Disqus - Latest Comments for Jerald Sheets

Re: Happy Veteran’s Day

Jerald Sheets — Thu, 11 Nov 2004 15:00:04 -0000

I would agree to a degree. Problem is, most organizations don't have the money for that, and then the management in place encourages marketing folk to just bring in the numbers, and they'll sort out the problems caused later.

Just sign on the line.....sign on the line....

Re: Even Microsoft Uses Firefox

Jerald Sheets — Fri, 03 Dec 2004 21:31:23 -0000

The laptop is the way to go. I've got the 15" Powerbook. Now that I've got all my X11 trappings in and my favorite Linux desktop apps coexisting happily with my shiny new Cocoa/Aqua apps, I couldn't be happier.

I think I may actually start figuring out how to program in this puppy. I want to support the OSX environment in any way I possibly can.

Re: The Sysadmin’s Customer

Jerald Sheets — Wed, 19 Jan 2005 21:31:56 -0000

Re: Inaugural Eve

Jerald Sheets — Wed, 19 Jan 2005 21:33:30 -0000

Maybe you should move.....

A little further south, perhaps?

LOL!

Re: The UNIX Crystal Ball

Jerald Sheets — Wed, 26 Jan 2005 17:33:07 -0000

>Then sysadmins will slowly become stupider about configuration.

It's already begun.

I've been in on interviews where UNIX guys couldn't do the configurations "by-hand" without the aid of an interface.

Re: Anatomy of a Revolution

Jerald Sheets — Mon, 14 Feb 2005 23:06:14 -0000

As a matter of fact, I'm selling my 17" HP notebook to add to the kitty to buy the Powerbook I want. Anyone interested? jsheets at yahoo dot com.

Re: My Resume in Bash

Jerald Sheets — Fri, 25 Feb 2005 03:48:57 -0000

Definitely too much time on your hands.

Where's that program you were working on for me?

LOL!

Re: New Halo 2 Game Variants

Jerald Sheets — Thu, 17 Mar 2005 23:23:59 -0000

The keynote held several clues. Most importantly, a "very soon after" interview revealed:

After Jobs' presentation, Apple Senior Vice President Phil Schiller addressed the issue of running Windows on Macs, saying there are no plans to sell or support Windows on an Intel-based Mac. "That doesn't preclude someone from running it on a Mac. They probably will," he said. "We won't do anything to preclude that."

However, Schiller said the company does not plan to let people run Mac OS X on other computer makers' hardware. "We will not allow running Mac OS X on anything other than an Apple Mac."

As you can see, Apple has no intentions whatsoever of opening the floodgates.

To hold on to the superior stability of the platform, they have to control what hardware is available for, and certified for use with the OS. One of the major problems with Winblows stability is the vast array of devices they have to support.

Make no mistake, you won't be able to buy a $200 Dell, and run OS X on it.

Re: Stunning Lack of Support From My Senator (A “Republican”)

Jerald Sheets — Tue, 22 Mar 2005 03:04:41 -0000

Ummm... Aaron, I don't see your beef.

While we may not agree with what's going on, your buddy there is doing what your quote above says. He's both supporting the constitution and defending it to you. While we may not agree with the subject matter on immigration grounds, remember that this is a country of immigrants. I think the law in and of itself is a decent one, but it is currently being abused. Amendment and due process is the only way to go on this. Start a PAC, find people of like-mindedness, and get busy. If enough of us support the cause, I'll be there one future november pulling the lever "for".

Bashing the guy for doing what he's paid to do (and took an oath to do) isn't going to help your cause *or* alleviate your frustration.

Re: I did it.

Jerald Sheets — Tue, 29 Mar 2005 06:40:34 -0000

Re: 100 Years

Jerald Sheets — Wed, 20 Apr 2005 02:36:56 -0000

It's because you need to get back to playing music like you did a couple of years ago. You may not know the people or the place right now, but it will come.

Bank on it.

Re: Yahoo! Please Call Me!

Jerald Sheets — Thu, 12 May 2005 02:22:48 -0000

Man... you are just shameless...

Re: Downtime

Jerald Sheets — Thu, 12 May 2005 02:31:55 -0000

What's a "bussing" sysadmin?

You clearing tables at the local Deli now?

Re: Update on Office Formats: Microsoft joins the fray

Jerald Sheets — Fri, 03 Jun 2005 16:48:07 -0000

The problem is, though, that Microsoft had the opportunity to use an existing standard, and be a good netizen. Instead, they've tacked a pile of "Microsoft Only" extensions onto XML and made the standard something it wasn't expected to be.

This smacks of the same thing they did to HTML in IE, where something you programmed in their tool would work in no other browser than IE.

