T O T K a t - 2 0 0 6

Next year

Next year I hope to sell my house. I hope to buy a new one. We hope to buy a new one. Together.

I've not been working as quickly as I possibly could on this house, but things have changed a lot over the last two years and I've been a lot busier. The builders started on the hard bits only just over a year ago. This time last year, my house was freezing cold and in bits. Now there's one room left to decorate and some carpet to put in and that's it.

I've lived in this house for a while now; eight and a half years. That's nearly the longest I've lived in one house and I'm "only" (er, how old am I again? I can't remember without doing the sums.) 33. It was part of my independence (along with a job, a car and cable TV ;o)). It really is time to move on. One could say it was long overdue.

3 years

On Friday 23rd December, I had been working in my current company for three years. Not in the same job, as I've gone up a rung on the ladder. Not under the same company name, as we've been sold and the name changed. But still. Three years. That's twice as long as my last longest employment.

Solstice

Welcome to the shortest day. It all gets better from tomorrow onwards!

About bloody time

Took the Americans damned long enough to ban teaching Intelligent Design, though.

Housey Housey

The bathroom, spare room, kitchen(, extension, porch and hall) appear to be pretty much done...

Before	Spare Room	After
Before	Bathroom	After
Before	Bathroom & wall	After
Before	Shower	After
[no photo]	Kitchen	After

Festive thingy

I put up my Christmas decorations on Tuesday. I have a tree and everything! Lotsa sparkly lights. And tinsel hanging off things. I was going to put them up on 1st, but given the painting and decorating stuff all over the house, there wasn't any room and it wouldn't have been sensible. Having tidied that lot away as much as possible, I had space enough to put up the tree.

In other news: tea is great.

And I've got 705 services under Nagios (and 104 machines) now that I've made inroads into the Windows clients. I had a look at a Cacti installation (thanks to gmh) yesterday but I'm still not sure about it. Having discussed the graphing problem with some of my team, it looks like there is experience of RRD tool in the team so it'll definitely be based on that, whatever we do, the only variable will be what gets used to render the graphs.

The march of innovation

Nagios is eating my braaaaane - 606 services monitored at the moment and I've got one more unix nrpe client to install for load and disk monitoring, then I play with the Windows boxes. Thankfully they are relatively few. Then I go back to the start and start doing the "clever" stuff. Reckon I might hit 1000 services monitored. Now, I need to find a good way of producing (automatically) graphs of performance over time (not just the up, down, critical, unknown and warn status ones that Nagios does for itself). I took a (very very brief) look at Cacti, but I'm not sure about it yet. I'll try to get it installed and working when I next get a reasonable block of time, but what with the recruitment I'm doing at the moment, on top of everything else there's not a huge amount of spare time at work. Maybe I should actually give myself one of those project days that I introduced for my team. I mean, this is a real project, so I don't see why not. And I'd get so much done.

Self destruct SMSs for the utterly paranoid, or just plain sneaky. Seems like just another way to use a mobile phone to facilitate various shenanigans like stealing corporate secrets, or having an affair.

Nagios

I've been spending the minutes, when I'm not in meetings, working on Nagios. There is still a lot to do. I have the Nagios host done and 95 clients are underway with disk, load, http, mysql, postgres and oracle to monitor for starters. 290 services already done. Just over 100 monitored remotely and then a buttload using nrpe. Linux, Solaris and Windows. I'm nothing if not varied in the platforms for what I do.

I guess I ought to update my documentation so that it is less crappy and actually covers nrpe as well. My "to do" list is as long as my arm, however, and that's just the work one.

And in other news... over the last few days, I've been starting to take a liking the Niagra stuff that Sun have just started to officially evangelise.

Kew

I now have a lovely, warm, tweed, winter skirt. And it wasn't from Monsoon! I appear to have found another shop that does good quality clothes that I like, in my size. Yay! I always hated resorting to Evans. Their stuff is so cheap and not great in terms of materials and finish (and the design generally sucks too). So hoorah for Kew!

Absence

I've been busy. Work is very different in the newer role I'm in now. Plus I've had a rotten cold that was bad enough for me to need a couple of days off last week. I've still got the tail end now, which appears to be resulting in sinus headaches due to blockage and odd coldness in the tubes.

Work is also weird at the moment. Things are changing. The changes are needed and if they're done the right way, things will be better for it. Roll on the Christmas break though... the bit where I don't have to do anything much really. That'd be really good.