My Wushu Blog

todo From one Lab to another After 9.5 years with one employer (LLNL), I joined Bay Photo Lab in Santa Cruz. This has brought on many changes, not just a career change but a significant change in my way of life. First off, I’m renting a room until my family gets down here. I have this weird double life now, where during the week I live alone in a small room with no heating, and then I go back home on the weekend.

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I’m absolutely crushed. I’ve lost a great friend and member of our family, Coal. He escaped our backyard and was hit by car between the A and G street freeway on-ramps. He turned two on 11/16. Coal was the dog I dreamed of having; he was the combination of all the Aussies I’ve had growing up. He was the best. That dog never seemed to have a down moment. He was always happy, and always looking for trouble.

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todo Well, after about 9 and a half years with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory 11/09 was my last day. Now, I wasn’t the only admin besides Jenny (thats the aquilino1@llnl.gov email you see there), but she was my closest friend and peer while I was there. There was a little poetic license there, but it was accurate. It is hard to quantify the emotions about leaving LLNL. I do not know if I have the appropriate words to describe the feeling.

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For a few reasons, I decided to go through the City of Antioch’s Type I crime reports (available here: http://www.ci.antioch.ca.us/citygov/police/crime-maps/crime-maps.htm). The City only publishes this as a PDF image, comparing the year selected, and the previous year. It also only goes back to 2005. To help view this as a possible trend, and not just a snapshot in time, I typed up all of them in Google Docs - City of Antioch Crime Stats

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At work I ran a 5 part FreeBSD Administration training course for the Unix team. I enjoyed it a lot, because I really like to share information. It is especially rewarding when it is something I have taken a great interest in, like the FreeBSD Operating System. The design of the course was simple, I did my best to fill in the gap that a Solaris or Linux administrator might have.

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Software As mentioned many times, this is a FreeBSD based environment. Some good sysinfo output below: Operating system release: FreeBSD 8.2-RELEASE OS architecture: amd64 Kernel build dir location: /usr/obj/usr/src/sys/GENERIC Currently booted kernel: /boot/kernel/kernel Currently loaded kernel modules (kldstat(8)): zfs.ko opensolaris.ko Bootloader settings for the Director/Database node: The /boot/loader.conf has the following contents: kern.ipc.semmni=1024 kern.ipc.semmns=2048 kern.ipc.semmnu=1024 All of the storage nodes and the director are running a GENERIC kernel with very few system tweaking.

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I’ve been using Bacula, the open source backup software, for over a year now. Things have been going well, and I would like to dedicate a post or two to the environment I built. Background Over a year ago, I took it upon myself to replace a single Legato Networker server with Bacula. One of our collaborators had decided to ship us (for no reason at all really, I think they were cleaning out their data center) a Sun X4200 AMD server, and two StorageTek/Sun NAS servers.

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A while ago, I posted about how I backup my server with Duplicity to Amazon’s S3 storage. To follow up, here is a little guide I wrote on using Duplicity in the everyday work environment Overview Duplicity is a backup tool that will create compressed and encrypted (uses gnupg) backup archives. It can use a variety of protocols as the target (file, ftp, webdav, imap, ssh/scp, rsync, hsi, s3 and hsi).

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I can be a glutton for punishment for a nearly trivial amount of gain. So lets bring on the two-factor authentication for my personal FreeBSD server. I’ve been using Google’s 2-step verification since Jenny told me about it, along with my android powered phone. What is nice about Google’s Authenticator app is its availability for multiple smartphone platforms: Android version 1.5 or later BlackBerry OS 4.2 - 4.7 iPhone iOS 4 or later How it works is pretty simple.

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To follow up on two previous posts, the Buckethead concert and making your own YouTube bootlegs, I’m going to add just a little more. As I mentioned, the concert was great. If I were to pick out one part, it would have been this lengthy untitled (as far as I know) freestyle jam he did with a simple looping beat. I cannot think of anything worse than falling in love with a song at a concert, and not knowing the name of it.

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