Andrew’s Blog

Does your job involve administering servers/applications in a network? Are you interested in system administration and are partially sighted or blind? Are you interested in knowing how blind/VI people can work in system administration? Then this list may be for you.

This list is for discussing all aspects of system/network administration, from asking questions about how to get your job done most effectively, the best way to recover from a good day (or usually night!) in the office, and even – if you are especially lucky - we will even let you talk technical!

If you want to subscribe, send a blank email to blind-sysadmins-subscribe@lists.hodgsonfamily.org, or go to the list webpage.

Hope to see you on the list,
Andrew.

Hi all,

Well have been really busy with work of late, but just wanted to say that for the first time ever, I have been ID’d in a pub!

Yes, I was in a local pub on Friday night (I won’t say where it was, but won’t be going there in the future), and got asked for ID! I said that although I was 25, I didn’t have any ID on me, but they accepted a credit card as ID.

This was after having a wonderful night ringing on a simulator – this involves making sure the bells don’t make any noise, by tying up the clappers, then starting up a computer program, and with the help of sensors connected to the serial port, you can have the computer play a noise when the sensor is activated. We first rang on all 6 bells, but after this, decided to try ringing 6 bells, with an extra two bells in place (letting the computer fill in!). This was ok, but people were looking for the missing bells, and subsequently held up. I think it is fair to say that I mastered it quite well, because I don’t look round at the other bells, but it was very tempting to hold up if there was a large gap in the ringing!

We then had a single bell, and started specific methods on the computer, filling in our one bell. This was surprisingly difficult for people who only used rope sight, but I managed quite a respectable Cambridge Surprise Major, with only around 22% off at hand stroke (not sure what it was on backstroke).

Managed to get hold of a Cisco ASA firewall quite cheap (!), and have got it semi configured, mainly after trying to get the GUI to work with the installed version of Java. I wanted to use both the GUI and the CLI, as I wanted to see what the GUI did, and the impact it had on the commands, as it is used quite heavily at work. I have now managed to get incoming traffic set up ok, and everything that isn’t in the ACL gets dropped, but I tried to do a VPN connection, and it went quite wrong.

One good thing on the firewall is the inspection rules, so it can handle specific services that depend on connections coming back, usually to a different port on the connecting IP. One such example is FTP, and I was able to use standard FTP without having to go to passive mode, which is something I haven’t been able to do in a long time.

Hope the weather will hold up for tomorrow, as it is a public holiday in the UK.

Andrew.

Hi,

Today rang a peel of Superlative Major for the Cumberland Youths. It
went very well, but I always think I could do better on the striking.

Was off last week on Spring Harvest, which is a large Christian
gathering. We had a grate time there, but managed to pick up horrible
cold type virus whilst there, and had that over Easter.

Back to work tomorrow.
Andrew.

Hi,

Just posting because I saw a program on the television tonight that a
friend lent me. It was originally on Channel 4 last week sometime, on
a blind couple who were letting their two eldest children do most of
the caring. It was one of those programs which made me both upset and
angry, not because of the portrayal of blind people, but because of
the lack of caring the children had from the parents. In the program,
we saw the parents going all day without changing the nappies of the
youngest children until the older children came home from school,
having the older children care for one of the kids who had just fallen
over, and having the window of one room closed so tightly shut it
steamed up the camera with the heat in the bedroom!

One thing that struck a chord with me was that the father in the
episode explained that he was at boarding school, from a young age,
and hated going home because he was beaten by his father. I really
wonder what sort of caring environment he was in whilst growing up? I
went to a school for the blind for a short time as a day pupil, but
stayed long enough to realize that it was nowhere close to the
environment I was in at home, quite a contrast in fact. What
disturbed me the most however, was that it appeared that the attitude
of “just get on with it regardless, and don’t ask for help”, was
rubbing off on the oldest (?) child, who was obviously putting up a
front. I wonder if a sighted person that went through the same system
would act in a similar way?

In other news, we had snow most of Thursday and Friday. The Friday
snow was not forecast, and I ended up coming home from work early
because I live around 15 minutes away, and I didn’t fancy getting
stranded at Whitestone (a small village just outside Hereford). It
would have probably been ok, but at least it meant the taxi didn’t
have to come there and back to fetch me (as I got a lift). Apparently
we may be in for some more during the middle of next week, so
hopefully me saying it in the blog will prove me wrong!

I was supposed to do my CCNA exam on Tuesday, but after filling in all
the paperwork to allow me to have someone read the questions/write
down the answers for me (as I am not allowed to use a screen reader),
I turned up at the training centre on Tuesday, only to find out the
extra time was not set up, and the testing company had lost all
knowledge of the paperwork! I am now trying to battle my way through
the system (for the second time) to hopefully re-take the test on
=46riday. On the bright side, extra time for revision!

Well I managed to get a new computer just before the Vista price hikes. I ended up with a Dell, mainly because a lot of the online places seemed to sell you the goods, but had very poor reviews, and at least I know what I am dealing with with Dell (as we use them at work!) The machine is a Dual Core 6700, with 4GB of ram, 1TB of hard disk, 2 CD/DVD writers, and a 256MB Nvidia card. I am hoping to play about with virtual machines on it, and use up some of that hdd space with the virtual images. Its very fast, and the drives working in RAID 0 make the system quicker on access, but there is a slight niggling noise on the case which i am still tracking down.

