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Archive for the ‘Technology’ Category

11th Annual System Administrator Appreciation Day

30 Jul

Happy System Administrator Day everyone. Today is the 11th Anniversary, and I’ve been a System Administrator for almost 9 years! I’m very proud to be a system administrator, an IT engineer. In my entire system administrator career, I have laid hundreds of kilometers of cables, connected hundreds of broadband access points, connecting millions of users using dial-up connection, DSL cable, satellite, fiber optic cable and broadband wireless connection and provided e-mail services, web services and other services to millions of users.

When the server, router or any other problem occurred at night. I’m the one who get called. I got less sleep since the first day I became a system administrator, that is indeed disrupting my mental stability, worsening my BPD. But, I like it. It’s a big self satisfaction to get on an important role in this age of technology.

So, happy anniversary to all system administrators in the world! You can check this following link for more information on this event! http://www.sysadminday.com

 
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VirtualBox 3.2 Has Been Released

19 May

It still don’t have a feature to run guest OS from BootCamp partition like VMWare Fusion, but what makes it better than VMWare is it support for creating virtual machines running Mac OS X (Apple hardware only). I know it’s a little awkward, why do we want to have Mac OS X virtual machine inside our Mac OS X? But, never mind… I’m sure it can be handy somehow, someday :-)

If you need a free alternative for VMWare or Parallel Desktop, VirtualBox is a great option. You can download it here.

 
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Zimbra Upgrade

03 Dec

I’ve spent two nights upgrading Zimbra 4.5.11 on 32 bit Centos 4 to Zimbra 6.0.3 on 64 bit CentOS 5. The upgrade process didn’t cost too much time, but the backup process was killing me. First rule of system administration “Never do anything to production system without taking a backup first”. I was forced to do it at night because people are using it at working hour. Second rule of system administration “keep the downtime as minimum as possible especially when many people are using the system”.

First night, I upgraded Zimbra from version 4.5.11 to 6.0.3 in place. To do so I can’t upgrade it directly, the upgrade path forced me to upgrade it twice from 4.5.11 to 5.0.20 first, and then from 5.0.20 to 6.0.3 or else the upgrade process will fail and all your data will be fucked up. I didn’t move it to the new server yet because I felt very sleepy already. In the morning, most users wouldn’t notice until they realized, there are many new feature on their webmail, it’s appearance looks different, it looks good!.

Second night, I migrated Zimbra 6.0.3 from 32 bit Centos 4 to another machine, 64 bit CentOS 5. It only needed one upgrade step, but once again, remember the first rule of system administration. At least it was quicker than the first night, nothing wrong happened and Zimbra successfully migrated. I sent notification to all users to accept the new SSL certificate if they are using secure connection. In the morning, once again people wouldn’t notice the different.

Now Zimbra has been upgraded to the newest version and migrated to new machine, everything was done at night, when they were sleeping. The only thing they will notice is, two days in a rows they saw me came to the office after lunch time, and maybe they are thinking that I will be sacked soon.

 
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Huawei E220 driver for 64-Bit Snow Leopard

29 Sep

Since I upgraded my MacBook Pro to Snow Leopard, I was tempted to use the 64-bit mode. But I was having a problem with my Huawei E220 HSDPA modem, it was not detected. Since then, I was regularly search the driver for it to work and finally, here it is. I found it on a forum thread where people were also having the same problem as I do. Thanks to to them, and thanks to Google who helped me to find them :-)

Now, to make it work, you just need to download these 2 files. First, Mobile Partner Software which can be found here and the driver itself which you can download it from here. Install both of them, and tadaa! you’re done, you don’t even have to restart.

 
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Writing my own NMS (Network Monitoring System)

02 Sep

Since almost 5 years ago, I’ve made my own monitoring tools. Yes, I wrote it from scratch using PERL. You may or may not be wondering about “why bother making your own NMS when you could use an open source NMS like Nagios, JFFNMS or OpenNMS?”. Well, one simple answer for that question is “I need a NMS features which they doesn’t provides”.

First, I need  a dependency feature between hosts and services, which should be implemented on availability check and also, to automatically generate my network map for me.  I’ve been using Nagios before I made my own NMS, and I was always annoyed everytime for example, one of my switch is down, it send me a failure reports not only for that switch, but also for all hosts and services which depends on it. Second, I need a custom reporting display AND reporting system. I don’t want to get a same failure report again and again before it get fixed. Just send me once and remind me if the problem has not being fixed every 6 or 12 hours  would be convenient. Third, my networks is not a network which suppose to be online for 24/7. So I want to have a schedule for every hosts and services. NMS should not check hosts or services which are not in their uptime schedule.

The last and most important reason is, I love doing it. It feels like I have a full control over my own system. I could check every aspects on my network and system using my own method and my own style. I could freely customized my own reporting system, I could send the alert notification using any method I want, send an SMS through Kannel, send an e-mail, display Growl or Windows alert, Post it to Twitter, or post it as my Facebook status!. So generally, I can do anything without limitation, or at least the only limit is my own imagination :-)

 
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