I can assure you, when the dust settles, your creations will only be usable in IE, or your creations will be marginal in competing browsers while fully functional in IE.

Re: Mac OS 10.4 Intel Based?

Jerald Sheets — Tue, 07 Jun 2005 02:50:27 -0000

The keynote held several clues. Most importantly, a "very soon after" interview revealed:

After Jobs' presentation, Apple Senior Vice President Phil Schiller addressed the issue of running Windows on Macs, saying there are no plans to sell or support Windows on an Intel-based Mac. "That doesn't preclude someone from running it on a Mac. They probably will," he said. "We won't do anything to preclude that."

However, Schiller said the company does not plan to let people run Mac OS X on other computer makers' hardware. "We will not allow running Mac OS X on anything other than an Apple Mac."

Re: New Theme Unrolled

Jerald Sheets — Thu, 16 Jun 2005 00:07:02 -0000

looks like I'll only be reading via RSS from now on. Dude, the theme really blows.

Re: Rant: Oh the Ignorance

Jerald Sheets — Sun, 24 Jul 2005 21:44:08 -0000

Word, bro. Well put and well observed.

Multiply it by 30 or 40, and you have the beginningsofan idea of what it is like in the South.

Re: Montgomery, Alabama: Day Seven

Jerald Sheets — Sun, 18 Sep 2005 20:12:26 -0000

LoL... I'm still reading. On top of that, you're only a couple hours from my house. I work in Atlanta on the Perimeter at 75. If you come into town, don't hesitate to call me. You have my cell #.

Great to see what you're doing down there.

Re: Montgomery, Alabama: Day Seven

Jerald Sheets — Sun, 18 Sep 2005 20:12:50 -0000

Oh, great to see you're using our imagery too. ;)

Re: Montgomery, Alabama: Day Seven

Jerald Sheets — Sun, 18 Sep 2005 22:25:19 -0000

Yeah, gotta plug the office whenever possible ;)

Re: Stat Soup

Jerald Sheets — Wed, 12 Oct 2005 13:07:31 -0000

Sorry for skewing those OSX Specs for ya LoL

Re: Quitting Smoking

Jerald Sheets — Mon, 17 Oct 2005 12:20:25 -0000

ooOooOOoOOooo...

Time to make comments about the page format again!

(j/k, buddy)

Good luck with the endeavor. It'll benice to have those extra years with the little one.

Re: Quitting Smoking

Jerald Sheets — Mon, 17 Oct 2005 12:31:13 -0000

No, I'm just targeting your house for a ton of snow this year, that's all.

Re: Unix on the Horizon

Jerald Sheets — Tue, 18 Oct 2005 10:47:38 -0000

It doesn't really matter.

You put a good year in with "Solaris Admin" as your duties & title, and you're well on your way.

The trick is to make the commitment to really sell into the UNIX thing. Go download OpenSolaris... Put it on a beater box at the house, and go nuts. It's *very* different from Linux, and will take some getting used to, but if you can tough it through, you can do *EXTREMELY* well for yourself over time.

IN your area is the DC SYstems Administrator's guild (http://www.dc-sage.org). They have two mailing lists: dc-sage and dc-sage-chat. The first is moderated, and the second one is not. (take or leave the second one... It makes for good conversation sometimes). The other is the OldBay SAGE. <a href="http://www.oldbaysage.org.http://www.oldbaysage.org.<br />

Those two groups alone can give you a big enough mindshare of sysadmins to bounce stuff off of as you're entering the field. Introduce yourself, and let people know you're new to the field, and there's a lot of folks VERY willing to help in those two groups.

Also, I recommend to EVERYONE starting out in career Systems Administration (on UNIX, of course) the book "Essential System Administration" 3rd Edition by Aeleen Frisch. It is the "Rosetta Stone" of Systems Admin work across all the popular commercial and non-commercial platforms out there.

Good luck, and if you need anything at all, you always know you can call.

Re: Unix

Jerald Sheets — Wed, 02 Nov 2005 18:08:22 -0000

You have skills?

Re: Fred Reed on the Election

Jerald Sheets — Wed, 09 Nov 2005 10:57:52 -0000

Re: Friday Poll and Another Migration

Jerald Sheets — Sat, 26 Nov 2005 10:15:39 -0000

So THAT's where your updates went off to. I was juust about to visit to see what was up with the lack of updates (I primarily RSS you through my Safari reader). Glad to see the updates back in my toolbar in the mornings.

Re: I need Work

Jerald Sheets — Sun, 04 Dec 2005 07:55:29 -0000

You should sign up for the DC Sage and the Baltimore SAGE groups.

http://www.dc-sage.org
http://www.oldbaysage.org

They are the DC area Systems Administrator's Guild chapters, and each have mailing lists of moderate to low traffic. There is a continual stream of jobs that come through the lists posted by people "with a clue" (tm).