It is snowing here at the moment, I can’t remember when it last snowed like this, the last time I remember having school off was in 1996, but unfortunately still had to go to work today! It is starting to get a bit mushy now, and will probably freeze tomorrow (grate!).

My new virtual host is going very well, configured Apache and secondary MX stuff on it already, I was also thinking of configuring Bind on it, but am not in a hurry since I don’t pay anything for DNS hosting currently, and it has been rock solid.

Haven’t rung any quarter peels yet this year to completion, we were nearly there last Sunday with Stedman Triples, but something went wrong and it came rounds just over halfway through. I am organizing an outing on the 17th, which will be a sequel to the training we had in Birmingham.

Hi, 

This is on my new virtual machine running Debian.  It is a continual struggle to ensure it is all set up right, but am getting there. 

It is my birthday on Monday, I will be 25 L  (I am feeling old!). 

Andrew.

Hi all,

Just looking at the fact that nearly all of my mail coming through our
secondary MX is spam or viri. Most get rejected by Spamassassin, and
thus at the SMTP level as I configured the Milter to reject with a
ClamAV or User Unknown message. However, more often than not, the
return envelope for these messages is one of my users, so they get
deluged anyway with DSNs from the Exim running on the secondary MX,
and thus complain at me.

I have two options:
Do without the secondary MX, just leaving my primary server to cope
with mail. Pros: Easy to manage, if I am offline mail will get queued
at sender’s server etc. Cons: No control over mail queues when
offline, will have to accept all the connections from the machines
that would have connected to the secondary MX. I do see quite a few
of these since my MX provider (www.dyndns.org) do a check on the
recipient envelope, so I see the attempts in the logs.

There is another option: Use a cheap VPS server, get secondary MX set
up on it, with better controls, and possibly move some services from
here to it (eg DNS, and set up our mailing lists etc). It would also
be a good chance to get Debian really working, and something else to
play with.

So this evening have been looking into the different options. Have
found two companies that seem to do cheap VPS for around £10-15 a
month, including www.bytemark.co.uk, and www.rymuhosting.com. The
later is slightly larger, and is cheaper, but the first seems slightly
more flexible and appears to give the user more control over the VM
(although it is running the kernel under a user mode, whereas the
Rymuhosting use Xen). If anyone has used any of these or knows any
pros/cons, or knows any others, drop me a comment/email.

Also looking at getting a new machine, I want one which will last
several years, so it has to be very high spec at the current. I also
want it to be fairly quiet, but won’t be playing games on it, so no
fancy video cards for me. Currently it seems like
www.pcspecialist.co.uk have the edge, though am still looking.

Not rang any quarter peels recently (my first post without mentioning
ringing perhaps)?!

Andrew.

Hi all,

Well its been a little late coming, but this is the first post of
2006!

We had a good new year, I spent it doing my usual thing of ringing in
the new year, we usually ring out the old year half muffled. This is
when we put a soft hat on one side of the clapper, so you get a
muffled sound for one half of the strike, and then a normal sound for
the other. We then take off the muffles before midnight, and then we
strike the tenner for 12:00, and then ring rounds to ring in the new
year! Add that to a couple (few!) glasses of punch, and you’re
laughing!

I got myself a new phone, the Nokia E61. The reason I did this was
that I wanted a qwerty keyboard, and also I wanted more email
functions, and not a load of camera functions I never use. Plus, with
the camera missing, the phone is actually thinner than the N70 and its
counterparts. The only problem is, the case I have makes it just as
thick, and the belt clip on it is really lame, as it stands out at
least 2 inches from the case, and there is no way to remove it!
Anyhow, one cool feature on this is that you can use Exchange
ActiveSync, which means you can have emails pushed to your phone when
you receive them. This is like the Blackberry system, which the phone
supports, but the Exchange way is a lot better, as I believe with
Blackberry, you need to sign up to the relevant service, as well as
using your mobile data rate. This phone has an 802.1 wireless
interface, and we can use this with Mail for Exchange. The only
problem with this is that it is not as good as the POP3 email client
on the phone, where you can specify that you want wireless when you
are at home, and GPRS when out and about, but you can’t have
everything.

Spent Saturday and Sunday with friends, on Saturday spent the
afternoon in Worcester, and got quite a few oddments, and on Sunday I
had a friend for dinner who I hadn’t seen since my early school days!
It was a very interesting day.

Nothing else much happened apart from the usual work stuff, so I
didn’t want to bore you all with boring entries about that!

Anyway, signing off for now,
Andrew.

Hi all,

This time between Christmas ending and the new year always goes slowly for me. I had a relaxing day yesterday after completing the Yorkshire peel on boxing day, which I really enjoyed. Am back to work now, waiting for all the users to finish working at 13:00 :(.

Recently on my Internet searches I came across this article which is about some of the new “features” in the new Vista OS. It makes for interesting reading.

Hi,

Just wishing you all a happy Christmas, our day went well - basically
doing nothing, got loads of beer, though can only drink a bit as have
peel tomorrow of Yorkshire (probably will take around 3 hours!).
Nan’s birthday is tomorrow, so will be doing more family visiting
tomorrow after the peel in which I will be either celebrating or
commiserating with beer!

I have Wednesday to recover, the back to work for Thursday and Friday.

Andrew.