Sysadmin

Just a sampling of my favorites from the past week:

“Why didn’t you tell us in advance of the unscheduled outage you didn’t know would happen?”

“Is there any technical reason you’re doing this?”

“It’s your job to figure out what I really needed even though you gave me exactly what I asked for, that’s called customer service.”

Sigh.

Thank you to all of you that make IT work! Happy System Administration Day!!!

I decided to switch my old T40 to Ubuntu 8. Almost everything worked out of the box. The secret to getting wireless to work was to add the following lines to /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist:

These aes modules break the airo driver.

Have a Happy Sysadmin Day! Thank you to all the people behind the scenes making IT work!

iSquint is a cool utility to convert AVI files into iTunes/iPod/AppleTV friendly mp4 files. Works great!

I have a Mac laptop that I take between two networks. One network is an open one at my home and the other is a corporate network with proxy servers. Specifically we use a pac file for automatic proxy configuration. For normal web stuff there’s nothing special that needs to happen – if I’m on the corporate network the pac file is found and the proxy servers are connected to. If I’m home there is no pac file to be had and I directly connect to the web.

iTunes however isn’t all that bright it seems. It will hang trying to find the pac file. The fix is to not use a pac file when you’re on a network where it won’t be found. Locations make that a lot easier but being lazy about just leaving the pac file settings alone will bite ya.

Hope that helps someone – it took me a while to figure out what was going on.