(Reblogged from caseyliss)

Red Hat Upgrade Woes

So, I was building a system last week with CentOS 5.5, and most everything was going well. The software stack on top of it was working as expected, which was a pleasant surprise, given some of the changes I had made to it. The one thing that wasn’t working correctly was an entry in root’s crontab, and I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why, especially considering the exact same entry/script was working great on some of our other systems, running CentOS 5.4. One of my coworkers couldn’t figure it out either. A few days later (while working on a variety of other things, of course), I finally figured it out.

First, a bit of background. This script was running as root, and was invoking various commands using sudo (to run the commands as a user other than root). I didn’t think much of this until I happened to look at /var/log/secure for another issue, when I noticed some messages regarding this script in there. As it turns out, Red Hat, in their infinite wisdom, made the decision to disable sudo from running under anything than a proper TTY (i.e., console/SSH/et cetera). They made this decision despite RHEL 5.4 (and thus CentOS 5.4) not having this behavior, and despite Red Hat’s premise of being an enterprise distribution, where as little as necessary will change between point releases.

Now, I realize I should’ve found this sooner, and the manner in which sudo was being invoked wasn’t terribly logical, but it worked, and it wasn’t something that should’ve been changed in a point release of an enterprise distribution. Marginal additional security (in my not-so-humble opinion) doesn’t outweigh some of the headaches I can foresee this causing. Sorry Red Hat, but bad move…

Oh, and a word to Dell too: for the love of god, why do you have not one, but two lights-out management boards in some of your rackmount servers? I had to replace a motherboard last week, and while I swapped the iDRAC 6 Super Active Enterprise® card over, I missed this tiny little do-nothing iDRAC 6 Useless Edition board in the corner. A board that the Super Active Enterprise edition happened to depend upon, for some odd reason.

I do still love working in IT though. I must be psychotic.

Electrical fires suck. No real damage other than this, but it necessitated a quick trip to Home Depot for a new outlet and what not. Oh, and dry fire extinguishers are a bitch to clean up after.

Favorite Concert DVDs

Like a lot of people, I love music, but a lot of the artists that I like the most are well past their prime, so if I want to see any of their concerts, I’m best off watching them on DVD. A few of my favorites:

Pink Floyd - “Pulse” - Yes, there is no Roger Waters, but have you ever seen a Roger Waters concert? He’s missing the rest of the group far more than they are him (though “Comfortably Numb” done with Van Morrison is quite good). They do the entirety of “Dark Side of the Moon” on this one, and almost all of it is amazing (save for “The Great Gig in the Sky,” which just can’t compete with the album version). Seeing “Wish You Were Here” performed live must have been a real treat too. The audio is also the best I’ve heard on any concert DVD, which is especially surprising since the concert was filmed in 1994.

Fleetwood Mac - “The Dance” - Like “Pulse,” I could watch and listen to this one endlessly. The best tracks are “I’m So Afraid,” “Go Insane,” “Gold Dust Woman,” and “Silver Springs,” I think, though their bigger hits are also quite well done. Pay particular attention to “I’m So Afraid,” and you may start to think Lindsay Buckingham is the one of the most underrated guitarists of that era.

The Eagles - “Hell Freezes Over” - This one is quite good, and is definitely on my list of favorites (otherwise it wouldn’t be here), but it doesn’t make me want to watch it the way the other two do. The highlight is definitely “Hotel California,” and if you only know that song because of the album version, you’re in for a treat. “New York Minute” was also quite good. By the end though, you’ll be quite sick about hearing the name J.D. Souther. Great music though…

And now, an aside. Watching “Pulse” and listening to “Money,” you have to sort of chuckle at Nick Mason, when you know about the Enzo Ferrari he owns. Money, it is a gas…

(Reblogged from marco)
caseyliss:

mykol78:

rosiesiman:

Tesla owner talks smack using world’s greatest vanity plate via Engadget



Definitely funny, but I wouldn’t be surprised if an Elise had a lower carbon footprint than the average Tesla charged by the United States’ leading producers of electricity. Not to mention an Elise has to be a hell of a lot more fun on the track…

caseyliss:

mykol78:

rosiesiman:

Tesla owner talks smack using world’s greatest vanity plate via Engadget

Definitely funny, but I wouldn’t be surprised if an Elise had a lower carbon footprint than the average Tesla charged by the United States’ leading producers of electricity. Not to mention an Elise has to be a hell of a lot more fun on the track…

(Reblogged from caseyliss)
I’ve never been in the Vatican, and I’ve heard it’s supposed to be beautiful.

Why I’m Not A Developer

I spent over a hour today trying to debug a piece of code I’m writing in Perl (used via Asterisk’s nifty AGI interface), and I couldn’t figure out for the life of me why a certain function call was being made. It was being executed as part of a while loop, and it kept going one increment past my exit condition. And then it hit me: I was calling the function as part of a logical AND statement that formed the conditional for the loop. And it just so happened to be the first portion of the AND conditional, so simply swapping places allowed what was the second conditional to short circuit the AND statement once the exit condition was reached.

And that is why I never want programming to be my full time job. I’ll take troubleshooting crashing daemons and quirky IOS configuration issues over this kind of thing any day.

(Reblogged from caseyliss)