Patrick’s Rants

The wireless bridge was still out when I got to work yesterday morning. That meant that the outside world, in the form of email and internet, still did not exist. To top it off, road construction crews ripped out a huge bundle of wires cutting off phone service to something like a few square miles. So there were no phones either. Well, at least things would be quiet.

Qwest fixed our phones sometime around 3:00 pm and tech services walked in about 4:15 or so with our half of the new bridge. After banging on it for a few minutes - perhaps half an hour - he walked back out with the device in hand. Well, it’ll be another day before it’s all sorted out. Around 6:15 I was surprised to see the head of our tech services department walk in with the transceiver unit and plug it in. Surprised because I figured we wouldn’t see anything until the following day, their schedules over there are pretty much 8-4 or something along those lines. But here he was plugging in the unit, logging in and making configuration changes. He chatted on the phone with the tech from earlier who was working on the other end of the bridge. After about 20 minutes or so it seemed we were back online. They had decided to leave our machines on the static IPs assigned on Thursday. I also learned that our machine wasn’t a backup domain controller or whatever it’s called due to the wireless bridge. I guess it was decided that would be too much data to periodically transfer to have our machine as a backup. The offices are supposed to move to a different building so we’ll get a primary controller at that point along with a rumored T1.

I walked into work last Thursday and was told that the network was down. There was no internet access, nothing. We have a “departmental server” which holds such things as departmental data, but it does little else. When the network is down there are some interesting things that happen. The work is only about half done on the configuration over there. All of our login and authentication is done by the PDC (perhaps AD?) on a server in another building on the other end of a Cisco wireless bridge. It was the bridge that was down; the other end had effectively melted down. Slowly but surely our machines in the office have their dynamic IP addresses expire (7 day lease time according to one of the tech guys who showed up later) so no one notices right away when their logon to the server goes down. The internet though is noticed right away. So too are the remote logins to the district software: accounting and student database. And the network printer stops working as well.

After the tech guys - nearly the entire department - arrived to work on our stuff I learned a number of things:

1. Our server is not a BDC, doesn’t authenticate users, offer dynamic IP addressess, or even have the same user names as the PDC - it probably should be a Backup Domain Controller
2. The network printer stops functioning because of a “legacy IP address” - it was assigned a public IP address when every device had a public IP address at a time when everything flowed through NAU
3. The printer IP address, and of many other printers, has not been switched over to the private network within the district because it would require reconfiguration of the finance software in the district
4. Currently, the public IP address is magically routed at a switch in the district office back to the right printer - print jobs head out through the wireless link, bounce through the tech services building, through the administration building where the switch directs it back through tech services back over the wireless link and finally to our printer
5. Our tech services department is understaffed - they could use some help building out some of this redundancy, but they have to work on an “if it aint broke” schedule

This is such a beautifully written and humorous letter in response to a Cease and Desist letter written to a little cable maker company.
Blue Jeans Cable Strikes Back - Response to Monster Cable — Audioholics Home Theater Reviews and News

K12LTSP based on CentOS 5EL CD isos: torrent file grab ‘em, burn ‘em and seed ‘em

Kubuntu Linux based distribution extends the life of older hardware and gives IT workers what they are looking for down under:
Computerworld - Ubuntu breathes new life into school’s abandoned hardware

I upgraded Wordpress when the last update came out and never even bothered to post anything about it. I merely cranked out my upgrade script that I wrote and checked the upgrade page - and then forgot about it. Readers might not have noticed anything either. I kept my funky plain style for the site. It wasn’t until I read Linux.com :: The new WordPress that I even logged into the admin part of the site. I kinda like it Well, except for the fact that it looks like categories are supposed to be replaced with tags eventually. That means I have to modify my theme or use a new one if I don’t hang onto categories for dear life.

It’s been four days since I decided to bring my Slackware firewall box completely up to date. It was running a 2.4.x Linux kernel and I really wanted to get it running a current 2.6.x kernel. All of my other Slack boxes around here have the 2.6.x kernel and are working decently (not perfectly, one of the laptops has some funkiness with X and one of the kid’s computers isn’t running X at all right now - I kind of chalked that up to X) Installing and running Slackware is not beyond me, I’ve done it numerous times. This time all I found was failure.
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You might find that the machines are less than perfect.
The Columbus Dispatch : County’s voting machines examined

Where my wife works management has decided that they want a single type face for all of their documents, Arial 12 pt. bold. She told me that she recently began bucking the “corporate line” and started mixing in Helvetica. I expect her to be called out it any moment now.

The State of New Jersey was going to send some voting machines to Ed Felten to check out. The voting machine company, Sequoia Voting System sent him an email threatening to “protect their intellectual property rights” which you can read on Felten’s blog Freedom To Tinker.

The Brad Blog goes into more detail, even encouraging the readers to contact the New Jersey Attorney General to impress upon her the importance of elections that are open, error free and not subject to being subverted. Here’s my email:

I understand that your office has declined to order testing of electronic voting machines manufactured by Sequoia Voting Systems. Based upon reports available across the internet, Sequoia machines have errors that may affect election outcomes. These machines need to be verified to ensure that democracy is not subverted. Your state, as most states, has open records laws. We should expect no less from our voting machines; that our vote is counted by observing the proper operation of the voting machines.