You might wondered why I posted this a few days ago. Well, recently, I had an online duel with a person who makes me wonder why they bother to be on online help forums. I didn't want a duel, but this person was patronizing right off the bat. Basically, they claimed something was impossible even though I had done it and provided links to others who had done it and how anyone could do it. After battling with him about what he thinks happened, he started arguing semantics and redefining what I had said, and then claiming THAT was wrong. Without getting too technical about how one can mount a floppy image via loopback, it was kind of like this: imagine you had a basic car issue:

Me: I have changed my oil in my car, and I was wondering how one properly disposes of the used oil in my area. Do I just drop it off at a gas station?

Him: You can't change the oil in your car. You have to have a mechanic do that.

Me: Yes you can.

Him: Not without taking the engine apart.

Me: No no, anyone can change their oil [description of how].

Him: That's not changing oil.

Me: Yes, it is. Here's the link to the car manual, along with illustrations showing what I did [link].

Him: First of all, that does not show a normal person CHANGING oil. It shows a mechanic DRAINING oil. You are not a mechanic, and further proof of this is you don't know how to dispose of the oil, and still call it a "gas station," a term only used in the movies.

Me: Look, if you don't have the answer, why are you even bothering posting in this forum?

Him: Because people like you ruin engines ever day, trying to take them apart. Now you don't even know how to dispose of your own mess. But tell you what, go ahead and ruin it. Whatever. Not my car. You're probably a woman, anyway.

Me: Not that it matters, but I am a guy, I changed my oil, and I have a large jug of used motor oil. My car runs fine. I finally got an answer elsewhere, and I have deposed of it at my local Jiffy-Lube, who gave me a coupon for my troubles.

Him: Okay, "MISTER" So-and-so (wink)... first of all, you don't CHANGE oil. What are you, a magician? What did you change it to, a rabbit? A fully licensed mechanic can DRAIN the oil, and REPLACE the oil, but can't CHANGE it into something else, sweetie. Oh, but the thieves at Jiffy-Lube took your damaged car, and gave you a coupon. Aw, isn't that sweet.

Me: [thinking]You must be very lonely.

This is not some peon-run free Linux forum, but a forum that you can only get if you get an expensive certification which requires grueling exams to pass. And what makes it worse is this forum is filled with tons of basic, 101-level questions that anyone who supposedly passed this exam SHOULD know. Using the car model, imagine if your licensed mechanic was asking this in a forum for licensed mechanics:

- Can't a car theoretically run with no tires?
- Aren't all cars "four wheel" drive?
- OMG Steering wheels on the wrong side in London. WTF LOL
- Car runs out of gas, how often should I fuel?

Oy.

One hour of every four I have spent in my tech career has been fixing a Microsoft product. You know, when you make a mistake in Linux, usually, 9 times out of 10, it's your own damn fault. But you can tell it's your fault because most people who write open source/GNU stuff have decent logging. Microsoft has a little GUI window called "Event Log" which isn't a text file but a kind of database of events without a decent grep filter of any kind, but a crude "Find..." option.

Linux is rock-solid stable, which sometimes leads to a problem where you "set it and forget it." For years. Make a box, set up Apache, tune some things for PHP, sent up snmp to check for problems, and boom... 4 years later, you wonder what the hell is on the box because you forgot what you did, and didn't document it (I do, though, for just these reasons, you just have to remember where the notes are). I have had Linux boxes with 2 year uptimes, which is kind of bad, since that means you have missed a dozen or so security updates, but rarely are they attacked. Windows you have to reboot a lot. If anything, because the latest security patch forces you to reboot. Most of my Windows boxes at work have uptimes of 30 days or less. In my entire career, I have repaired just two compromised Linux boxes. I can't count how many Windows boxes I have wiped. More than 100, surely. Sometimes you do a DnR on a Windows system because it just takes far too long to diagnose and repair them. Most high-level Windows sysadmins I know do this unless the data is just to valuable to lose in a reformat.

When I used to do QA for AOL, Windows users were so used to crashes and problems, they were often far better educated than Mac folks when reporting bugs. Mac folks were so unused to crashes, they were shocked and even insulted when shit went wrong. And AOL software went wrong a lot. Still does, from what I hear. Linux folks, especially the GUI set that are prevalent now with the rise of Ubuntu, still have a lot of stuff that goes wrong, often with hardware interaction and GUI scripts that conflict with other scripts. Thus most are still pretty educated as the Windows folks were back in the day. Numerous help forums have honed early Linux adopters to grep through error logs and whatnot. But in 2014? Maybe Linux will be completely run by masses not used to looking under the hood.

