May 19, 2009

There’s Never a Dull Moment

There are no words… I was just forwarded a call from our NOC after the caller demanded to speak with the manager. I am still not clear what the issue is but the caller “Carlo” was demanding to speak with Juan. I repeated the same thing that Heather had said – that there was no person named Juan that worked for the company. Carlo goes on about how I’m a lier and that Juan is a security guard in my building. Okay so at this point I’m thinking Carlo must be talking about one of our datacenters which are all staffed by security. Before I can respond Carlo starts in that I’m a lier and he’s going to send a couple guys down to sort this out.

I still have no idea:

  1. What building he’s talking about
  2. Where he got our number
  3. What his original issue was
  4. What exactly he thinks he’s going to accomplish by sending some guys out to deal with building security. I’m not positive but I would guess that Securitas/Pinkerton has 911 on speed dial.

Unfortunately my curiosity is peaked and I doubt I’ll ever find out what exactly is going on.

May 4, 2009

HOWTO Install OS X on a Dell Mini 9

I just finished installing OS X on my Dell Mini 9 pic (as an aside – probably one of the best form factors I have owned for a traveling laptop). The instructions here:

How-To: Install Mac OS X – DellEFI Method

are pretty good. I followed Section 2 Part A. One thing to note, when booting the system via the “small” USB drive you will have to press “esc” and select the larger USB drive to boot from. The syslinux/isolinux on the small USB drive will continue to boot in a loop until you break the cycle. Other than that everything worked like a charm right from the start (camera, audio, wifi, etc…).

I still need to install and tweet some additional settings and my 16 GB USB drive will always be close by (6 GB installation). Additional links and information are below – enjoy.

May 1, 2009

Patch for IRR Power Tools (irrpt)

Small patch to the IRR Power Tools (irrpt) package to allow setting the prefix length via the irrpt_pfxgen script on the command line:

--- irrpt-1.27/bin/irrpt_pfxgen 2007-06-08 21:16:47.000000000 +0000
+++ irrpt/bin/irrpt_pfxgen 2009-05-01 19:36:30.000000000 +0000
@@ -50,7 +50,7 @@

case "-l":
case "--pfxlength":
- $o_pfxlength = $_SERVER['argv'][++$offset];
+ $o_pfxlen = $_SERVER['argv'][++$offset];
break;

case "-f":