• RJ45/Rj11 Crimper
• Impact Punchdown tool
• 110 & 66 punchdown bits
• sharp dykes (diagonal cutters)
• tweezers
• needle nose pliers
• small adjustable wrench
• small vice grips
• Variable bit screw driver
• English and Metric Allen wrenches
• Utility knife with extra blades
• Magnetic pickup tool
• sharpie markers
• flashlight
• tape measure
• Multimeter w/ continuity test
• soldering iron
• Coax Crimper
• Electrical tape
• Zip ties

• IDE -> USB adapter
• SATA -> USB adapter
• Serial Cable
• Null Modem Adapter
• Serial gender changer
• USB -> Serial adapter
• 10′ CAT5 Patch cable
• ATX Power supply tester
• Array of USB cables
• Cordless Drill
• Drill bits
• Fox/Hound kit
• Alligator clip wires
• Tweaker set
• Torx Bit set
• USB Flash Drive
• Mult-Memory Card reader
• Lock pick set
• Label maker
• Drywall Saw
• Cisco console cable

Another day and another time to play “Stump the Salesperson”.

I was asked by our FD (Finance Director) to come and discuss new financial software since the software we own that was supposed to be supported indefinately is no longer supported after April of next year.

So he gets a quote about updating the software to the newest version which I go over and immediately pull out certain line items that I know we don’t need after which we decide to call the sales person and ask a few questions.

My first question was can I have their application on one server and the database on another server. He sounds confused by this, but says yes we can but it’ll be an additional cost. To which I ask why is it additional? He says because we’d need two servers, well duh! I know that, I already have a server dedicated as a Database server, and I have a server dedicated as an application server. Thus the two servers. He then tells me that they ‘like to have their application all by itself on a server, that why when there is a problem they know it’s not interference from another program’. Which then I say “if I listened to every time a salesman told me something like that I’d have 30 servers laying around.” and I’m thinking to myself that they must not do any quality control on their product.

So he starts spouting off about their ability to run their product fully offsite via a VPN connection, so we don’t need a server onsite at all. I ask him what type of encryption their VPN uses, he doesn’t know, but starts spouting about all their different clients that are using their product and if it’s good enough for them, it must be good enough for us. Umm, Yeah sure.

He likes to side step questions by talking about all the wonderful services they offer, so he starts to talk about their Disaster recovery plan, for only $5k/year, that guarantees that we’d be back up and running within 12 hours, but according to him, most of the time it’s within 2 hours of us calling. Oh yeah, I believe that one. So I quickly skim through their literature on their disaster recovery plan and see that you can only call and report a disaster between 8am and 6pm M-F EST. So I guess we’d have to plan our disasters accordingly. When I asked him about what happens when the system goes down at 6:01PM on Friday night, he didn’t really have an answer. He mumbled something about Financial things could wait until monday morning and the call could be placed then.

Of course, that’s something every Admin loves to do, wait until first thing monday morning when people are bitchy about coming into work to tell them there’s been a failure and they can’t get the things done they need to do. I’d rather work over the weekend and get it done instead of having several people standing over my shoulder asking me when it’s going to get fixed.

We signed off on the call with him with the understanding that he was going to get the answers that hey didn’t know about, and that ends the daily game of stump the salesperson.

I guess the reason why I’ve posted the two stories about sales people is to point out that all sales people will try to sell you a bag of magic beans. They’re used to talking to suits that are impressed by technical jargon, even though the salesperson themselves doesn’t understand the jargon. It’s your job as Admin/Bullshit filter to press the salesperson to get the truth out of them. You need to read the fine print on that bag of magic beans and find out that they don’t grow unless they’re exposed to high doses of gamma radiation. You’ll also need to press the salesperson to find out where their company will be when the fire-breathing-poison monkies come flying in and destroy all that you’ve built. Will they be standing there toe to toe with you against the monkies with a BFG or will they be cowering behind their desk?

