it's been a while

I'd love to say I have been spending the last month playing with my great new CCNA lab, but I haven't been. It's sitting on a chair in my front room right now. I have almost everything I need. All I have to get is a rack, a shelf, a pdu (perfer a switched pdu), and a PC to rule it all (which is sitting half a part on my kitchen table and floor, changing cases).

However, due to projects at work, I'm back to studying Xen. The last book I had sucked. In fact it sucked so bad that all the errata I submitted has yet to show up. I will not be wasting my time with that book anymore, and probably will just toss it into the recycle bin the next time I find it.

I recently purchased Running Xen: A Hands-On Guide to the Art of Virtualization. It's really good. I mean really really good. I did have some problem with the Xen 3.0.3-0 LiveCD, but that's not the book's fault. I am also seriously telling everyone I know in computers to buy this book.

Other things I have worked on...

Well once again, I remind everyone in the department why you want physical security on the servers, not just software. I've had 5 boxes, from a company the people I work for bought out, that had to have data or other things accessed. 4 of the 5 went down easy with TRK. We just reset the administrator password, that's right I get paid to crack boxes. The last one we had to do a little different. We really needed the data off of it, and it turns out that KDE based linux distros (at least the 2 we tried) don't handle ntfs mounts very well maybe it's just something in the debian tree, I'll have to check more later. However Fedora 8 (gnome desktop)got the data no problem did. Even if it is taking all day to copy the data over to our usb drive (probably could have done a network drop faster but I was teaching the windows admin how to use the stuff, and he went with the usb drive).

I recently got to build out a system to move the large amounts of data we get from customers to our network in what we hope will be a faster way. Get the drive, take it out of it's usb case, put it into a removable SATA tray and copy it up to the share at gb speeds (after they get the line ran next week, so for now it will be 100mb speed). It's been a pain in my but to get the system up, problems with the Nix distros I wanted to install, bios updates, things breaking when I install the drivers. It went from being a Linux box, to a Win2k3 to an XP-64bit box. I'm hoping XP will work since intel's excuse is it's meant to be a desktop box. It has to be up and running by morning though, which is why I'm still at work at almost 22:30 edt.

Today I also got to design an 8TB storage system. I'm hoping it will work, I'll find out in a week or so when the hardware comes in. 8 sata drives, 1 ide drive (os), lots of memory and FreeNAS