Well I've successfully started a new job. It's officially the first time both my wife and I are working a day shift that is also in the same city. It's 'wheird' but ultimately very very nice. I don't think I'll ever miss working the night shift - or driving 2+ hours every day just to get back and forth for work.

The new job is pretty good so far. The previous sysadmin didn't leave much in the way of documentation so I'm kind of exploring the infrastructure. I've found several things that were in a broken state (most notably the nagios monitoring). What I haven't found myself, my workmates have brought to my attention (some that apparently have been waiting for quite some time to be completed). Nobody else, of course, knows what is going on with the infrastructure - they are all developers and have their own projects. I'm the sole sysadmin here (which wasn't really clear to me when I took the position) - but I'm considering it a big plus since I don't have to really argue my decisions with anyone :-)

I must say, though, the last sysadmin did leave me with a couple of very cluttered and messy server rooms as well as a broken laptop. Ah well, I guess if you're on your way out the door you don't necessarily feel the burn of success. I've since, re-racked to random servers, completed a fileserver migration and setup an appropriate ESXi 4 host to consolidate all those "white box servers" which someone apparently thought would be a good idea. I mean really - does dns and dhcp need their own xeon? What about nagios - I'm pretty sure a VM would do just fine for that. Besides that I'm not going to be using nagios - opennms is much nicer anyway - if you haven't tried it, I suggest you do; it is so chic.

AND OH - how about that lack on VPN! Remote workers have been using ssh tunnels to connect in and do work. I feel so bad for them - I'm putting together openvpn hosts for their individual environments. I have a feeling they will enjoy that quite a bit more.

Well, my viclient appears to be done installing. Enough of these shenanigans.

The new blackberry (8330 curve - sprint)  is somewhat fun to play around with. The gps in particular I used to configured a mapping database of my locations - (See links to left "Where's MAP Been" and "Where's MAP Now"). I combined two free API services to get the results. The GPS software and tracking is provided by http://bb.tech9computers.com. This runs in the background on the bb. It checks for a changed position every 30 seconds and sends latitude & longitude updates to their server. My vps checks for changes through their API interface and pulls it down to a local database. When the scripts are called locally (aka, the links on the left are clicked), the database results are pulled and perform a lookup against the Google Maps API (http://maps.google.com and http://google.com/apis/maps). The maps api is highly configurable and essentially just javascript so quite easy to get going. I had some fun with it and plan to look at other fun stuff to do with it. There is apparently a facebook plugin for the tech9 API so I may play around with that too.

Well, here I am unable to sleep in the middle of the night. I had a nice migraine earlier so I went to sleep when I got home from work. Woke up to heavy rain around 10:00pm and still had some of the headache. I tried drinking a little water and using the neck massager but that didn't really help either so made green tea and took some aspirin. I put on some star trek and am having a bowl of corn now with water. I think it's starting to get better though it hurts more when I lay down so sitting up is the answer for the time being.

I am on-call all this week and I'm a little surprised that I haven't been paged tonight. There is planned maintenance from AT&T on a circuit that effects a customer so it will probably happen soon if it's going to at all. I'll have to follow-up after 6am to ensure that the circuit is working. 

Mom and Dad came up last weekend for my birthday and bought us brunch. It was nice seeing them. I made them play Force Unleashed and Mario Cart on the Wii. I'm thinking they could've done without that, but I had fun. I stayed home on Monday and played Force Unleashed for several hours. It's really sad, but my upper arms are sort from use the controllers. Just one more thing...

Well, Cpt. Kirk is about to kick a Klingons ass, and I should try to go to sleep.  Blah.

I feel like I'm from the stupid farm never having heard of distcc. Once I saw it I immediately had to set it up on all my machines and run some kernel compiles to see how it stacked up to all the hype. I'm pretty impressed with the results. See below:

Machines:

anubis (localhost) - P4 3.4Ghz /w ht & 1Gb DDR2 RAM
geb - AMD 64 FX-62 dual core & 4Gb DDR2 RAM
tiamat - AMD 64 X2 3800+ dual core & 2Gb DDR2 RAM
satis - AMD 64 X2 3800+ dual core & 2Gb DDR2 RAM
isis - P2 450Mhz & 384Mb SDRAM
nut - P3 733Mhz & 384Mb SDRAM

Built: linux-2.6.26 (1914 modules):

time make -j2 modules

real    51m53.589s
user    82m26.921s
sys     5m43.753s

export DISTCC_HOSTS='localhost geb tiamat satis nut isis'
time make -j8 CC=distcc modules

real    24m8.465s
user    33m14.449s
sys     5m1.259s

time make -j10 CC=distcc modules

real    21m12.494s
user    28m16.922s
sys     4m57.727s


export DISTCC_HOSTS='geb tiamat satis nut isis localhost'

time make -j20 CC=distcc modules

real    18m5.297s
user    22m33.285s
sys     4m51.614s

export DISTCC_HOSTS='geb tiamat satis nut isis'

time make -j14 CC=distcc modules

real    18m18.102s
user    15m7.181s
sys     4m21.156s