Category Archives: sysadmin notes

My morning ritual at work is at follows: I roll into the office, scamper into the IT cave, drop my bag down, turn my computer on and while it boots I make a bee line for the local coffee dispenser. … Continue reading →

The saga continues. If you haven’t been following this series, you can catch up to speed here. What follows might be funnier that way. It is the day after the Beef Instrumentality Incident #631. We are finally chugging along on … Continue reading →

If you haven’t been following this series of posts, please familiarize yourself with the previous entries. Things will actually make more sense this way. Or you can just jump in. Last time when we left off, my new friends Toby … Continue reading →

As you may recall from Part 1, our Checkpoint Firewall-1 has a weird quirk. It’s like that guy from Memento – every time you reboot it, it forgets all the license keys, assumes it is being run illegaly and goes … Continue reading →

My office is protected by Checkpoint Firewall-1. It is one of those fancy-shmancy enterprise level firewalls, that thankfully I do not need to maintain. You see, me and my brethren in suffering are the “internal affairs” team. The firewall falls … Continue reading →

It’s Friday morning, and the IT cave is misty with the heavy anticipation of coming weekend. No one is working. Some people are reading reddit while sipping their morning coffee, while others are twiddling with their phones. The intern is … Continue reading →

I have been an owner of a shiny Mac Book Pro for about a month now. I figured I will share a few of the tricks I have learned so far. If you own a Mac you probably already know … Continue reading →

Bob and Alice never met in person. They both lived in different time zones. Bob worked in a company located on the East coast, while Alice was a California girl working on the opposite end of the continent. Few decades … Continue reading →

This is the story of “The Big Printer” which was named so, because of it’s relative size. It was big, compared to it’s neighbors who were rather small desk printers, that became network enabled – mostly against their own will. … Continue reading →

Allegedly the whole thing started on a weekend. One of the high ranking directors (those who get the keys to the office) managed to escape the clutches of his family, and hide in the familiar and peaceful confines of the … Continue reading →

Firstly, sorry for dropping off the face of the earth yesterday morning. My host sucks, and I’m to lazy and too afraid of change to do anything about it. Secondly, sorry about lame pi related post. I just wasn’t that … Continue reading →

I’m sort of continuing with my data privacy rant from Friday, but this time I want to bring it around and talk about another privacy aspect. This comes up every once in a while in conversations, and my opinion usually … Continue reading →

Setup Assistant 0.7 is now available for download. Much of the modifications I made to it were in response to the feedback here. For example, I added application cacheing, so that the third party tools only have to be downloaded … Continue reading →

I keep telling people how important it is to back up their data on regular basis but most don’t listen. Honestly, it is either like preaching to a choir or like talking to a wall. Those folks who could be … Continue reading →

If you read this blog regularly, you know that I’m not a big fan of MS office. But most of my hate is clustered around Word and the silly WYSIWYG mentality. That said, Excel or rather spreadsheet tools in general … Continue reading →

I love meaningless error messages. I didn’t take a screenshot of this particular one but it said, and I quote: Error “Setup.rul 380” has occurred and Setup cannot continue This error occurred when I wiped clean a relatively new Dell … Continue reading →

It was Monday and the incessant blinking LED on my phone just wouldn’t leave me alone. It was demanding attention. The LCD display didn’t help either. It was showing a large 1 accompanied by an envelope. Someone has called the … Continue reading →

I have inherited yet another old laptop. This time it is a lovely Compaq Presario 1800. If you have never actually seen one of these, here is how it looks like: I have no clue what is it with my … Continue reading →

I really don’t know what is it with lusers and asking technical questions. I swear I have a fruitless conversation that goes like this almost every day: luser: I am having a problem with my computer me: Ok, what’s the … Continue reading →

Live CD’s are great. When I first downloaded and booted up Knoppix, it blew my mind. A whole operating system that runs off a CD. But why not. The concept behind these distributions is simple enough. After all, the kernel … Continue reading →

I haven’t done any polls lately so guess what time it is? Yes, it’s poll time! Better yet, this is not just any poll – this poll is serious business. I want to talk about revision control software. Yes, I … Continue reading →

Dear internet, please remind me not to do free tech support anymore. Seriously! I mean it. Next time you see me agreeing to this bullshit just smack me upside the head or something. To make a long story short, an … Continue reading →

I think we should really do something about Mondays. I mean, I don’t think there is one person out there who actually likes Mondays. I’m surprised we even keep them around. I’d say that on average they probably cause more … Continue reading →

Around the time I reviewed Chromium OS, I managed to totally b0rk one of my thumb drives. I somehow botched the dd command, and the device became unusable. When I plugged it in, nothing would happen. Or rather nothing on … Continue reading →

Few days ago, a user brought us a machine with some irrelevant software related issue. It was a relatively easy fix and we got the machine back to usable state in no time, only to discover something strange. The machine … Continue reading →