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.

Wednesday, August 02, 2000

Restart, Reboot, thankfully, no Reinstall …

There was a big thunderstorm here this morning and I think it affected the network somewhat. I turned on the Windows box (what? You think I leave that thing running all night? With all the garbage Windows spews forth on the network?) and after it finishes booting, it can't see the network.

The hub shows a connection. I remove the termination from the 10Base2 connection and half the network goes down like it should, so the hub is fine. Okay, restart Windows.

I check monnet, and I see some wierd stuff—the Windows box is sending out Ethernet packets with the broadcast address as the source! That's not right.

I shutdown Windows and powercycle the machine.

Now it's okay.

Man, Windows is just sooooooo wierd.

One out of three visitors is a robot

I found out that about 30% of my webserver traffic are robots—programs that crawl the Internet indexing webpages. Why did I calculate that?

A question on the Robots Mailing List (dealing with programs that crawl the Internet and not mechanical devices that walk about going “R2-D2, where are you?”) asking if robots skew banner impressions and click throughs. An interesting question and while 30% might seem a bit high, that's only because my server isn't a heavily trafficked site at all, despite my good placement in the search engines.

Sysadmins. I can't shoot them as I would end up with their job.

I wonder how sysadmins get their jobs. Especially those that have to administrate UNIX and yet don't quite grasp UNIX. Or directories. Or shell scripts.

Then there are those UNIX sysadmins that love complexity. They write inscrutable scripts that work most of the time yet still require a degree of micromanagment usually reserved for taking care of babies. They relish in foot high piles of network cables none of which are labeled.

What prompted this? A particular clueless UNIX sysadmin I have to work with. The sysadmin in question is nice, but is not a UNIX sysadmin and I want to vent a bit.

Sysadmins. Can't shoot them as I would end up with their job.

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