It's been a good run with LiveJournal. However I will no longer be posting here. Please see my new blog/homepage at http://charlesnw.blogspot.com

Thanks to LiveJournal for the outstanding service. I will still keep my account here and participate in the various community blogs that are unique to LiveJournal.

I thought I would take some time and define my daily process and some of my productivity tips. I have always been pretty efficient, but am always looking for ways to improve.

I start my day by catching up on e-mail. I subscribe to some RedHat Emerging Technology Project lists (such as FreeIPA and et-mgmt-tools). I generally will skim those messages first as they relate to the InfrasBox project. I then move my spam into the junk folder.

My next step is to open Flock and skim my RSS feeds. I click on the articles that interest me and read them. I generally don't follow the links in the articles as that consumes quite a bit of time. If I don't know what something is I'll search and skim the WikiPedia article and/or info page. I will often bookmark something that is of interest.

Both my e-mail and bookmarks are in a somewhat obsessive/extreme folder structure and I am able to locate just about any e-mail or bookmark in less then 30 seconds. I have found that I have a very category/hierarchy oriented mindset.

Another e-mail tip I have is that I almost never save messages from a list. They are all archived (at least the ones I subscribe to). A lot of information I will never refer to again anyway. For example bug reports/triage etc. Its very interesting and topical for a short period of time, then becomes old news. I don't really have any hard and fast criteria for saving list messages, as I do it so rarely.

So that covers e-mail/rss (new information).

The above process usually takes me about 2 hours on a daily basis. The e-mail portion is generally completed while I commute (I take mass transit).

Any e-mails which require action I add to a task list.

I then work through those tasks. If I am interrupted I will either complete the task (if its less then 10 minutes) or will add it to my task list.

I am reviewing the GTD approach and looking at my current process and seeing how I stack up. So far I have the collect and organize steps down quite well. I am also able to accomplish a lot efficiently enough that my customers haven't complained about lack of progress. :)

Hopefully this post will help you become more productive. :)

I have resigned from my position with Siderean Software as of 10:00 am this morning. I am currently looking for a system engineering position. My resume can be found online at http://thewybles.com/~charles/me/resume/charles-wyble-resume-2008.pdf

I would like to give props to my network for coming through with quite a few interviews and opportunities. You guys rock!

If you would like to follow my job hunt see my twitter page which will have up to the minute information on my daily activities. Obviously my highest priority now will be finding a job. If you know of anything that I could be a fit for please let me know!

Weblogs are fun. I don't mean blogs (though those are fun too). I am referring to Apache logs. Some entries of interest from today:

24.199.1.218 - - [14/Feb/2008:13:30:53 -0800] "GET /~charles/me/resume/resume.html HTTP/1.1" 200 12687

"http://www.altavista.com/web/results?itag=ody&kgs=1&k
ls=0&q=%28intitle%3Aresume+OR+inurl%3Aresume%29+-jobs+-post+-careers+-submit+%28engineer+OR+developer%29+%28818+OR+310+OR+323+OR+626+OR+213%29Web+Java+j2ee&s
tq=30" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.2; SU 3.011; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)"


220.225.234.204 - - [14/Feb/2008:12:09:55 -0800]
"GET /~charles/me/resume/resume.pdf HTTP/1.1" 200 8211

"http://www.google.com/custom?q=UNIX+,+MYSQL+ADMIN+-+
CA+more:resume_search_-_pdf_file&hl=en&client=google-coop-np&

cof=AH:left%3BCX:Passive%2520Recruiting%2520Search%2520Engine

%3BL:http://www.google.com/coop/intl/en/images/custom_search_sm.gif%3BLH:65%3BLP:1%3BLC:%23000099%3BVLC:%23663399%3BGALT:%23009900%3BDIV:%23000000%3B&cx=000807618478942348746:78fen_f3moe&adkw=
AELymgUkG39NIRUEeKJSIMYjeLVqLigGvuBpQN_nok2XOLNxGynCqLHyCklPTPDuKr4A4DkzCACfDYKqTYk5wa6PzAZNs9knfc3Wodu2ENbb9op3cjOXPCA&start=40&sa=N" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows;
 U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1) Gecko/20061010 Firefox/2.0"

First the good points.