So, like with Windows 95 beta testers back in the day, when troubleshooting Windows servers, so much of the OS is cockeyed and nonsensical, it's only my experience that has made me a better admin. You could know how a network stack works inside and out, but that won't help you much when trying to determine why a running service on Windows isn't reachable from one subnet. Can't grep a tcpdump. You got to know what set of menus, sub-menus, tabs, and checkboxes to click. Gets in my way. Command lines are MUCH faster in the end. Finding an error in Linux is like looking over a field of moving objects, and looking for one that doesn't look right. Finding an error in Windows is having to go through a maze with doors, traps, and puzzles to try and find if you can see that error, and then the same goes for fixing it.

It's like a special kind of insanity. And over time, I am actually learning this insanity. It reminds me of why I was made a FanTekk BBS sysop.

The FanTek BBS was run by some of the craziest software imaginable. "Nitelite," Paul Swanson's BBS software for the Atari ST, was built from Pascal over a Motorola 68000 chipset for mutli-line BBSing. The BBS program itself had its own proprietary language which made no sense whatsoever. It was based on commands that looked like "K6:" or "PRL!" which were often riddled meta-commands and lacked any sort of consistent structure. It was as if the designer had grouped commands by letter as he thought of them, so the "L" commands had no real grouping as opposed to the "K" or "M"-based commands. KR2 may have meant "write to a file" and G1 might have meant "read a file" but G2 might have meant "send user to chat room." The entire chat room, I think, was a meta command, which made no sense except if pulled from a menu.

The file directory system was DOS-based, but used letters that had little bearing on actual locations. I recall "X:\" was a kind of "virtual directory" which had to do with the BBS loaded into memory as opposed to the actual files on a disk. "K:\" was the read-only program executables, and "L:\" would be the read/write data, if I recall. Totally insane.

The BBS was not ANSI compatible, but I knew a slew of VT100 escape codes, and so hacked the menus to have colors, rewdraw themselves, and so on. I redesigned a new chat room from scratch because the software author was so tired hearing from Bruce, he gave us the source code and told us to compile the damn thing ourselves if we thought he could do better. And we did (thanks to ALICE PASCAL). Sadly, Pascal for the Atari had a memory pointer limit of 2^15, which meant anything that went over the number 32,768 (number of files, message board ID number, number of e-mails posted since start, etc), the system crashed.

Previous sysops, like Allon, Suzi, Darryl, and Ralph, had a saying. "You have to be a special kind of crazy to manage this system. Punkie has that kind of crazy." I am not sure if that was meant as a complement, but I took it as such. In fact, whenever I can't figure out something, a voice in my head says, "You fucking managed the FanTek BBS. If you can do that, you can do this."

It takes a special kind of crazy to manage Microsoft products.

I found a way how to fix the "exit fullscreen" key combination for tsclient/rdesktop when compiz is active. You have to install the Compiz settings manager, and activate the plugin "Workarounds." Disable the "Legacy Fullscreen support" checkbox.

CTRL ALT ENTER exits/enters fullscreen mode.

This made me so mad. Apparently, since Debian Etch, the login banner "Message of the day" is re-written after reboot. Well, that sucks. The issue is, I created some nice MOTD banners for a bunch of Debian system, but upon reboot, they had the annoying default uname -a and copyright info from the install. I was so annoyed. I generated fonts, made them look nice and professional... pooh. So I decided to do some research, and nail down the MOTD for my systems. I was even going to see if I could generate "giant text" on the fly.

There are several ways to go about fixing this. The first is to know that the MOTD is created upon bootup with /etc/init.d/bootmisc.sh. If you look at that line:

# Update motd
uname -snrvm > /var/run/motd
[ -f /etc/motd.tail ] && cat /etc/motd.tail >> /var/run/motd

The file /etc/motd is a symlink to /var/run/motd. So you have a few choices:

1. Comment out that portion in /etc/init.d/bootmisc.sh
   
2. Change /etc/motd.tail (if you don't mind the uname info up top, or change that in bootmisc.sh)
   
3. Link /etc/motd to something else. Like /etc/motd.static
   
4. Make your own script that changes the MOTD in rc.local, via a cron job, etc...
   

I kind of like the old UNIX style of doing MOTD back at the University of Maryland. Our MOTD really was a "message of the day," and changed when we had something new to say to people logging in (which was about every day, sometimes twice a day). A few years ago, I worked with a company that modified Red Hat 9 to do some nifty "professional touches," to their systems, and one of them I liked was automatically having BIG FONTS in their MOTD. By that I mean, when you renamed a system, like to "SYSTEM54.SRV," when you logged in, the banner would say, automatically:

