dangerous), or if my perception of all of the bad things going on is just increasing as I get older. There hasn't been a day that goes by in the last two weeks that I haven't worried about the future - the collapse of the economy, and the very real threat that myself and my family could be homeless and standing on a soup kitchen line with hundreds of other people. I don't know if I can blame the situation in the world on Bush (which would be a convenient label to stick on everything) or if it's just the inevitable conclusion of the way things have been headed for generations and generations.

All that I know is that I am terrified of the future.

ssl yes

Which enabled Secure LDAP in RHEL4. In RHEL5 the line needs to be:

ssl start_tls

Incidentally, that line works fine in RHEL4, which means that I can continue using the same config files (and eventually package them up as an RPM or something for when we provision new nodes) across RHEL4 and RHEL5 systems.

Beyond that Chris managed to get two Itanium HPUX servers racked and their console cards configured. He had a nice introduction to Wireshark to get their MAC address, and then arp ping to configure the IP's. Tomorrow I will work with him to get the VLANs set correctly on the switch uplinks, and then I will have to do something to jog my memory to disable Serviceguard on those two nodes.