Monthly Archives: August 2004

Battleground state?

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This guy must be nuts:

The Keyes candidacy also poses a dilemma for Democratic presidential contender John Kerry, and potentially a dividend for Bush. Illinois is no lock for the Democrats. It’s a highly contested key battleground state.

I mean, come on, even The Daily Show has written Illinois off as a “blue state”. The rest of the column makes some sense, but I think the “carpetbagger” moniker and Keyes own taped quotes about Hillary are going to do more damage than he thinks. As long as Barack doesn’t have any skeletons in his closet, he’s going to skate through this one.

Lab installs

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I’ve been busy rebuilding lab machines, hammering the network, as this graph shows:spikes
That’s the gig interface on a Dell 2650 server, working hard. And those spikes correspond to about 120 workstation installs across 5 sites. Graduate sites, that have to be scheduled, start tommorrow morning.
And we get to find out how people are going to react to losing the (free) dot printers. With cheaper laser printing, more lasers and color lasers available in 3 sites, hopefully it will go well.

FreeS/WAN, x509 patches and the Unix epoch

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Just so this gets into google: If you are creating a Windows Certificate Server CA to use with FreeSWAN/OpenSWAN/etc, don’t set it to be valid past the end of the unix epoch (ie 2038). FreeSWAN barfs on the RootCA cert, with nothing resembling a useful error (mentioned here). Now, back to running around like a chicken with it’s head cut off getting the labs ready to open.

Stinky

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Stinky thumbnail
Hi, my name is Stinky. I’m sleeping, because it’s sunny in here. Maybe later I’ll pose for some better pictures.
Update: I woke up a bit more and posed some.
Stinky thumbnailStinky thumbnail

Been kind of quiet around here

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Working my tail off, getting ready for opening, as usual. Lab rebuilds are progressing nicely, close to go time, but I should probably roll in the latest (out of cycle) security bulletin from Microsoft first. Hopefully it doesn’t require any strange things to install properly. Now I just need to hope for no critical patches on patch Tuesday.

In what will probably be the last chance until September, I took Friday off, and spent most of the day working at Hoopeston, getting my linux desktop closer to moving over to new hardware and other misc tasks. And we had one of those 10 minute tasks turn into an all afternoon clusterf$%k. But, in the long run, it was really just moving up the schedule for a reinstall, not creating work. Yeah, that’s the ticket.

Saturday I took advantage of the wonderful concrete floor and air tools to rotate the tires on the Dakota and spent some time working in Hoopeston again. I picked up Alisha’s new hamster, Stinky, from my in-laws and brought it home. He seems to be happier in his plastic habitat than in the cardboard box. Maybe I’ll get some pictures this week.

A funny random link to a former co-worker’s blog.