Author: way0utwest

We have a couple of boxes at a local Denver co-location facility for the training business, SQL Share. Our firewall died a few weeks ago, and so I called a friend that I’ve typically used for network stuff. He found us one on eBay for $200 and last night was the time to install it. We’d been trying to coordinate things, and last night worked.

I’d given him the IPs and setup, and some preliminary work had been done yesterday, but there are things that you can’t test until you get the real network set up. I should have known things were bad when we arrived and I couldn’t get Jordan in at first. The security is tight and I hadn’t said "2 people" so we needed to wait and get authorization from the company I rent space from. Once that was done, we got in and needed to get cage nuts into the rack for the firewall.

There’s a shelf right above us and we had little space. I managed to use a screwdriver to get the top two nuts in. Then I went to get the last one in and couldn’t. So I tried to squeeze it with finger and slipped, cutting below the thumbnail, and starting to bleed a little. While I sucked on it to get the bleeding stopped, Jordan told me I didn’t need to mess with it that way and then proceeded to do the same thing.

A nice delay while both of us stopped the bleeding. Then we mounted things, got it plugged in, and started to configure it. Jordan did the work while I stood around, coughing in the extremely dry air of the colo. Fortunately we were in the hot aisle, and not the cold one, but it was still hard.

We had issues getting the firewall to first allow things out, and then to allow things back in. It’s a little flaky to work with IOS, and you have to go slow. We kept having issues and things went slow. Our expected 30-60 minutes turned into 120 almost. That wasn’t the way I wanted to spend a Saturday night, but it wasn’t all bad. I saw a guy from the Denver User group there who was rebuilding a few boxes for his company and expected to be there for hours.

We finally narrowed it down to the ARP cache in the ISP switches. At the lowest level of networking, the switches are often set up with specific groups of ports working together. To speed the movement of packets, the switches cache the MAC address of your network card. That’s the address burned into the card. It’s similar to the IP address you have and the DNS caching your machine does. In this case it means when we unplugged the server and plugged that cord into the firewall right away, the switch thought it was a momentary interruption and didn’t reset the ARP cache with the MAC addresses in it’s memory tables.

Once we realized that our rules were correct, we went to the Network Operations Center for the colo and had them clear their switch’s cache. That cleared things up and once that was done, things looked OK. Jordan drove to Barnes and Noble to check things from the outside while I hit the bank for funds.

We met up, thinks were working, and we called it a night.

I tried out Bing’s new visual search after seeing a few people note it on Twitter. I was a little excited to try it, thinking that it might help me to find images for the editorials easier.

It didn’t, and I was disappointed. I thought that this short review in PC Week summed it up. It just doesn’t work well, and the best quote:

Yet after every search trial I always come back to Google, because it works.

I tried typing something in, but that brought me back to the regular search. I clicked “TV Shows”, looking for images from Leverage, but I couldn’t make out detail in the images. Too many to look through, and too slow. I found myself looking up at the search box for the words as I moused over

I’ve given Yahoo and Live chances, and each time they just don’t do a better job. So why should I switch? I haven’t used Bing a lot, but unless it improves on Google significantly, why should I switch?

What I want

I’d use a visual search if it made things easier. What I’d like in visual search is a combination of meta data and breadcrumbs to narrow things down. If I search for “flower”, then give me some options on the side like Amazon does. Let me pick from

• Media (books, movies, pictures)
• Red, pink, white, red, or even “more red” or “less red” (or other colors)
• natural, in stores
• people

Then let me click those to narrow down the images I want. I can scan images quickly if I’m trying to narrow things down or find some type of image.

If someone could make search for better, I’d try it, but so far Google does the job.

The more I think about this, the more I think it should be built into SQL Server as a default. Why not ask for the information to create an operator and email at install and then create a few nice default alerts, like one for which log is full.

It’s such a common problem, why not get people to enable DBMail and enter their email address during installation? For the people that really need to lock down their servers, they could skip it, but for the average person, it might save some headaches if they knew when their log was 80% full.

If you want the general steps for creating an alert, it’s on MSDN.

I started watching Leverage this season, after it was recommended by Wil Wheaton (blog/twitter). For those of you that don’t know Wil, he is an actor and writer, best known by me for playing Wesley Crusher on Star Trek: The Next Generation. I had been working my way through Seasons 1, 2, and 3 while running this year and started following him on Twitter.

He talked a bunch about Leverage over the summer, where he was a guest in one of the episodes. I was hoping he’d be in more, but his excitement while shooting the show got me to tune in, and I’m hooked. I record it every week on my TiVo and bought the first season so I could watch it while running.

What does this have to do with Vegas?

Nothing really, but the characters on Leverage are thieves, and con artists, and it entertains me. So when looking for some new books to read, I plugged in "grifters" and "con artists" in Amazon and came up with a few by James Swain.

He has a series of novels starring Tony Valentine, who tries to catch those people that a ripping off casinos. There’s the Vegas tie-in 🙂

I’ve read a couple of them, Mr. Lucky and Grift Sense, and am working on the third. I’m not much of a gambler, but I enjoy reading about it and sleight of hand entertains me immensely.

That’s my preparation for Vegas, and SQL Connections. That, and picking out a few sessions to attend.