My thoughts on life, the universe and beer

BAH!

Woke up and felt a bit sick……Went on a short trip last night to Hvalfjörður, a fjord here on the southern part of Iceland. However it was pretty darn cold last night…must buy some warm clothes to wear on cold nights when cruising on a cold autumn night

Haven’t been blogging a lot….those last few months have been something else. Went on a 5 week summer vacation, managed to do pretty much nothing except for riding my bike, going to a small festival at Borgarfjörður etc etc, but I’ve never felt so rested after a vacation before! Live is getting back to normal after the summer however, my son is starting school once again and work seems to be getting back to normal after vacation. So I guess, life is good !

Been reading up on Oracle Dataguard for a project at work, seems like they actually did something right. I’ll put up some notes on that when I’ve configured it in a lab.

Well….Back to being sick….

Bgrds,
Finnzi

Howdy all,

Bought my first bike last Thursday. It’s a Yamaha Fazer FZ6N 2006. Wee!

Only been riding it since Thursday but so far it has been great. I first wanted to buy a type R bike but a good friend of mine (which has been on a bike for a long long time) got me to first consider getting a good street bike and ride that for a year or two before considering anything else. After riding for a few days on this bike I’m pretty sure that was the right thing to do since this bike has plenty of power (600cc, 98 HP) and surely it’s safer to learn to handle something that’s less powerful then ~127-130 HP at first

Summer vacation starts on the 12th of July. Not sure how I will spend it but I’m pretty sure I’ll be on the road a lot….Biking is awesome !

Well…Off to ride for few hours.

Bgrds,
Finnzi

Howdy,

I just looked at my calendar earlier today and remembered…..9 years ago i started working for Skyggnir

It’s been a ride, 2 mergers, 5+ bosses (not talking about CEO’s and such).

Has it been fun? Hell yeah…No one would have stayed in this deep for so long if it wouldn’t have been fun. Over the last 9 years I am pretty darn sure I have gained more experience with all kinds of hardware/software combination’s then most of you would like. But then again I have probably spent more time at work then one would have liked

However, life is pretty good right now. The summer is finally here, and I have signed up for the motorcycle driving license. Hopefully I’ll find a good bike shortly If you have a KTM/Husaberg/Husqvarna ~2006-2007 250-450cc and want to sell it, drop me a note!

Maaaan, Let’s make this summer awesome!

Bgrds,
Finnzi

Howdy all,

This week has been pretty darn bad….It started with my son being sick so i had to work mostly from home, and then i got sick on Wednesday and am still sitting in my living room….Hopefully i will feel good enough to go to work tomorrow

Bleh, just felt like whining here on the internet where nobody cares!

Bgrds,
Finnzi

Howdy,

Woke up early today. Got my coffee mug filled up, decided to relax in my fancy sofa, got my macbook and went on to read up on some mailing lists (Yeah….i like to read up on mailing lists…now beat it!). Now the first post i read was from a person trying to add a specific functionality to a certain software product. The mail was something like this:

“Please teach me howto to X”
Bgrds,
Unamed Person

Now, the software product in question here is a widely used piece of high availability clustering software. The manufacturer has some good manuals on how to do X and a quick google will give you a awful lot of information on how to do this.

What i am trying to say here: RTFM or at least TRY to Google your issue before posting onto a list. I’m betting around 70% of the users on the mailing lists are system administrators that are already working in a 150% job and would really like to help, but they won’t help if you don’t even try to read the bloody manual!

Bleh….maybe i have not had enough coffee in the morning….but people…TRY!

I’m off to read up on more mailing lists….wish me luck!

Bgrds,
Finnzi

Howdy all,

Just wanted to show some color….i am still alive!

The last month has been quite the ride. The Icelandic economy has been trying to stabilize, the beer prize is going up and our politicians have been fighting for control. Yes….We’re in a bloody recession.

Although everyone seems to be worried and distracted i have been busy learning some new stuff. I’m in the middle of migrating some Lotus Domino instances from a AS/400 machine to Linux on x86_64, migrating off Oracle RAC to a RHCS setup and planning a upgrade of a IBM SAN environment that haven’t seen software upgrades for too long .

Sadly a friend decided to quit his job at Skyggnir after working there for ~8 years. That’s pretty long in the IT business here in Iceland i would say. He got a job at a financial company in the USA which is opening a office here in Iceland shortly. He is now waiting for a private plane to arrive here in Iceland which is going to transport him to Los Angeles….biatch!

