American Liberty Dollar

Getting off the techie topic for a min. My brother showed me a silver coin a few years ago.. i remember thinking how heavy it was. Come to find out it was printed by the US mint, but rather a separate body all together. The dollar amount imprinted on the coin was $10. The worth was based on the amount of raw silver that was used to make the coin. A few years later we were talking about the coin and come to find out they were now printing $20 coins out of the same of silver. The price of silver had doubled in the time that had past. I pulled out the $10 coin and my brother offered me a $20 in exchange for it.. I declined (if my brother wanted it.. I should keep it.. I grew up with this guy.. I should know ;)), instead I bought another coin (I think I bought dinner actually.. something like that). So now I have a $10 and a $20 coin, both "worth" $20 in silver. The story goes on in that the body that printed these coins www.libertydollar.org had a raid performed on them by the FBI. Apparently the FBI feels they were doing something underhanded. The law suit has been going through it's motions for some time now, but the company has been permitted to keep doing it's line of work. It'll be interesting to see what happens to the company, but in the end for me... silver is worth it's weight in... well.. silver. After looking at the real estate and stock markets... just buying silver and gold.. holding onto it for a while .. then selling on ebay.. sounds like a pretty good proposition... but I'm just an IT guy.. anyone out there care to comment with thier thoughts?

LPI certifications

After playing with linux for many years, I've been lucky enough to get a new project using it at work. I thought this would be a good time to study up more and possibly even get a certification in it. Up till now I've only done microsoft certifications. I've started (and stopped) studying for the Cisco CCNA at least twice (never seem to keep the motivation going when I start thinking "why do I need to memorize this stuff when google is just a click away".. now I know the real answer to that, but just try telling me that when I'm frustrated with the memorization's).
I've asked around and while the RedHat cerification seems to be the most widely desired (by careerbuilder that is), I don't think I have enough experience to realistically go for that just yet. Instead I've decided to shoot for the LPI I certification. It's targeted for just beyond a power user (which is all I've ever claimed to be on Linux). The LPI folks are vendor neutral and offer 3 (or 4?..I'm a little unclear on the Ubuntu cert they seem to offer) certifications.
That brings up a question I've been asking myself.. with all the rage Ubuntu seems to be making (do a google for what Linux distro is the most popular.. you'll see what I mean).. how come so many people don't know anything about it? How come it hasn't really made it into corporate america? We had to go with Redhat or Suse due to Oracle certifying it (and the DBA's would freak on anything without the Oracle certification). I've always felt redhat was the corporate server to beat.. and now feel ubuntu is the other desktop software to use.

Ubuntu Dell precision 380 w/ dual monitors

I've tried various different linux distro's and some failed on install, some installed, but only partially worked "out of the box". I am under the mind set that for servers you go Redahat (or centos.. more on that later), and for desktops you go Ubuntu. Ubuntu 8.04 LTS was easier to get setup then I orginally though. I dual boot at the bios level to one hard drive or another. I have a scsi card and scsi drive with Windows XP on it. I now have a SATA drive (and onboard controller that came with me Dell) with Ubuntu on it. At boot I push F12 and select which drive I want to boot into. By default it goes to Windows for the sake of other household members, but I try to keep it in Ubuntu (maybe someday soon I can change the default).

Now for the install of ubuntu here's the tricks I had to use:
1) Shutdown pc ->remove scsi card and to be safe remove power to scsi drive
2) boot pc with F12 option to boot from cd rom with the ubuntu install cd in the cd drive
3) Go through the install wizad following the directions (when it get's to formatting the partion it may "hang" at 5% for a long time.. don't woory, it's still working and not hung)
4) Now, provided the install went well as it did for me, you've rebooted and logged in with the username and password you set during install. Now you shoudl see a popup for software updates... apply them (this will take some time as it downloads and installs them. I've got a pretty quick system and it seemed to almost have hung during the update of the update manager (funny to thik it uses itself to update itself.. pretty cool)
5) reboot again and login again. At this point I had two issues. Dual monitors don't work (only 1), and I liek to autologin for ease of use for my house. Autologin was easy enough. System->Administration->Login Window. This took an unusually long time to come up after the password prompt, but it did eventually open and opens much quicker after the first time (don't know why there is such a delay the first time it's loaded)
6) Dual monitors... this can be tough for many linux installs (for non-linux gurus like myself). Now you may have scene another popup near the software updates popup talking about hardware drivers. If not go System->Administration->Hardware Drivers. I had to enable and install "Nvidia accelerated graphics driver (latest cards). This is installing the Nvidia drivers rather then the ones that come with Ubuntu.. there is mix feelings on this.. but it's how I got my system to work.. so I'm happy. After install reboot if it asks too.
7) The last thing I had to do was edit the config file for Xserver. I read that I should have been able to call a GUI util installed by nvidia, but for whatever reason I don't have it.. o it doesn't work. So I ran this in a terminal session.
su (then enter password)
gedit etc/X11/xorg.conf
(this brings up a text editor and I needed to edit the "devices" section:
it looked like this when I opened it:
Section "Device"
Identifier "Configured Video Device"
Driver "nvidia"
Option "NoLogo" "True"
EndSection

