So this just happened… Police can collect DNA from arrestees.
I have to be honest and say this scares the crap out of me. No DNA should be taken from any individual without a court order, i.e. a judge must be presented evidence that makes him believe that the DNA evidence will effect the case. And if the person is found innocent, the DNA should be destroyed.
As I eluded to in earlier posts, $work (a large university) held our annual disaster recovery test last week. This involved recovering the following items at our “cold” site in Atlanta, GA: network, backup server, and various systems supporting payroll, registrar, alumni, and grant proposals. We are supposed to try to get everything up and running in 72 hours, and we normally come very close, on average between 72 and 80 hours.
Before I go any further, I should explain what a “cold” site is. There are three types of sites normally used for disaster recovery. A “cold” site, meaning nothing is on-site until we declare a disaster, except for the physical datacenter. A “warm” site, which has some hardware that is not in production use, but is running and remotely accessible. And a “hot” site, which contains production systems. Every company should be striving to have a hot site, more commonly known as Business Continuity in ITIL speak. In a hot site, if a production system fails, users have no idea the system that were using is gone an continue working like nothing happened. Continue reading
Returned from our yearly disaster recovery test late Friday night, and had some good friends invite me over to relax by the fire. A great end to a stressful week.
I have been pretty busy this week reviewing documentation and creating media for our disaster recovery test coming up next week.
Happy Mothers Day to my wife and all the other mothers out there. I hope you all had a relaxing day and were able to recharge.
For dinner this evening we grilled pork chops with a side of spinach and mushrooms as well as a side salad. The meal was delicious and as we were discussing events of the day and upcoming week I realized something.
All the food we ate was locally grown! With a co-worker, we purchased half a pig from the local university, We ended up with 45 pounds of meat for roughly $3 a pound.
We also signed up for a Community Shares Farm (CSA) this season. Is is called Care of The Earth Community Farm. We get about half a bushel of vegetables every other week. We spent an hour or so yesterday making salad dressing. I made some Italian and my wife made two kinds, a poppyseed dressing and a Blackberry vinaigrette; The blackberries came from a patch in our yard).
So for those keeping track the store bough items in our meal this evening were: mushrooms, olives, and croutons. We did use some raspberry chipotle marinade on the pork chops.
Filed under food
At $WORK I have been tasked with building a centralized logging infrastructure. After researching the available options I came across the following blog: edgeofsanity.net. The author is implementing centralized logging with Kibana and Logstash.
So I am following along, but since we only have 200 servers I am only building 2 servers, one to host Kibana and one running elasticsearch.
Filed under elasticsearch, linux, logstash, puppet, server
I just returned form our spring dive trip to Vortex Spring located in the panhandle of Florida.
We left at 7a last Thursday and total drive time was approximately 9 hours. We arrived at 4:30p, approximately 30 minutes before a major storm passed through. Most of us were able to get our tents setup before the rain started.
I attended the dive trip to get my Nitrox Certification (EANx). I performed five total training dives across a 48 hour period, including 1 night dive, all with 31.7% mix. I reached a depth of sixty feet, which was at the entrance to the cave and as far as I am certified to go since I do not have a cave certification. In case you are wondering, yes I passed.
It was a great weekend with some friend and we had a blast.
Filed under scuba
Springtime is upon us. I just finished planting a some fruit trees so we can have some jam and jelly in a few years.
Onto the next project: I want to clean up the area under our deck. Since the deck is at least 10 feet off the ground and difficult to mow with the riding mower, I plan to kill the grass and put down some ground cloth. I have not decided what I want to put down on the ground cloth, but I have it narrowed down to rubber mulch (made from recycled tires) or some type of rock/pebbles.
Mostly because I do not like using the trimmer under there and the dogs need a place to lay when they are outside.
Filed under projects
So I finally found enough time at $work to set up my triple monitor desktop. I received an new desktop and monitor a few months ago; I was already running dual monitors and the new system came with a monitor.
I am running Fedora16 on my desktop with Xfce desktop environment. The new system is a Dell Optiplex 980 with an ATI Radeon 3450HD. I added the ATI Radeon X600 (PCIE) card out of the old system, a Dell Optiplex GX620. Both cards have the capability to run dual monitors so I currently have the capability to run four screens. Configuration is posted below the fold.
Big things are happening at $work; Most of my time has been tied up architecting and helping design the flexpods we recently purchased from NetApp. More info on that can be found here.
The other item I have been busy with is our data center shutdown. We are getting a new UPS and we have to power down the primary server room for 48 hours during the installation.