The organizers did an outstanding job as always. The venue was perfect. The talks I attended had plenty of capacity. I didn't use the wireless or wired network at all. However everyone I talked to that used it had no issues. So the various core parts of the conference have vastly improved and matured.

Now the bad points.

I was thoroughly unimpressed this year. I attended two talks (one on virtualization/openvz and one on Untangle).  The Untangle talk was outstanding. The OpenVZ talk I wasn't really impressed with. They gave an incredibly high level overview and a demo. Nothing really all that exciting.

Other talks that I was potentially interested in, I have already seen the subject matter covered at various LUGs in Southern California. I did see some new vendors this year (in particular Talend). However I didn't discover anything new at SCALE, which is generally my primary reason for going. I guess its a sign of maturity in the overall community and my experience with Linux.  I actually didn't even attend the conference on Sunday.

So SCALE6 gets a score of 7 out of ten.

So i wanted to let everyone know I'll be speaking at the March meeting of UUASC Los Angeles. 

I'll be covering the following:

1) Update on the Los Angeles city WiFI project.
2) Unveiling of OpenSrcLearn.org and my work at Roosevelt High School
3) A demo of the back end technology I covered at my previous presentations

3.A) Auto provisioning a client system with Ubuntu
3.B) Network Access Control  (using PacketFence)
3.C) DD-WRT on the WRT54GL tied in to back end infrastructure (Directory Services/RADIUS/OpenVPN)

I may even throw in some high availability magic as well.

I think that should fill 2 hours. :)
                  

I plan to blog about the various things above throughout the month of February. 

Dreamhost makes a 7.5 millon dollar mistake

http://blog.dreamhost.com/2008/01/15/um-whoops/

I can't believe the yahoos they let build commerce systems these days. Good grief!

If this had happened on the commerce systems that I coded/supported and it was my mistake, I certainly wouldn't be blogging about it? Why? Cause I would have been fired and then sued into oblivion. Commerce is serious business for serious coders.

Not some 2 bit guy who thinks he is a hot shot coder/admin. Those are the kind of people you want to keep as far away from production as possible.  (Yes I am talking to you Josh Jones).

Ugh. This sort of stuff makes me sick.

Dreamhost should immediately terminate Josh and I strongly encourage customers of dreamhost to sue the organization and the developer who made this horribly evil and unforgivable mistake.

And yes I take commerce very seriously.

The World Wide Web has many many strands.  I have many spiders which sit on various strands (yahoo/google/twitter/techncorati). I track a number of subjects, brand names, company names etc.  Today my twitter spy brings me news of an acquisition. Intuit is buying Electronic Clearing House (a former employer who booted me).

Now ECHO was a decent company with strong growth. Technology was well respected and well fed. A management shake up occurred and a number of people got canned.  Shortly after I was eliminated (like withing a  week) I interviewed at Intuit card processing services. I saw top management from my firm on the sign in sheet. So I knew something was in the works.

http://www.foxbusiness.com/markets/industries/finance/article/intuit-buy-electronic-clearing-house-17-share_414474_9.html

Both companies seemed to not really have there head on straight in terms of systems operations management. 

So someone didn't really do their homework in my opinion.  Or maybe more people got canned and new blood was brought in?

Eh Whatever.

So the time has come for me to being thinking about my next job.

I am currently looking at positions with Microsoft and Canonical. Microsoft has a really interesting spot in LA which I believe I would be a good fit for:

http://eefeiv.notlong.com/

Also Canonical has a platform developer position which I am interested in as well:

http://www.ubuntu.com/employment#upd

I need to update my resume and setup some test virtual machines.

So my main project at work right now is setting up automated monitoring for our hosted web applications. I did an extensive amount of research and reading and tried using WebLoad but for a number of reasons it didn't work out very well. I then started using Jmeter and have been pleasantly surprised.

