Webs’ Random Ideas

Below is what I say yesterday from lunch till a couple hours before I leave for the day. Hard to concentrate when looking at that!

While I sit back nervously and wait for the news.

and boy are my legs tired!! No joke. Its about a 2.5-3 mile ride in one direction and takes about 30 minutes. Not to mention I haven’t rode a bike since November. The real problem for me though is all the hills. Some do not seem so bad when you look at them or walk up them, but I swear hills grow a couple feet in height and length when you bike on them.

I’m hoping my body jumps into shape quickly because I want to make this a habit. I’m just going to have to do a better job of scoping out the terrain when I look for a place to live next time I move.

A group at work here just got in a WiFi drill that sends data to a base unit over WiFi. Being an IT guy and having worked in networking I am always very very skeptical of such devices.

The 2.4 range is for the most part open and companies can make devices that broadcast how they want to, following FCC rules. But the FCC is under staffed and manned to adequately enforce everything that happens, so companies end up with devices that blast RF everywhere and take out wireless, in our case, LWAPP.

So we hooked up the base unit, got the wireless drill operating, and pulled out the spectrum analyzer to see what the drill was doing in our WiFi environment. The results? We found nothing. I was shocked and thought for a second the equipment might be malfunctioning or our spectrum software or device was somehow not working correctly.

Everything was operating as it should. So why didn’t we see it? This drill uses the a newer wifi protocol, zigbee: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZigBee. Its a wireless mesh protocol that operates at 900 mhz in the US. All WiFi today in the US is either 2.4 or 5 ghz. So anything wireless at 900 mhz is a network admin’s wet dream.

The Zigbee protocol is interesting, but I will leave it to another post. We approved the device and I was pleasantly surprised.

The server guy is checking out projector screen motors today.

This is what I found when racking new servers.

This rogue will be the death of me. I have been searching for it since 7 this morning. The entire factory power is shut off and we can still see it. So its either battery powered or UPS. Which should make it easy right?

Ha!

learned the hard way.

Never touch *.nix permissions from Windows. I ended up having to delete my folder and then recreate it in unix to fix the permission issue. Luckily I had nothing of high importance in the folder.

… File permission issues with a file copied from Windows but edited through *.nix. I copied a file with root permissions to a folder only my user account can access. For some reason local root cannot access that folder, I think because it is an NFS share. Normally not a big deal, just play around with placement of file. But the file is 3.4gigs. Ugh!

The short way of stating this is file permission hell…

Well I just did my mandatory ethics training which consists of 3 separate classes and a quiz at the end of each one. I missed one question on one of the quizzes but pulled through…

I’m officially ethical. Oh, and don’t forget about my certificate that proves it.