Tuesday, December 06, 2005
Open Source, Crossovers & Reunions
In my experiences, every so often I'm asked the typical "So what do you do?" question. I usually end up giving an explanation of my activities. Since I have so many varied so called jobs, I usually hit the major points, and it usually comes down to me saying "I'm a computer programmer". I don't like, because I do so much more than that. I'm a system administrator, a Database admin, developer. I'm and analyst, a technician. I provide support. I do do programming. But I'm also a designer, tester, implementor, how about a mentor period. I was on site to do some systems "problem solving", and I was asked to sit on a meeting with a potential client. There was a process of getting me some business cards, and I was asked "So what's your title?". I replied ... "I don't know ... what did the contract you gave me say?". There was something in there ... I just can not remember. I offered to be called "Linux God", but I think they were looking for something a tad more professional. The end result was a small set of business cards that read "Andrew Kopciuch - Open Source Systems Analyst". I like that because it does cover a great deal of things I do with pigeonholing me into something. The most important part is it states "Open Source". Since one of the duties I pride myself on is being an Open Source advocate, I get the warm fuzzies from my new business cards.
I had to setup the backup procedure between two server. We decided not to bog down the public network with such activities. Since there was a plethora of network cards in the servers (alright ... 3 ... but it I like the word plethora), we just plugged in some cables, and an available switch to avoid finding a crossover cable. This way we have a direct Ethernet connection between to cards. I had free reign to assign some private IP addresses to the cards. This was the fun step because I was doing this all remotely and had no idea with cards were plugged in. I just set them all up, added static routes for all of them, nd started pinging on specified interfaces to find out which ones were hooked in. I wrote a couple of little scripts to bring up these private connections and manually add the routes. The rsync of over 22 Gigs of data took around 2 hours. I love cool things like that. :D
Coming up in the new year marks the 10th anniversary of my high school graduation. My best friend John emailed me today and asked if I would be interested in organizing with him. I don't know what my time will be like with all this work coming up, but I threw out some ideas to make it as little work, and organization as possible. He mentioned a day time one day gig, people can come and go as they please, or not come at all. He mentioned a BBQ, and I suggested to have the high schools entrepreneur class run the BBQ, or the charity group do it as a fundraiser. Then he and I won't be flipping burgers all day long. This all just happened a few hours ago, so I'm sure plans will change, but I'm looking forward to it. I even offered to make a web site for it all. ¶ 2:31:00 AM
I had to setup the backup procedure between two server. We decided not to bog down the public network with such activities. Since there was a plethora of network cards in the servers (alright ... 3 ... but it I like the word plethora), we just plugged in some cables, and an available switch to avoid finding a crossover cable. This way we have a direct Ethernet connection between to cards. I had free reign to assign some private IP addresses to the cards. This was the fun step because I was doing this all remotely and had no idea with cards were plugged in. I just set them all up, added static routes for all of them, nd started pinging on specified interfaces to find out which ones were hooked in. I wrote a couple of little scripts to bring up these private connections and manually add the routes. The rsync of over 22 Gigs of data took around 2 hours. I love cool things like that. :D
Coming up in the new year marks the 10th anniversary of my high school graduation. My best friend John emailed me today and asked if I would be interested in organizing with him. I don't know what my time will be like with all this work coming up, but I threw out some ideas to make it as little work, and organization as possible. He mentioned a day time one day gig, people can come and go as they please, or not come at all. He mentioned a BBQ, and I suggested to have the high schools entrepreneur class run the BBQ, or the charity group do it as a fundraiser. Then he and I won't be flipping burgers all day long. This all just happened a few hours ago, so I'm sure plans will change, but I'm looking forward to it. I even offered to make a web site for it all. ¶ 2:31:00 AM
