The Boston Diaries

The ongoing saga of a programmer who doesn't live in Boston, nor does he even like Boston, but yet named his weblog/journal “The Boston Diaries.”

Go figure.

Thursday, Debtember 04, 2003

Digital Camera Focus Technician

From: XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
To: sean@conman.org
Subject: Technician Digital Cemeras
Date: Thu, 4 Dec 2003 11:23:45 EST

Dear Sean:

Hi I am an executive recruiter who needs to find qualified Digital Camera Repair Technicians for a leading firm in NY. They would relocate the appropriate candidate if need be. Please contact me if you or anyone you know have any interest. THERE IS NO COST TO YOU FOR MY SERVICE.

All replies will be held in strict confidence. I will speak with you soon.

Best wishes,

Jim Chrystal, James Chrystal Enterprises

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
(631) XXX-XXXX

Heh. I'm guessing Jim Chrystal did a search for digital camera technician and got my bit about refocusing a digital camera (as of the day this was posted, the number one result is Jim Chrystal's ad for a digital camera technician, and the number two result is my page). I hate to disapoint Jim there, but I'm not exactly a digital camera technician—heck, I'm even surprised they can be repaired, unless the job in question is “Yup, it's broke,” then tossing it away.

But if any digital camera technitians happen to read this, Jim would love to talk to you.

troubling server crashes

One of the servers I'm monitoring (and it happens to be the most critical of servers, go figure) has crashed every day for the past week on a 24.5 hour schedule. This is not good, especially since the machine in question is not a Windows system, but a Linux system. The other admin and I (we're in a transition period as I take over) can't figure out what is causing the problem. The only major change this past week has been the installation of MySQL.

We're not sure what to make of the problem.

To that end, I installed Nagios, a framework of monitoring programs on another server to monitor the troublesome machine. It took a while to configure Nagios as the configuration file is complex, due to the separate definitions for hosts, services, contacts and groupings of hosts, services and contacts, but this complexity means you can fine tune the monitoring (and it's easy to add new hosts, services or contacts once the initial configuration is complete).

I will also be rebooting the server in a few hours in an attempt to see if it always crashes around 8:00 in the morning, or just after 24.5 hours since the last reboot; I doubt the crashes are due to the janitorial staff unplugging the computer to plug their vaccuum cleaner.

At least, I hope that's not the case.

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