Some links of interest I have come across

http://cwiki.apache.org/WICKET/wicket-and-jmeter-with-regular-expressions.html
http://jorge.martincuervo.com/2006/10/15/jmeter-and-dwr/


Many more can be found
http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=jmeter+ajax&ei=UTF-8&fr=moz2

I'll probably do a more comprehensive post and brain dump on this subject later. Needless to say I will have a lot of material for my presentation in February to UUASC.

So I figured I would post a summary of the things I have going online.

1) My main and longest running blog http://jackshck.livejournal.com (your reading it now). Covering various projects and ideas. Showing progress towards them (scattered though it may be).

2) My corporate project blog. Covering my revenue generating ideas and how I am getting there. Essentially covering the nitty gritty details of building a professional services and corporate Linux/Open Source Operations training firm. http://siliconvs.blogspot.com (Silicon Valley South).

3) My "life blog". This is a fairly new blog of mine.  Actually its old (created in January 2006). I went to register the blog the other day, and saw it was already registered. I'll try to post to it each and every day both in person (on topics like what I ate that day and travel times etc) and automated (sending  SNORT and LogWatch reports).  In a similar vein to my twitter ( http://www.twitter.com/charlesnw ) but on a more consistent set of subjects etc. The URL for my "life blog" is http://charlesnw.blogspot.com

And of course I am on LinkedIn for professional networking, and Facebook. I don't usually do much with Facebook and don't utilize LinkedIn to a great extent.

There are a myriad of other social networking sites out there. I am not really interested in them per se.

Oh of course I have a youtube account ( http://www.youtube.com/charlesnw) and a blip.tv channel (http://opensrclearn.blip.tv) Both of those are in support of my main 2008 project (the on site corporate training).

So that's me in a nutshell.

I also have all my online properties linked together. I actually have a spreadsheet with the whole setup. I should post that sometime. :)

So a number of the things I will be working on in 2008 will be projects in the field. I have become increasingly mobile in 2007 but a lot of the projects I have been working on were foundational/ core infrastructure tasks. Those are winding down now, and setting the stage for 2008.

So lets start with an inventory of equipment I take with me everywhere in my Targus TXL617 backpack:


1) HP Pavillion dv6000 laptop running Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon. Dual core AMD Turion 64. 2 gigs of ram. Not an ultra portable system but not a luggable either. A very capable system for all types of projects. I have an incredibly broad spectrum of software installed and as such can easily be a local Ubuntu mirror :)

2) Blackberry Pearl (8100) with an unlimited data plan from t-mobile. I use this device extensively. Its great for taking notes and handling e-mails/twitter alerts.

3) A 62 piece BoXer screwdriver set. Just about every type of screw can be handled with this nifty toy.

4) A no name USB headset. Works like a champ. Great for listening to music, podcasts or doing voice communications.

5) A maxtor USB hard drive. I use that to store my Vista virtual machine as well as audio/video recordings of LUG meetings. Not a lot of that there now, but much more to come in 2008. Much much more.

6) A targus tri pod. Used for video recording of various user group meetings.

7) A raines compact umbrella. Never know when it might be needed. Especially with all of the travel I will be doing in 2008. Won't always be in sunny so cal. :)

8) An AirLink 101 Super G Wireless Router. Perfect for when I need to setup a quick network.

9) A neck pillow. For all the time I spend on the bus and soon train/plane.

10) A Sansa c140 which I use to record user group meetings. Works incredibly well.

11) A nokia N95 phone.

12) A LaFonera router

13) A keyspan serial to usb converter.


And of course some assorted cables (s-video/firewire/usb/network).

Later on I will post more about productive mobility.</a>

So I setup logwatch and snort on all my boxes recently.  In todays daily report I see:

Failed logins from these:
    122.70.135.124: 68 times
       root/password: 68 times
    219.129.219.66: 1 time
       root/password: 1 time
 
 Illegal users from these:
    219.129.219.66: 1 time
       fluffy/password: 1 time


I looked up the two IP addresses:
http://isc.sans.org/ipinfo.html?ip=122.70.135.124
http://isc.sans.org/ipinfo.html?ip=219.129.219.66

both of them have been bad little boys. 

