I started my new job last week, doing systems and network administration at Headweb, the best movie site known to man. ;)

And of course, a shot from a regular day at the office.

It’s this time of year, when you get Christmas gifts for being a good customer. We got one from our ISP/Colocation provider IP-Only. These are small chips of hard bread sent via snail mail…

All I can say is Thank you, IP-Only!

I have a severe problem, I get distracted too easy. A great example is this very morning, I woke up early, I was all by my self. I was supposed to work on a customer’s project, but did I? No, I didn’t… I ended up cleaning the whole kitchen and then went to the store effectively killing all my work-time this morning. I’ll do almost anything to come up with an excuse for not working.. No matter how boring or downright stupid the excuse might be. I mean, cleaning should be less fun than writing code..

I can not force my self to work at home, it is simply impossible. Do you people working at home have any helpful ideas? I don’t have a spare room, so I can’t build an office at home. Do I really have to go to the office to get something done at all? Please, help me!

Routing, and especially BGP routing has historically been something looked after by the big dragons of the networking world like Cisco Systems and Juniper. There have indeed been alternatives in the open source world. One example is Zebra, which later turned into Quagga.

Quagga is a set of daemons that run on a UNIX platform which tried to emulate the Cisco IOS command line interface but never really cut the mustard… It was slow, unstable and most of all, a horror to configure due to it being almost like IOS but not quite the same. As usual, when things are not entirely up to scratch in the open source world, the OpenBSD team stepped forward and made a free, stable and consistent alternative, much like they did with VRRP (CARP) and SSH (OpenSSH).

OpenBGPD is everything that Quagga isn’t, fast, reliable and integrates nicely with the UNIX environment.. Quagga has telnet interfaces to configure the daemons, OpenBGPD has a config file
which anyone familiar with other OpenBSD projects like PF will be instantaneously familiar with.

I don’t see OpenBGPD taking Cisco/Juniper gear’s place in the service provider core network but it is indeed a real alternative for the smallish network wanting to take the step to a redundant internet connection. From an administrators point of view, there are some shortcomings; for instance you can not show what you announce to a neighbor (show neighbors a.b.c.d advertised-routes in IOS) which is a tad annoying when you need to figure out what you are announcing… The function is great, but the administration interface needs a bit polishing. How ever, the project isn’t really that old, and the product that they have created in this time span is simply amazing. I’ve seen what OpenBGPD coupled with CARP and PF can do in a production environment. A fully redundant, fully meshed firewall/router setup for below 60 000 SEK which actually works is an awesome achievement. Thanks a lot OpenBSD!

I did my last day at optinet last friday, and today was the first day in school, Rune was brilliant as allways. ;) (I once again absolutely neeed to plug my fan site). At least I’m free from those windows systems once again. :) This summer has made me appriciate Unix so much more than before… Now I indeed know how bad the “other side” is.

Found this at work today. It’s labeled “Red boxes from hell” and it’s full of Watchguard firewalls.

Every company these days has an intranet site. The company that I work for has several, which contains most of our documentation. I’ve seen good intranets and I’ve indeed seen bad ones. The worst of them all must be Microsoft Sharepoint.

Microsoft has given the world a few brilliant things, like Active Directory — LDAP that makes sense although Sharepoint is not that brilliant. A system that’s designed to do everything for everyone without debugging capabilities isn’t really that good at all. I really really think that you should design and construct your systems around your needs and thoughts, and not just get the latest bright n’ shiny Microsoft product, PLEASE!

If you got any tips for debugging Sharepoint, please let me know.

I’ve recently got a new job, as a windows/networking consultant, which isn’t my cup of tea at all. But a job is a job… I’m mostly working with the things I usually do; networking, DNS and Mail, some new stuff as well like storage and backups.

Backups are my new favorite hate object, I have nightmares about tape drives at night. Soon we’ll put our tape robot into production, and then the tape hell will be over happy happy me! I’ll keep you posted on my thoughts and thingies.