1. Semi-Auto pistols on TV shows that go “click click click” on an empty magazine when the actor pulls the trigger multiple times.
2. People who feel the need to stop right inside or outside the door of grocery stores to adjust jackets, look at receipts, count change, pick their ass, whatever.  Get the fsck out of the door, other people do exist in the world.
3. Toyota Prius’.
4. People from New Jersey that feel the need to video tape cows chewing their cud.  They’re cows, that’s what they fscking do.  You don’t need to hold up traffic so you can video tape them.
5. The added default sound of a hammer being cocked on TV shows when the person is holding a Glock, and the additional sound that’s always added when someone draws a pistol from a holster.
6. People that can’t seem to figure out the difference in chose, choose, lose, loose and many of the other most basic spelling errors that they should have learned in the second grade.
7. Twitter.
8. Users that feel the need to come to me with problems the very instant I sit down to each lunch, I guess I don’t get a break, I was only sitting at my desk all friggen morning.
9. Sales strumpets.
10. People that block the entire aisle in a store with their shopping cart and are completely oblivious that there are other people attempting to shop.
11. Walmart Greeters.
12. Tourists that stray off the main roads on to the back roads, keep off of them, that’s how us locals avoid you guys.
13. Stores that feel that since they installed self service checkout that they don’t need to have live checkout people working.
14. Bikers who think that the Tour De France is on local roads and that they don’t have to follow the rules of the road.  Yo, dumbass, the spandex biking suit looks like shit and move the fsck over, you don’t belong in the middle of the road.
15. Users that ask “Is Internet Explorer down” if our internet connection goes down for whatever reason.  These are the same people that only recently canceled their AOL accounts.

I’ve been using Snort on and off for the past several years but I haven’t been using it recently due to changes in the network topology here at work, I just didn’t have a good spot to install it where it would actually do much good.  I then started a project early in 2009 where I was going to be connecting multiple sites with a dedicated VPN connection back to our main office.  The plan was to use existing broadband service providers at these unmanned sites and route all traffic through the main network and down to our plant, as we have a dedicated T1 between our main office and the plant.  Below is how these will integrate into my existing connections:

The VPN connections were installed without much of a hitch, but after a while I decided I needed to add in remote Snort sensors at all these locations.  After some planning and research, I settled on the Alix2d3 board, as it had 3 LAN ports with enough horse power to run Snort and it was reasonably priced.  I initially purchased one unit to use as a prototype from Mini-Box.com for about $180 with enclosure, power supply and 4GB compact flash.  I have since purchased three more and  I’ll be purchasing 5 more later this year.  I spent quite sometime trying to get the iMedia linux to work with my plans and didn’t have much luck and decided to move onto FreeBSD.  I found a site that had excellent instructions on setting up FreeBSD to PXEBoot.  After a couple hours of configuration I was able to get FreeBSD installed.  I did a minimal install to begin with and then ran portsnap to download all the ports, which still left me with about 1.9GB available on the 4GB compact flash I’m using.

One thing I dont’ really like about all boards like this is that they have no method of turning them off other than pulling the power cord.  I’m not a real big fan of that, there are times you can see sparking across the plug, plus it causes undo wear and tear on the hardware.  I made a quick trip up to Radio Shack and bought part # 274-1563, 275-324 and 270-1801 and assembled a little switch box.  I cut a 2.1mm plug with leads off of an old wallwart for the plug end.  Below is the assembled product.

I also didn’t like that these don’t have an onboard battery, even though there’s a spot for one.  I found this blog post on someone else that had the same problem, but I didn’t really like the idea of using the battery holder and offsetting it because of the capacitor nearby.  I made a quick trip up to my local Batteries Plus and had them spot weld some leads onto a CR2032 battery, cost me less than $16 for four batteries.  I put a bit of electrical tape on the bottom of the battery just in case it touches something on the board and then soldered it carefully into place.  The unit will now keep time during power outages.  I figure the battery will probably last longer than the unit will be in service, and if it doesn’t, it really isn’t a big deal to install a new battery even though it’s soldered.

Installation and Configuration to follow.

Note: There is a print link embedded within this post, please visit this post to print it.

We had a couple companies come in and give us quotes on running the cable and connecting the set and after seeing the quotes we decided to do it in house instead.  I found the RapidRun series of cables from CablesToGo and ordered a 75′ HDMI cable with the appropriate ends.  I also ordered a second video card for one of my SCADA servers and a HDMI amplifier to compensate for the length of the run.  We ran the HDMI, and 2 runs of CATV from the control room table through the floor, across the ceiling of the room below back up through the floor in the corner of the control room, across the ceiling and down through a surface mount conduit to the display.  One of the CATV lines was for the surveillance system, the second in case sometime in the future we’d have Cable TV run into the plant for news and weather.