Also, as much as I know you hate it, you might have to work a regular in addition to or (the horro) in place of Northup.

It's a worker's market right now, Aaron. Go get you some.

Re: I need Work

Jerald Sheets — Sun, 04 Dec 2005 14:07:35 -0000

By the way, the info you sent me for my account here doesn't work, and the stuff Wordpress sends me doesn't work either.

Gimme a shout offline, and let's see if we can fix that. I've got a post brewing...

Re: I need Work

Jerald Sheets — Mon, 05 Dec 2005 12:04:58 -0000

Well... You know I'd rather have you hangin' at the hizzouse with muh peeps...

Buuut, you've got that whole "thing" about the south...

:)

Re: Proliferation

Jerald Sheets — Tue, 06 Dec 2005 23:02:15 -0000

And we all know how painful that can be for a man your age...

Re: Wallpapers or MP3 Player?

Jerald Sheets — Sun, 11 Dec 2005 16:35:14 -0000

Get the xmms-mp3 plugin, and you're all set.

Re: SuSE Screenshot

Jerald Sheets — Mon, 12 Dec 2005 06:37:24 -0000

Just Beautiful!

Glad you're having success witht the system!

Re: Wallpapers or MP3 Player?

Jerald Sheets — Tue, 13 Dec 2005 16:50:31 -0000

The only thing I'd kind of disagree with is that my desktop at work is a GUI Linux. (FC4+KDE) I use it for everything from Cervasie (CVS frontend) to email to text editing (GVim).

I'm sure the majority of *users* are using it for the age-old Email+Web+Music type stuff, but we career people use the whole OS most of the time.

Of course, the server is a different story.

Re: Wallpapers or MP3 Player?

Jerald Sheets — Wed, 14 Dec 2005 23:09:29 -0000

Let's see if I can hit all of these. The easy ones first:

Just because I run KDE doesn't mean I can't run both K-whatever and G-whatever apps. For the most part (obvious brain-damaged developers still statically linking against libraries that get replaced faster than yesterday's underwear notwithstanding) you can run Gnome apps on KDE and vice-versa. Now obviously I'm going to use yum whenever possible, but this particular app came as an rpm. I installed it by hand, and it worked just fine.

Remote X...

Here we go.

Aaron: I don't know the environment as well as I'd like, so I'll be making some assumptions here... Let's see how close I come.

The X subsystem is actually kind of backwards to the way we typically look at this stuff. You run the XServer on your machine, and the remote system is the client. That's the actual true description of an X session. How so? The machine you're on needs to run software that provides a location for the remote X machine to connect back to as a client. So, there's a couple scenarios you're probably experiencing.

1) You have a windows box on your end without X Server software and aren't really sure how to proceed.

2) You have a linux box, and you're getting the whole "permission denied" thing, and can't figure where the security is configured.

In case #1, there is a pile of software from the very expensive to the free out there to run an X server on your windows based system. I've used many, and tend to like Esker's SmartTerm X. Xoftware is another, and Cygwin is the free offering. Having one of these on your Windows box is always a good idea if you're working in UNIX. At the very least, Cygwin can foot this bill.

In case #2 you have a situation where you simply haven't enabled access. We'll cover that later.

Once you have an XServer involved, you have to configure thecliennt to know how to reach you. It needs to know how to send a display to you, the server. We do this by exporting our display address. (I'll use private addresses for example)

Solaris: 192.168.1.15
You: 192.168.1.27

while connected to the remote system (via ssh, presumably), you would execute a command telling that system where you are like so:

export DISPLAY=192.168.1.27:0.0

or, if your shell doesn't support that

DISPLAY=192.168.1.27:0.0; export DISPLAY

In doing this, you've told your client "I'm over here". This works on both windows-based and linux-based systems.

Next, there is a security system associated with X sessions. It's very simple, but you still need to execute the command to allow X connections. That security system is called "xhost". Xhost is used to add granular (and massive) rights to a system. It's usage is like so:

xhost [[+-]name ...]

Now, the simple running of the command: xhost + will completely open up your system to any X connection from anywhere on the wire. However, you can also man the command out to see some options, and the addition of users to an ACL and the like. This is all part of the XSecurity subsystem, which also has some pretty detailed man pages.

Finally, once you've run your X server, run the xhost command to allow access, you then SSH to the machine in question (you must tunnel X over SSH...this is pretty clear in SSH's config files). Once on the destination machine, you can type a known X command (like xclock or xterm. This would include any programs you could run under X.

Another way to connect to remote boxes is VNC. VNC is supported on most platforms now, and is an excellent way of doing what you're asking. It's by far the best performance, and you actually see the desktop you're trying to control instead of just the command prompt, and you needing to launch the various programs from thaqt location.

