IT Support Small Medium Business

I was titled both as as Systems Administrator and Systems Engineer in the past. I never made distinction between those two until recently.

In a recent team project, the apparent and blatant lack of systematic approach and lack of attention to details appalled me deeply. The shared agony made me think why, why some systems administrators or engineers are better than others.

I came to categorize SA/SE people to two groups. One is SA and the other is SE. I define systems engineers as those who

• have the skill-set of a systems administrator. And, to
• consistently apply engineering principles and practices to the systems administration work. Read the rest of this entry »

A week ago, I upgraded WordPress Hashcash plugin for this site to the latest version 4.1, since version 4.1 advertised to stop most trackback or pingback spam. I enabled the source IP check and source link check.

Apparently, the validation code is based on the simple trackback validation plugin at http://sw-guide.de/wordpress/plugins/simple-trackback-validation/ Read the rest of this entry »

Recently a Fonality Trixbox soft PBX server got racked to a cheap co-lo, where it enjoys a dedicated T1 line. Chatting using softphones such as X-lite, however, is mediocre at its best in sound quality. Yesterday, I got a Polycom SoundPoint 501 unit from http://www.pcconnection.com. It costs around USD 175. I was a bit skeptical about whether it worths every penny.

Well, it does worth every penny!

1. Powered on the Polycom SoundPoint 501 unit.
2. Set it on the phone to use my own Trixbox as its PBX server.
3. Saved the config and Rebooted the phone.
4. Once it got online on the network via DHCP, it pulled down the configuration and such directly from the trixbox TFTP server.
5. An extension got assigned to it automatically. Read the rest of this entry »

More often nowadays, I found that I need to deal with something ‘foreign’ in unix/linux servers I manage professionally. One thing in particular is an increased number of files whose names have white spaces in them. Most unix/linux utilities use any white space (tab, new line, space) as their delimiter character of choice, hence the problem.

These files are either legal immigrants from the other operating systems (uploads to a CMS/wiki/blog, for example), or some native programs or utilities with “foreign” roots (vmware server).

The common way to deal with it, is to opt to use ASCII NUL as delimiter when invoking command line utilities. This capability is a built-in for  more unix/linux utilities than I knew when I started to research to resolve a problem I had.

• grep -Z
• find . -print0
• xargs -0
• cut –output-delimiter=”\0″

“find . -print0 | xargs -0 ls -ltr” does work well, while ’svn status | cut -b8 –output-delimiter=”\0″ | xargs -0 ls -ltr’ doesn’t. Read the rest of this entry »

a few light-to-medium thunders later last night, main power to my house and the neighborhood was cut around 7:40pm. The power was restored only after 11:40pm. I reached their IVR, when I called the power company at 8:10pm. My wife scoffed the to-the-minute accuracy when the power company projected to restore power by 10:27pm.

I suspected the projected restoration time of10:27pm was just a WAG or SWAG added onto the time when the repair team was dispatched. From our past experience (6+ years in the neighborhood), power usually gets restored a lot quicker than projected.

This time, it took a lot longer, a full four hours, to restore the power. The APC UPS for the blog server stood up two hours after the outage. However, its WAN connection served by Comcast went offline with the main power too. Our modern life was cut short by four hours tonight, Read the rest of this entry »