Installing the second video card into the SCADA server wasn’t difficult since I purchased the same brand and similar model that was already installed, so only one set of drivers needed to be installed.  I found I didn’t really need the HDMI amplifier as the card was strong enough to drive the display.

It took me about 3 days of solid design to make the schematic of the plant and add all the control tags to the Graphics Panel.  All the design for the screen had to be done at the SCADA server running the display as I h ave it running in 1900×1200 and I have no other screen that can run that resolution.  The surveillance cameras are displayed as a PiP in the corner of the graphics panel, and I embedded a black box in the SCADA screen as a place holder for where the surveillance cameras will appear.  This ended up to be very time consuming because the PiP display doesn’t always appear in exactly the same place.

This has been a great help for our operators, as now they can just pop their head in the control room and quickly see what’s happening at any location in the plant.  All indicators are tri-state, so they will show Running, Stopped and Faulted states on each device.  Our surveillance system as presets for each of the PTZ cameras, so I created a popup window on the display to show them where the presets send them to on each camera. ]]> http://members.netjunkies.net/streaker/blog/?feed=rss2&p=334 0 http://members.netjunkies.net/streaker/blog/?p=322 http://members.netjunkies.net/streaker/blog/?p=322#comments Mon, 22 Feb 2010 18:09:14 +0000 admin http://members.netjunkies.net/streaker/blog/?p=322 I’m probably like many other people in my field, every Monday, Wednesday and Friday we stop by xkcd for a weekly dose of reality and humor.  I’ve been reading it for quite sometime and always look forward to what’s new there.

This particular one I found funny and true, as I just had a conversation relating to devotion to job duties just last week.  I don’t know about you, but I’ve been hearing a lot about the “hit by the bus” disaster plan lately, and it’s been getting pretty tiresome.  Apparently, management is concerned because I hold the keys to the kingdom and if I get hit by a bus then they’ll be in trouble not knowing how the network is configured.

It doesn’t seem to matter to them that I’ve spend considerable time documenting everything that I do, I’ve created a document “Open in case of hit by bus” and stored it in a safe place and have assured them that I don’t walk in front of buses.  They didn’t find it humorous when I pointed out that if I get hit by a bus I don’t really care what happens here anyway, as I’ll probably be dead.

Back to the dedication conversation:  I do happen to be very dedicated to ensuring that the network is up and running to optimum performance and I tend to probably be overly dedicated to my job.  I don’t really see anything wrong with that.  I can still spend time with my family and ensure that things are running with remote access to my Network Management station and emails to my Blackberry.  Myself and several other sysadmins that I know spend a great deal of time configuring, planning and implementing new ideas, and we tend to be dedicated as we take a personal stake in the operation.  I believe this is a sign of a good sysadmin.  Someone who views it as more than just a 9-5 job, but more as a dedicated career.

My manager brought up that there is a certain person here that has brought up concerns about how much control I have over the network which lead to the question as to whether I can be trusted with that much power.  I tried to assuage the concerns on that as best as I could, since the fear is that if I were to get angry, I could effectively destroy everything in just a few minutes.  I told him that I’m terribly dedicated, and if I were to do such a thing I know that I would end up in jail, so why I would I want to do that?  If it comes time for me to part ways, I’ll leave gracefully knowing full well that it I’ll have another position somewhere quickly, where I’ll be just as dedicated.

Dealing with this person can be very difficult.  Most of the time they have no patience and will stand over your shoulder while you work, huffing and sighing.  You do not want to feed this person’s feeling of self importance.  If you have more pressing matters, take care of them first.  Even if you don’t have more pressing matters, make them wait for a few minutes.  Never, ever jump right up to fix their problem.  Doing so will only lead to more hassles later.

You are going to have run-ins with the person and chances are you’re going to have to sit down with your manager about them.  Make it very clear to your manager that this person continually feels that they are more important than anything else going on, and that they are wrong.  After all, the person not being able to print coupons to the local pizza place isn’t nearly as important as the mail server being on fire.