 ______   ______ _____ _____ __  __ ____  _  _    ____  ______     __
/ ___\ \ / / ___|_   _| ____|  \/  | ___|| || |  / ___||  _ \ \   / /
\___ \\ V /\___ \ | | |  _| | |\/| |___ \| || |_ \___ \| |_) \ \ / / 
 ___) || |  ___) || | | |___| |  | |___) |__   _| ___) |  _ < \ V /  
|____/ |_| |____/ |_| |_____|_|  |_|____/   |_|(_)____/|_| \_\ \_/   
                                                                   
Greetings fellow Star Gazers!
System last booted:         system boot  2009-03-29 09:58

How did they do that? That's when I learned (today) about figlet. It's not in the main free repositories, so you'll have to add:

    deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian lenny main non-free

to your sources.list and run an apt-get update (assuming you have Lenny, replace Etch or Intrepid or whatever if you're not on vanilla Debian 5.0). Then do apt-get install figlet. Do a man figlet to get all the options, but the base font was fine for me.

figlet SYSTEM54.SRV && printf '\nGreetings fellow Star Gazers!\n' && 
printf "System last booted:" && who -b

gave me the output above.

Pretty cool, huh? There's all kinds of info you can slap in there. Keep in mind, the MOTD is not a dynamic file, you have to manually change it somehow. If you want neat stuff like "you last logged in," or some random fortune, that's done in the .bash_login file (for bash).

I have been wondering about this, and I finally got it to work, thanks so some tips from multiple sites.

The No Machine (NX) client allows you to choose between five types of UNIX desktop sessions: KDE, GNOME, CDE, XDM and "custom." In the first four cases the session startup is invoked via the normal route (like "startkde") and the NoMachine X server is destroyed when the session exits. In the case of a custom session, however, NoMachine doesn't know when your program has finished (it may have put itself in the background) so the X server stays running and you have to terminate the NoMachine session manually.

Make a wrapper script, save it as /usr/NX/bin/nxwrapper, and then make it executable (chmod 755). The script:

#!/bin/bash
# Script origianlly found here:
# http://iain.cx/nx/nxwrapper.html

nxnode=$(ps -o ppid= -p $PPID)
nxagent=$(pgrep -P $nxnode -u $USER -x nxagent)
${1+"$@"}
exec kill $nxagent

This should take care of killing the X server after your session is completed.

To start an XFCE session, for example, you would use nxwrapper xfce4-session as the command to run. From the wizard, select "custom," then "Settings..." Check "Run the following command," and enter in /usr/NX/bin/nxwrapper /usr/bin/xfce4-session (or whatever the path is for your desktop GUI, flux box would be /usr/bin/startfluxbox). Then select "New Virtual desktop" and Save.

Viola!

Most of my friends on here are either in or closely related to the tech industry during this crisis. This was forwarded around at the office by a manager I really trust, and links like these are part of that.

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20080929/0426042403.shtml

In the short term, there's still going to be a fair amount of bloodshed, and the downside will impact companies outside of the financial sector, but for those in tech, the good news is that we're probably more isolated than other industries, though certainly not completely isolated. And, since everything is changing so rapidly, you never know what shoe might drop next.

However, in the long run, there is still money out there, and there are still opportunities. People will need to put that money to work one way or another, and rather than freaking out, now is a time to be looking for the opportunities created by this mess, and the tech industry is likely to have a lot of those opportunities. Remember that for every bubble bursting, something ends up getting devalued below its real value. The trick is just figuring out what it is before anyone else notices.

My company is doing fairly well, actually,. We just got two huge government contracts which I am not at liberty to discuss, obviously, but it was enough to reinvest in our core infrastructure before it became outdated, and guess who's on the top of that pile? That's why I am getting the certs, man, while the gettin's good... :D

I am now LPI Level 1 certified!

Hoo-ray! The test was really hard, though. Mostly fill-in-the-blanks, with a lot of esoteric questions. If it had been a bar fight, my victim would have looked worse than me, but not by much. I'd still have a split lip and walk away with a limp. I can't comment much on the exam for NDA reasons, but I still felt like I wasn't being tested on core knowledge as much as I was being tested on, "Suppose this happened?" I would say I was tested on stuff I didn't study for, and only pulled out of my ass from stuff I did back at AOL or as a hobby moment when I got stuck at something.

There was also some oddball scoring. Like I got a 33% on a set of 2 questions. I would think the only outcomes from 2 questions would be a 0%, 50%, or 100%. Maybe they mean in hex.

Anyway, I passed, and I am grateful my cold didn't make me too woozy. Next, I am on to my CompTIA Network+, then MCITP, which will be the really hard one. After that, I think I go back to LPI, but for Level 2.

Man, I am so brain dead. First, I have a cold. I got sick from the hospital visit yesterday, which happens a lot when I visit hospitals. I get cold chills, then get some kind of virus or bacterial infection. So far, this hasn't been TOO bad, but it's annoying when I am trying to study.

