Michael Fleming’s Networked Mind

Thought I’d post a quick update seeing that’s it’s been a while.

Firstly, I am again looking for work. I’m not going to go into detail other than to say I’m extremely disappointed and will be very careful who I work for in the future. If anyone in Brisbane (or doesn’t mind a telecommuter) needs a systems architect / administrator who does some infrastructure hacking, let me know; my credentials and experience are in my LinkedIn profile (and I’m happy to send a resume to anyone requesting one :-))

I’m also considering doing some consultancy work relating to subsets of my expertise. Watch this space. Be warned, I’m probably going to be out of the price range of two-bit shops and Mickey Mouse fly-by-nighters, which is fine with me.

I’d like to get paid and work with people that take this stuff seriously; there are just too many cowboys who go into IT businesses with no experience or understanding, with the sole purpose of making big profits while paying staff / contractors peanuts (and / or hire monkeys :-P). I’ve found you get what you pay for in systems operations fields and these characters invariably give their customers sub-par service.

Secondly, updates to Fedora / CentOS are pending while the Fedora Infrastructure team sort things out. There seemed to be some major breakage (hopefully not a breach of some sort) and a lot of restoration work has been happening, but it looks like all will get sorted out. Good work there folks. Once the dust has settled I’ll be pushing out some more timely updates.

Work: Is going well. Security and fixup work at the moment, a nice mailserver build (learning a bit about I/O kernel elevators) and miscellanea.

Life: My love is back from interstate with all of her needed gear. Catching up with old friends from school via Facebook of all places. Another old wound crossed off The List (no, my name is not Earl, but thanks Louise :-))

Hopefully I’ll have paid off the flashy jacket soon, can’t wait to give it some airings out on the town.

Went down the coast with my love and her half-sister - stayed mostly sober and enjoyed it immensely. The sore head I had afterwards wasn’t so much an issue.

Tech: Qbert is in HostingShop/Dedicated Server’s datacentre. MelbIT have released thatfleminggent.com’s DNS to me, which means I’ve taken over control of the zonefile (with zoneedit.com/SAGE-AU as secondaries for this and other domains under my control). I can now add all the funky records that MIT’s notoriously under-trained techs have no idea of, like SPF and SRV records. The latter meaning I can now do XMPP/Jabber properly and I can do VoIP/SIP if I wish (and plan to). I’m fairly happy about that.

Packge-wise, just updates for standard packages (more are going into Fedora proper, but more slowly). I am packaging for CentOS now that outrun is online (see my servers page) and I encourage folks to use it if they like.

Heh, a month between posts? I must be getting slack.

Things have mostly improved. I am again gainfully employed in a systems architecture / infrastructure development type role with Dedicated Servers / Hosting Shop here in Brisbane. It means less systems admin work (and the downsides like insane hours and being tied to a pager / mobile for work purposes) and more interesting development and new-toy type tinkering.

It’s based in the CBD too so it’s a short-ish commute, and their 2 DC’s (a small one in an office block a few streets over - coincidentally where qbert is now stored  - as well as a larger one in the main office building) are easy to get to.

On the Fedora front, the Sulphur repo is chugging along, with the F7 repo now officially being retired. As I’ve got CentOS boxes I’m packaging more for that too (mainly release 5 i386/x86_64). I’ve restored sinistar to my in house network and added - lord knows why, must have been drunk - a Solaris 10 box.

Offline life -wise things have been interesting. I’ve been using Facebook for about 9 months now (my old flatmate Steve got me on to it initially, but only started using serious since I met Meisha) and have re-connected with a group of old school friends and classmates, including a few I’d not expected (one initially found me on Myspace, which I generally don’t use too much - I pointed her at Facebook so she could reach my brother)

I’m spending less time on the ‘net and PCs in general - figured I need a break. Only exceptions to this are for some gaming (Call Of Duty 4, Need For Speed, Grand Turismo 4 on the PS2) and chatting with friends who happen to see me on IM.

I’m changing my look too - I’ve grown a soul patch and am looking to get the highlights back in my hair (had blond-ish highlights after my birthday, but they’ve grown out to an extent and aren’t prevalent after a recent haircut.). I’ve also got a nice jacket on layby which I’ll hopefully pick up soon. Thanks again to Meish for all the style tips

I promise to assail you all with photos once I’ve done all this…

Downside: My 6 year old titanium glasses frame snapped this afternoon (while reading Facebook, hah) and I’m off to get another set of frames tomorrow morning. I could do without the hassle (why do these things happen on a Sunday, and when I can least afford them?) but I like being able to see..

Well - what can I say?

I’ve suddenly have some free time on my hands, however not the way I’d intended (some holidays). My employer decided - very suddenly I might add, over a coffee @4pm last Tuesday afternoon - to make me redundant as of the 13th of May.

I wasn’t given any warning and frankly it’s a right pain in the arse (having just renewed a lease on my apartment for six months and trying to fix up and sell one of my own) but I’ll hopefully survive.As those who have worked with me and know me can attest I’m not omniscient but what I know, I know well. I’ve been assured that performance was never an issue, merely one of cost (alas, some of my colleagues went with me, they finished today..)

