Giant "evil" hosting organization McColo was disconnected by both its network service providers yesterday. It's almost horrifying to imagine a hosting company that actively marketed itself as a safe haven for spammers, botnet command-and-control, malware distribution, and child pornography.

McColo used Hurricane Electric and Global Crossing as ( Read more... )

I was just reminded, on schedule, for the fourth time in four years, that "The Ethics Act (5 ILCS 430/5 10) states that, beginning in 2004, each officer, member, and employee must complete, at least annually, an ethics training program conducted by the appropriate state agency."

So I'm now wasting taxpayer dollars using up an hour's salary going ( Read more... )

We just got our PI IPv6 address space from ARIN. Soon we'll start assigning out of 2620:0:E00::/48 which is enough room for 65536 subnets of four billion hosts apiece. And we get to start learning a whole new set of bugs and quirks ( Read more... )

Just got this bug report from a vendor. I almost laughed out loud at its specificity and quirkiness ( Read more... )

Spanning Sync is an Apple System Preference which will automatically keep your iCal and Google Calendars in sync. It works pretty well, in that "no fuss" way that you always want things like this to function. The downside is it's $25/yr after a 15-day trial, but it may well be worth it. I'd love to be able to use ALL the native collaboration and ( Read more... )

We came in today to find that our big wireless distribution tower on the south campus had toppled in yesterday's storm. There wasn't a lot of wind associated with the storm, though, so we're thinking some kind of structural failure and/or install problem.

What's funny is that our current set of wireless links are all still showing green on our ( Read more... )

Our 500GB external USB drives came in today. Under MacOS Leopard, you just plug it in and it asks you "do you want to use this drive for backups?" You click yes, and it takes care of everything else.

If you need to restore a file, you open the folder it was in, launch Time Machine, and scroll back in time through the coverflow of folder views until ( Read more... )

Unlike the experience of most people who work in Information Technology, working at a University exposes one to a lot of varied intellectual stimuli. I was walking past a collaboration area in the atrium of the building I work in last week, and on the whiteboard, instead of the usual ad hoc system analysis block diagram, or silly graffiti, I saw ( Read more... )

My results from that "answer 39 questions and we'll pick some careers we think you'd like" thing. Pretty accurate, I'd say. I'm kind of proud of the overwhelming engineer-heaviness, and that they managed to slip in physics, astronomy, avionics, and pilot. Although I'm not sure why "helicopter pilot" comes before regular old "pilot". Maybe because ( Read more... )

And two hours later...

lvm> vgrename VolGroup00 vg01
Volume group "VolGroup00" successfully renamed to "vg01"

Take that, BITCH!

I swear, system administration can be the most annoying time-suck sometimes.