I didn't make too many LJ notes this pass because I knew a lot of stuff already. I also didn't have as much time to study as I wanted. When I pass this, I will be a genuine Certified Level 1 Linux Professional by the Linux Professional Institute. Level 1 means I get Magic Missile and Tenser's Floating Disk. [snort]

I am nervous as hell... again. One last bit of "type to remember." I got too used to subnet calculators. I wrote this page years ago, recently updated it, but I forgot one vital piece of information: you are given an IP and subnet mask: how do you find out the network and broadcast address?

( Reverse engineering the IP )

I am taking the LPI 101 exam at 2pm today. Please, please, wish me luck. I am so nervous.

I passed 3 of 5 practice tests since last night, the highest being 82.5%, but the other two at 70.1 and 73.5, and a 70 is passing, so it's close. I am hoping my online practice exams are harder than the real thing.

Once I pass this test, I have a second exam to take (the LPI 102), and then I will be LPI Level 1 certified. After that, I need to start working on my MCITP

I have been taking practice tests in preparation for the LPI exam and failed EVERY. SINGLE. ONE.

The score is always the same, too, from 65-67% (70% or greater is passing).

FUCK!

The worst part is, most practice exams don't give you the right answer. So who knows what I think I know but actually don't. I knew I never went to college for a reason, :(

Yes, I am taking practice tests that give you the answer. I fail those, too. Somehow, it likes to target at least 5% of the stuff I don't know and magnifies it to 1/3rd of the test like a fucking magnet.

Man, I am pissed off.

It looks like I will be doing more of the LPI track than the Linux+ track. My boss wants me to focus progress on the MCITP and Network+ side of things by the end of the year, so it was discussed (not decided) to drop the Linux+ until possibly next year since "it's really only a basic Linux cert anyway in comparison to the LPI track."

I am really nervous about the exam. I am nervous because in the practice tests, I get wrong answers because I misread the question. This sucks donkey waffles. It's like I know the material, I just test poorly. That CCNA whipped my ass 8 years ago. I remember reading the questions, and they didn't make any sense compared to what I just studied. It was like a nightmare. The fact I got 60-65% was not "better than nothing" because I didn't get the cert.

The RHCE wasn't so bad because at least you can figure out what you did wrong as you are setting stuff up. Not so much with multiple choice/fill in the blanks.

This was the total opposite of what I experience back in school: I never did the homework, but I aced tests. Arg... :(

This is gonna be one big year for my edjumacation. Here's what's on my docket to learn and pass by May of next year:

LPI 101: Exam Aug 29th
LPI 102: Hopefully an exam by mid-Sept (if I pass both, I am LPI Level 1 certified)
Network+: Exam around mid-Oct
Linux+: Exam around mid-Nov
MCITP: Server Administrator by Christmas (3 exams)
LPI 201 & 202: by February (to get LPI Level 2 certs)
RHCE: Re-cert for Red Hat (mine will expire) Dine by April
LPI 301: Done by May/June (to get LPI Level 3 certs)

I'll be certified to install Windows or Linux on a dead badger by then.

Can I ask you guys something? What certs do you have, and have they been useful to you? Like RCHE, RHCT, CCNA, CCNP, MCSE, and so on? I am asking for real world recommendations, like, "I got this, it got me a better job," or "Never came in useful, but was really fun," or "I consider this cert many hours of my life I will never get back."

I am thinking of getting some certs in some areas that need a little back filling. For instance, CompTIA has a relatively new "Linux+" exam that I'd like to take, and I'd like to start with the LCPI exams as well. But I'm also kind of curious about the A+ and Network+ exams, since I seem to do fairly well on practice exams, although I am sure I couldn't pass the real ones blindly without some good prep work.

When I have gotten the prep books, I have found I am a little lacking in some areas that are "basic," but I have never actually had to use in any job I have. Like I am a little weak with permissions and quotas in Linux, for instance, because most of my setups have been my own personal box, and those that have shared with other people all pretty much stayed in their home directory. I recall a bad moment in my RHCE exam where I had to set up something that was not listed in my specs, and I was balking in my brain, "NOBODY would use [censored by my NDA with Red Hat] in a real server environment!!! Come on!" I lost valuable time trying to read the man page on it and get it set up. So it's difficult trying to set up, say, an NIS+ server and client when you are studying alone because you need a real-world like situation to really learn it.

I tried to get some people here at work interested in studying, but the reception was lukewarm at best, even when I promised Legos. I tried to start an "RHDA," for "Red Hat Dark Arts," because the 7th Harry Potter book had just come out, but it fizzed after a few sessions.