and like this when I saved and closed it:
Section "Device"
Identifier "Configured Video Device"
Driver "nvidia"
Option "NoLogo" "True"
Option "TwinView" "True"
Option "TwinViewOrientation" "LeftOf"
Option "UseEdidFreqs" "True"
Option "MetaModes" "1280x1024,1280x1024; 1024x768,1024x768"
Option "UseDisplayDevice" "DFP"
EndSection

I have dual flat panel displays (lucky me ;)).. you config may vary, but hopefully you too can get dual monitors and dual boot setup ... I for one don't want to go to vista.. so it's either run XP forever or start looking into alternatives

Redhat Linux does do mutilpathing well I'll give it that

Lots of my problems (come to find out) were due to not being registered with the redhat network. Note.. you need to have time/dat in sync with a time server. The SSL communication doesn't work other wise. In addition, if you aren't in sync you will corrupt the SSL certification process and may have to call redhat to get it straightened out (ask me how I know). I forget where under etc/redhatnetwork/ it was.. but you'll ahve many redhat network certificate saved as rhnw-someting.save1 save2 save 3... I used save 1 to replace my corrupt certificate. Once signed in there, I could add aditional software such as Base->legacy software support that I needed in order to install hp's Array Controller Utility (hpacu).
There's a real good write up at redhat site under docs on getting the multipathing setup. And the second redhat engineer I spoke with was very good (the first guy seemed in a hurry to get off the phone and didn't help me much).

Redhat 5.2 install today

After fighting with hard drive hardware issues yesterday, I managed to get redhat installed today. it wasn't without problems though. The KVM switch I was on only supports up to 1024x768 resolution. Apparently the quiet bootloader and x windows is set for something higher by default? After lots of research and relearning a quick edit to the /boot/grub/grub.conf and etc/X11/Xorg.conf and we've got GUI! Now there is some issue with a SSL certificate and still the problem of getting hard drives replaced, but that's for another day. Like I said before.. Linux was looking so good years ago.. and now it seems it's still at the same place. Only hard core techies and a lucky few (those with out of the box compatible hardware) will be inclined to use it on a daily basis.

SQL 2005 "maintenance plan" cleanup

Some time ago I learned that the easiest way (cheapest) to backup a SQL database was to use a maintenance job to dump the database to a file and then have backup software come along and back it up to tape. Then in 2005 they forgot to put in the option to clean up old dump files. So if you don't want your drive to fill up with multiple copies of your database, go into the maintenance plan and add the "cleanup maintenance job". However, even after I added it .. it wouldn't work as I expected it to. Come to find out I was over thinking the "file extension" field. I entered the proper folder location and then put ".bak" in the file extension field. When that didn't work I tried quotes on the folder location.. still no luck. Long story short(ish), just enter bak. Not .bak or *.bak

Redhat, 2 steps forward, 2 steps back.

So it's been a few years since I installed a copy of RedHat Linux. Now you need to purchase a subscription, download 6 CD's (I hope there's a DVD option), and enter some 16 digit key during install. They were getting good a few years back and I really thought there would be a push for companies to go Linux. As they got good, they got to charge (more) I guess. I fought with the MSA 1000 most of the day today Plauged by hard drive errors and learning that the smart start cd from HP isn't really a smart start for Redhat (like Dell was back in the day). The only advantage of a smart start cd that I can see, is to create an array prior to booting with the redhat cd's. Hopefully tomorrow is more productive.

Let's not forget "pretty girl"

Just wanted to say how lucky I am for finding this beautiful, kind, smart girl of mine... well.. really...I should say how lucky I am that I found her and that she liked me too ;). I love you , thank you for all the support.

MPIO

Multi-path I/O for an msa1000 is a freebe tool for "muti homeing" two firber cards into a msa 1000 (or 1500). The MPIO driver (for lack of a better term) is a easay to use version of what securepath does. I'll be working on getting this setup working with redhat linux this week. Since I've only recently figured out the right recipe for making this work in windows..(here's a tip.. flash the firmware on the msa1000 with the firmware for a msa1500)... it should prove to be an interesting week.