I wish him the best, and i sure hope i get to work with him again sometime in the future.

Hopefully i will be busy for the next few months, there are a lot of internal projects going on, as well as quite few large projects for our customers.

Well, just wanted to let the few that care know that i am still alive .

Bgrds,
Finnzi

Eyyy…

Just watched the newest episodes of The Big Bang Theory & Family Guy. Hot damn!….

The newest Big Bang Theory episode is the funniest ever!….i just laughted my ass off…..god …how can some TV show that’s non-animated be so fucking funny!

Lately i have been reading up on some mailing lists, and i saw that some work is being done on online-resizing of block devices with device-mapper-multipath in the RHEL 5.3 beta. This is exactly the feature i have been waiting for……my fellow Windows admins have been making fun of me for adding a new lun every time i need to resize a disk on my Linux boxes….it sucks! …..

I often wonder if people actually acknowledge the amount of work Red Hat has put in development of Linux….i hate to see all those damn Ubuntu followers badmouth Red Hat for being “Microsoft” of the linux world…..

I often highly doubt that i would be working with linux based systems at all if i would not have bought those Red Hat 4.2 cd’s i did back in 1997 i think it was……Man, does this bring back memories or what.

Today, i work with pretty much anything with a CLI….After i got accepted into our NOC (Network Operations Center) in 2003/2004 i’ve been the goto guy for anything with a CLI interface. My experience is just ridiculous….Networks, SAN’s, UNIX/Linux/Every fricking OS with a CLI interface, VXWorks, whatevah!….bring it on …

After 2 weeks of searching i just found my keyring…..It got lost after the last drunken adventure with my homes @ Skyggnir ….Siggi, Steini, Ommi, Orvar, Halldor, Oli, Baddi, Andri, Saevar….you guys know who you are!

Well …off to watching some TV …laters homes!

Bgrds,
Finnzi

Howdy,

Just finished a small upgrade from VMWare Server 2.0 RC2 to the final build on a small setup i did earlier this summer. As always the upgrade went without any pain and it goes on to show that VMWare has yet again proven it self as the virtualization solution of choice for me (hey, Xen/KVM guys, sorry, but your windows virtualization simply sucks!). This setup runs 3 servers, 2 Windows machines and 1 Linux. Everything went without a hitch but what i feel is the only thing missing for VMWare solutions is a client for MacOSX to be able to use the virtual machine console.

I am sick, started on friday evening, but on saturday night there was a party at work so i had to go and have some fun. Left the party at 00:00 after feeling not so good and have been tied to my sofa since then…feeling awful.

Hopefully i get back to work tomorrow!

Well …off to watch some more Familiy Guy!

Bgrds,
Finnzi

Eyyy,

I was looking around my table today when i realized that i run 3 different platforms on my computers.

My workstation at home runs Fedora.

My private laptop runs Mac OS X.

My work laptop runs Windows Vista.

I like to use multiple platforms. I think i am more open-minded towards computing platforms when i choose a OS for project X or Y.

Just felt like telling the world how leet i am!

Bgrds,
Finnzi

Howdy,

My summer vacation started last monday and i went to Neskaupstadur (My birthplace) with my son on tuesday. So far it has been pretty good, i am redesigning the server environment for my fathers company, moving it to a fully virtualized environment and hoping to get recovery time in a total server failure down to 15-30 minutes….pretty good for a 25 man shop ….virtual machines rule!

On tuesday i bought a iPod nano and did some video converting of some very legal TV shows i legally downloaded from the “internets” so i could watch them on the extremly small screen of the iPod…it is good enought for the 55 minute flight from Reykjavik to Egilsstadir.

Tomorrow the IBM x3500 server arrives and i can start the installation & configuration of the new server. Hopefully no issues arrise. In the whole redesign i am planning on to replace the current commercial backup software with Bacula, a open-source project that seems to do everything i would need to do for a sweet backup…it even seems to be able to do tiered storage! ….this software rocks!

The mail server is currently running debian testing (yeah yeah, i know….i should not be running debian, or even debian testing for that matter in a production enviroment, i am a hardcore Red Hat person!) and will be replaced with a nice CentOS 5 virtual machine…

Then there are two Windows 2003 servers, one domain controller which acts as a print & file server also, and another server that runs some misc software.

Well….i am getting pretty damn tired here …Laters!
Finnzi