I turned off direct ssh root login on that box just to be extra safe. 

So I highly recommend deploying logwatch/snort. The default Ubuntu configuration works great. Just make sure you set an alias for root in /etc/aliases. 

It has been a long and fairly productive year for me so far. However I haven't been as productive as I would have liked to be.

I have gone back through an entire year of blog posts, and done a lot of clean up and editing. I have deleted several posts, and consolidated a lot of the information from them into this post.

I have put together the following TODO list for the rest of the year. This will give me something to execute against so I can focus on LA City Wifi and other Known Element Enterprises products and services in 2008.

The following items are top priority for me. They are part of the core infrastructure work I have been doing most of the year. Before I embark on the other projects, I need to finish the core infrastructure work.

Productivity and personal system related items:

1) Setup backups using a fairly comprehensive home grown shell script which is in production use at multiple sites.

Update: Massive progress made toward this goal. Please see this post, this one, and this one for more details.

2) Setup monitoring using Hyperic and Microsoft System Center.

3) Setup sync4j and sync my blackberry to it.

4) Figure out how to use the remote control that comes with my laptop to perform various actions beyond next/previous. In GNOME when i hit various hot keys on the remote various applications open. Not so outside of GNOME :(

Projects:

1) Setup some clusters. Both for high performance and high availability. See this post (http://jackshck.livejournal.com/76973.html) and this one ( http://jackshck.livejournal.com/78100.html ) for more information on what I plan to do.
2) Setup a VPN and IPv6 cloud for SoCal Linux users. With vmware/xen/uml or whatever people want to use. Also will be looking at mesh stuff and things like Quagga.

Removed / completed items:

LUG Related Items:

1) Do more video/photo blogging and podcasting of group meetings.
I was recording the LiLax and UUASC meetings for a while, and have been remiss about doing so lately. Need to setup reminders in my Blackberry to tell me to do so.

Update: I have launched OpenSrcLearn.org and reorganized my portable storage to support my video needs. Also have been recording the meetings I have attended. So good progress against this goal and I will continue to make progress going forward.

2) Setup calendar.socallugs.com

Update: I am working with various members of the Los Angeles technology community to maintain event information on upcoming.org which can then be consumed by various specialty sites. So I'll be doing my best to maintain LUG related events on upcoming.org.

3) Setup UPS software on media and vmware server.
This was done, but was lost after the reinstall. Plan to have this done by EOD tomorrow (10/07/2007).

Update: This is now completed on both servers.




Removed the two items below. They really won't do much for me right now.

1) Purchase a bluetooth keyboard.
2) Get my bluetooth headset working as an audio input/output device.



3) Setup voice control
Complete. See this post for details.

5) Purchase a minipci atheros based wireless card for my laptop.
This will allow me to continue messing with WiFi as detailed here (http://jackshck.livejournal.com/76308.html).

Removing from list. It doesn't really benefit me in relation to my overall goals and objectives to spend time on hacking/security exploration type tasks.

7) Get internet access via my Phone under Linux over blue tooth.
Removed from list. See this post for details.

Setup a network intrusion detection system.
Original goal of a NIDS completed. See this post for details. Expanded the goal a bit to include file integrity monitoring.

One of the items I mentioned in my TODO list was intrusion detection. In support of this goal I have

1) Rolled out LogWatch and SNORT to all of my VmWare, bare metal systems and my vpsland.com Xen Slice.  I get daily summary e-mails of system/network activity.

2) Setup the /etc/aliases file on all systems to send root e-mail to charles@thewybles.com

I am in the process of evaluating file integrity monitoring software for deployment across my systems.

So the original goal of a network intrusion detection system has been met, and I am expanding that to system intrusion detection/monitoring as well.

Well its taken longer then I had hoped, but I am almost done with backups. Please see my previous posts on the topic for some background and earlier attempts.