Fortunately it seems the jobs market for systems administrators is good, so I don’t think I’ll be unemployed for long. I would really like to look more at systems/infrastructure architecture and perhaps some product engineering (I planned, tested, wrote the backend scripts for, built, installed and configured Webcentral/MelbourneIT’s managed MySQL offerings and I’ll wager I still know more about them than many working there now :-)). If you have an opening you think might interest me (ideally in the South Brisbane/CBD area) email me. You might also be interested to peruse my LinkedIn profile.

Just as I got the bad news some new kit arrived to replace the Sempron64 kit in defender. It’s now an Athlon64 5200+, with a nice new Gigabyte AM2+/780G board, 2G of Corsair RAM and an ASUS NVIDIA 8800GS (yeah, should have gone GT, but given the circumstance the price was right). The onboard NIC has a tendency to clash with other interrupts so I’ve slotted my old GA311 in it’s place. I’m using it now so it works OK (advice: if you flash the BIOS, clear the CMOS afterwards as I’ve had the Award F4 revision lock up a bit before doing so)

The change in mobo necessitated an XP reinstall (right PITA, see my Twitter updates.) but fortunately Fedora was semi-intelligent about it; as a precaution (and because I was planning to anyway) I’m on Fedora 9. More on that in the future. I have noticed that createrepo is busted - I’ve had a couple of emails so I’m aware and have worked around it, which is also why I’ve not done F9 builds yet.

Hopefully things improve as I spend some time with my sweetheart (who has been very supportive) and consider offers/positions with a good, secure employer.

ROLF (n); rolling on the floor laughing, while holding/playing a wobbleboard

(for the non-Aussie / Pom readers, or you youngsters who don’t get the above reference, it refers to this man

See what I mean on YouTube

(not a rickroll, I promise)

Posted to the U-Zendo mailing list:

…even comic characters understand the concept of impermanence

Me:

I’ve been doing some server infrastructure and web R&D lately; I am a fairly recent convert to the benefits of PowerDNS, especially the recursor, which I’ve now installed on qbert in place of BIND (there’s nothing wrong with BIND per se, each to their own. I just happen to like this app).

I’m also VERY impressed by the Zabbix monitoring system - all the cool things about nagios, with much less hassle, niftier and to-the-point notifications (inbuilt Jabber notifications for a start) and much less noise. I’d recommend systems admins have a good look at it if they haven’t already.

I’ve also been looking into WordPress plugins, and have packaged the OpenID plugin as a starter. I may publish more should the desire to do so take hold

I am also in a business frame of mind, which is partly driving the above. If you like the idea of integrated messaging systems using open protocols (ie XMPP) then you may be interested in a project I’m thinking up. Watch this space.

Other Minor Bits:

• Fedora 9 in 2 weeks. I will likely again package stuff for it, but as the distro gets larger there’s less for me to package that isn’t in the main repositories.
• I’ve also removed all pre Fedora 7 repository data, as it’s a) obsolete and thus b) potentially buggy and insecure. If you haven’t upgraded to at least Fedora 8 yet, do so.
• Oh, and by the way, if you like my packages and are feeling philanthropic, you can keep me in coffee and hard disk space by donating via PayPal - see my Packages page.
• I’ve also been tinkering with the blog itself; if you have an OpenID credential you can now login and make comments here using it, no need to explicitly register.
• I’ve given in to the twitterati - if you want to follow me, I’m thatfleminggent. You can probably see my tweets elsewhere on this page courtesy of Twitter Tools.

I’ve not had much inclination to update this (in case you’ve not noticed ;-)) but as I’ve updated the theme and done a bit of web design / hacking around I reckon “what the hell..”

Life (and love): Where do I start? An almost complete turnaround; a bit more style and grace as well as a change of hair colour (light brown highlights ahoy), loss of about 10 kilos in weight and a conversion to vegetarianism (and organic if I can get it). All this is thanks to a most wonderful young lady who, by taking a punt on this olde crone - I turned 35 on St. Patrick’s Day - has changed his life for the better, utterly. She knows who she is and that I love her with all my heart
It’s been a revelation being able to spend quality time with someone so free-spirited, loving and all-around wonderful (as well as traffic-stoppingly gorgeous). The vegetarianism has taken some getting used to (after eating the standard Australian diet for my entire life) but it’s been worth it… except most of my pants are too big now ;-). Getting out and about doing things I’ve not done for years (music festivals for example) or not even considered (vintage clothing shopping) has been a breath of fresh air.

It certainly beats sitting in an office all day and home in front of the teev / PC all night.

Work: Same old there, really. I have been reliably informed that many of my old colleagues from Webcentral (my former employer, now part of the MelbourneIT borg) have moved on, with good reason - there’s better opportunities out there there.

Tech: I’ve inherited a huge and noisy Dell server (installed and christened “combat”) which I’m unsure of future-wise. It’s simply too loud to keep in the house; I’d love to use it as “pong” is getting old and starting to fail.

qbert is in the iSeek datacentre and chugging nicely, acting as a public timeserver too.
I’ve been updating parts of the site too, mostly cosmetic changes.

Fedora 9 is out soon. I’m undecided as to whether I package privately for it; every release sees some of my packages (or others who’ve packaged the same stuff) in the main repository. This combined with changed priorities will mean I’ll decide later.

I have been doing some web design and some code, as I’m working on a site for my girlfriend’s makeup artistry business. It’s very basic thus far - it’s not even public per se - but already I’ve picked up a few tricks to add to my playbook.

If they work and she gets more work out of it, so much the better - two happy people, that’s a good start!

Enough said.