04.27.07

I need an electrical saving grace

Posted in Technology, Funny Stuff, Life at 6:27 pm by Stoner

It’s become apparent to me that I have to buy a UPS. When we lived in Dale City, the co-op power company buried the power lines. This had several wonderful benefits:

  1. no unsightly overhead power lines
  2. no place for birds to perch and crap on vehicles (although they are good dive bombers, I’ve found)
  3. high winds, heavy ice and falling branches didn’t disrupt power (with one notable exception)

Now that we live out in the stix, our power is more…varied. Lights flicker a lot. We’ve had 2 outages that lasted 4 or more hours. We’ve have power “blips” (complete power loss of a few seconds.) It’s this last aspect of Allegheney Power that has me peeved. Just today, I was on a conference call and my power went out. No power = no cable modem. No cable modem = no Vonage. No Vonage = no conference call. Yesterday, we had a blip between 7:30 am and 8:00 am. When I got up, the clocks were blinking “12:00″.

Every time these blips come down the line, my computers shut off. Computers don’t like having the rug pulled out from under them. So, to remedy, I’m going to have to purchase a UPS. I have a 21″ monitor, two desktops computers, a cable modem and router that all need plugged in to it. That’s a lot of juice so I need to shop for a UPS that can handle it.

APC is “the” name in UPSs. I’ve had varied experiences with APC. I’ve had more than a couple completely fry themselves when the power was lost. Any they really don’t like surges. At all. One fine day, back when I worked at the University of Pittsburgh, a co-worker, Tom, had a slight “accident.” He had a UPS on a table and had just removed its metal cover.  He turned to put down the screws and screwdriver he had in hand and set the metal cover on top of the UPS. Well, the battery terminals were exposed metal plugs and when the metal cover touched the plugs, he created a short. Oh, and the UPS was plugged in at the time. There followed a loud POP, followed by some sparks. The resulting surge went around and blew 5 other UPSs. Not tripped so that the equipment was running on battery but completely fried them. A minute or so later, a nice cloud of ozone formed that filled 3 offices. It was quite the event and Tom was the talk of the town for the next 2 weeks.

A sandwich for your network

Posted in Technology, Hobbies at 3:38 pm by Stoner

I read a brief article in SysAdmin Magazine about a network monitor called PBNJ. No, it doesn’t stand for Peanut Butter -N- Jelly…but rather Ports, Banners -N- Junk. It uses nmap to scan systems to see what ports are open, records that in a database, then allows you to run subsequent scans to see what changed.

This really isn’t anything new and lots of projects do this already. I used an nmap extension to Big Brother back when I worked at Blackboard. I had to abandon it due to performance reasons but I’m very familiar with the practice and implementation. I thought I’d contribute some of what I know to the fledgling project.

I already contacted the maintainer, Josh Abraham. I gave him some advice on the docs detailing the database integration. I’m going to check out the code from the subversion repository and give a good going-over. I know I can contribute more than a few comments, given all the stuff I’ve done with Big Brother, working in the ASP/hosting space and being a sys admin for 9 years.

This’ll be fun. Since the project is fairly new, there’s room for more folks to help.