If youhave any more questions, I'd be happy to answer. It's late, and this feels like it was somewhhat hard to follow, but I'm not really feeling well.

Let me know if I can be of more help.

Xhost Man: http://www.netadmintools.com/html/xhost.man.html

Re: Wallpapers or MP3 Player?

Jerald Sheets — Thu, 15 Dec 2005 09:53:21 -0000

Well, I posted a really long answer to Aaron here last night, but I can't see it. What gives?

Re: Survey Says: You’re Sexy!

Jerald Sheets — Wed, 01 Feb 2006 08:53:20 -0000

Aaron Brazell: Evil Overlord.

Re: A Car Worthy of the Technosailor label

Jerald Sheets — Wed, 15 Feb 2006 07:09:07 -0000

ummm....

Re: Samsung A920

Jerald Sheets — Wed, 08 Mar 2006 13:15:10 -0000

Gah! What is it? GET IT OFF MY SCREEN!

Re: Anticipating 15k

Jerald Sheets — Thu, 30 Mar 2006 17:12:55 -0000

Hey look! I had 15,000 visits while I was posting this!

Just yanking ya. Good luck with that, dude. Congrats!

Re: Anticipating 15k

Jerald Sheets — Thu, 30 Mar 2006 22:27:01 -0000

That's what I meant. We had something like 25 million uniques today.

Re: Posting in another man’s blog is like driving another man’s car

Jerald Sheets — Tue, 05 Sep 2006 11:16:38 -0000

First, I had to click because the shortened RSS link in Safari said "Posting in another mans blog is like driving annother man..."

Outstandingly hilarious.

As one that has been honored to post here in Aaron's stead and as a guest in the past, I can verify what Darren says about Technosailor here. You never ffeel quite comfy, watch what you say a lot more than you would on your own blog, and maybe don't explore topics to the extent you would otherwise.

Still in all, great job Darren.

Re: Posting in another man’s blog is like driving another man’s car

Jerald Sheets — Tue, 05 Sep 2006 11:25:29 -0000

It was just really funny to see that pop up in Safari like that. :D

Re: Have you ever woke up in a strange place?

Jerald Sheets — Thu, 07 Sep 2006 12:54:06 -0000

LoL!

Was this entirely necessary?

:P

Re: Ego and the Family

Jerald Sheets — Fri, 08 Sep 2006 07:20:30 -0000

Ummm....

Wow.

Re: Microsoft Originality

Jerald Sheets — Tue, 17 Oct 2006 23:11:35 -0000

Well, Aaron, believe it or not I have a couple of items that MS makes that are quite good.

#1 The Microsoft Keyboard.

I bought my MS Keyboard like in 1992 or 1993, and still use it today. It is simple, elegant, and has pretty much eliminated a burgeoning carpal problem.

#2 The Microsoft Mouse

I have the MS mouse because at 6'5", just about any mouse is dwarfed in my hand. The MS mice, however fit my hand EXTREMELY well for whatever reason, and I can really appreciate the ergonomic engineering that went into the (at the time) unique design of the mouse shape.

#3 Microsoft Windows Mobile 5

I have a Smartphone, and with the wane of Palm products all but inevitable, I find Windows mobile (until iPhone, of course) to be the smartphone OS of choice.

Microsoft may not do very well with innovation and originaliity in their current suite of applications, but their hardware has ALWAYS been one of my favorite features of the MS corporation.

OS: crap
APPS: crap
Hardware: A-OK.

Re: Microsoft Originality

Jerald Sheets — Wed, 18 Oct 2006 07:51:06 -0000

Interesting.

Now, I didn't have the problems with DS everyone else seems to have had with NDS. It was just a fancy LDAP storage infrastructure. I had no trouble with NDS trees local or across both slow and fast links. It was very logically thought out, laid out, and implemented.

Yeah, I liked NDS quite a bit. ;)

Re: Speedlinking: October 19, 2006

Jerald Sheets — Thu, 19 Oct 2006 11:37:34 -0000

Ummm...

First security exploit already found. People all a-titter on both Digg *AND* Slashdot. ff & opera fanboys rejoicing, ie proponents making excuses. Grumpy people griping for the fun of it.

This is going to be one interesting ride...

Re: You Thought You Knew Me, but You Didn’t

Jerald Sheets — Mon, 18 Dec 2006 20:06:51 -0000

Now you know as well as I do that Atlanta is the best city in the US. And you'd never attract a gay homeless man here. ;)

Re: You Thought You Knew Me, but You Didn’t

Jerald Sheets — Mon, 18 Dec 2006 20:33:53 -0000

You did it wrong...