I have done a number of experiments and test runs, and have come up with the following:

1) A set of scripts on my file server which run out of cron and ssh to the server which hosts my personal home page, and the server which hosts all my corporate pages. It backs up my web pages and e-mail directory. The script is fairly simple:

#!/bin/bash
#A script to backup the content of my vpsland.com sites and my personal homepage


backup_root="/samba/backups"
backup_storage_root="$backup_root/backups/web-backups/"
logFile="$backup_root/logs/remote-backup.log"
private_key="$backup_root/keys/privateBackupKey"
rsync_opts="-avz"

echo "To: charles@thewybles.com" > ${logFile}
echo "From: remote-backup@thewybles.com" >> ${logFile}
echo "Subject: E-mail/Web Backup Ran `date`" >> ${logFile}
echo "" >> ${logFile}
echo "Starting E-mail/Web Backup `date`" >> ${logFile}

echo "" >> ${logFile}

rsync $rsync_opts -e "ssh -i $private_key" charles@www.socallugs.com:/home/charles/web $backup_storage_root/vpsland-backup
backupReturnValue=$?
echo "VPSLAND webpage backups returned $backupReturnValue" >> ${logFile}

rsync $rsync_opts -e "ssh -i $private_key" charles@www.socallugs.com:/home/charles/web $backup_storage_root/vpsland-backup
backupReturnValue=$?
echo "VPSLAND webpage backups returned $backupReturnValue" >> ${logFile}

rsync $rsync_opts -e "ssh -p 2345 -i $private_key" charles@www.thewybles.com:/home/charles/public_html $backup_storage_root/homepage-backup
backupReturnValue=$?
echo "Homepage backup returned $backupReturnValue" >> ${logFile}

rsync $rsync_opts -e "ssh -p 2345 -i $private_key" charles@www.thewybles.com:/home/charles/Maildir $backup_storage_root/email-backup
backupReturnValue=$?
echo "E-mail backup returned $backupReturnValue" >> ${logFile}

cat ${logFile} | /usr/sbin/sendmail -t -i

2) A script which backs up the music and pictures on the media server. Same as above just different source server and local storage point.
3) A script which backs up web pages and e-mail to rsync.net. Same as above script just different source and target server.

The above 3 scripts have been running for a week or so (maybe longer I dunno) and work perfectly.

The following tasks remain:

1) Backing up Patti and I laptop.
2) Backing up local VmWare servers.

Both of the above should be doable with the above script, however I have run into a problem attempting to set it up. So going to work on that later today.

3) Backing up MySQL databases. Part of me wants to do a mysqldump, and part of me wants to setup a MySQL replica. In the interest of time and simplicity, I think I'll do the mysqldump.

So if everything goes well, I should have backups finished by the end of the day today.

So one of the things I observed was as you go farther south in California, the technology landscape changes. Or at least the slice I see at user group meetings and other events. 

Los Angeles is very system engineering/application administration oriented.
Orange County and San Diego are heavily oriented towards programming. A lot of .NET and Ruby but not a lot of Java.

The crowd was smaller at BarCampSd2.  I attended and contributed to the Nagios/Groundworks talks quite a bit. Didn't give my presentation on community websites, as the audience didn't really seem quite right for it.

The event  was well organized and the food was excellent. However other then the Nagios/Groundworks talks and a talk on a web based IDE, the content didn't really appeal to me. I made a few connections of some value.

I think I'll stick to the LA based events from now on.  As its the area I live in and the market that interests me the most. We shall see.

So I am in a Motel 6 with Ralf and dallas in San Diego. Doing some random stuff tonight. One of those things is uploading a screenshot of my vmware  control panel at home.

Also working on a spreadsheet with my various web properties and page ranks. Part of my analytics and monitoring project.

Finishing up the backups and ups stuff as well.

Will post more when complete...

I will be in San Diego this weekend at Barcamp San Diego presenting on SoCalLugs.com and community sites in general. Will be carpooling down with some of my  regular crew.

Hope to see a lot of people I know there and meet a number of new people as well. Should be fun!