Early morning cats
Originally uploaded by sldownard.
Meow.
so, i had a really shitty day at work today.
first of all, there was a crap meeting on friday that had me all stressed out so that i basically didn’t sleep sunday night. then i went in, and things kept going wrong. since customer service means never having to say you’re not sorry, i had to keep accepting blame and apologizing over and over to people who were emailing and calling me for help about brokenness. i had a massive headache, and it was not at all improved when finally one of the users said to me, “sabrina, what the hell! you used to be so awesome! what happened?!” (he’s a good guy, and i know he was just giving me shit, but it still stung badly. especially since basically none of the things i’d been apologizing to him about all day were actually my fault.) that pretty much spelled the end of the day’s productiveness at that point.
when i left work, all i really wanted to do was collapse into a heap and have a beer, but of course i had class tonight so there was no beer. i was so dispirited i didn’t even run for it when i saw a brown line train coming, i trudged up the stairs as it trundled into and out of the station, and then just waited balefully under the heat lamps for the next one. and then i texted the lovely and delightful pirate dan to have a whiskey on my behalf — i believe he was happy to oblige — and went on my way to class, which i was convinced was going to be boring because today was tire day: we were going to learn how to mount and unmount tires on rims. booooooooooooriiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiing.
…hours pass…
turns out, though? TIRES ARE AWESOME. i mean, they’re a really big pain in the ass (at least when you’re working with crappy old tires that are all bitchy about going on the rims without a lot of force), and i have a lot more sympathy for the guys who put all new tires on my car a few months ago, but it was so much fun! with enough heavy machinery and getting my hands all greasy, apparently anything can be fun. i gleefully went “WOO!” really loudly at one point after successfully getting my tire back on the rim after a couple of tries, which was a little embarassing because it turns out giddy, girly woohoos echo really well in a shop.
then i walked out of class and it had warmed up a little bit and was snowing and it was so nice, and i was in a great mood. i’m so glad i decided to take that class, even if it does mean being tired during the week. this class is the best decision i’ve made in months.
Rearrange!
Originally uploaded by sldownard.
When ‘i think i’ll clean my living room today’ goes wrong
<niqui> FUCK YEAH
<niqui> this is how awesome snmpd is
<niqui> in order to show a failure that it gets from an external script, i put this in the config file:
<niqui> exec SOMEARBITRARYNAME /path/to/script arg1 arg2
<niqui> but it expects an immediate response, so since my script-to-see-if-a-database-is-being-updated takes minimally 10 seconds to run, i can’t exec it directly
<niqui> so i have to run something out of cron that runs it periodically and writes state into a file on disk
<niqui> i have it basically run “$scriptname >/dev/null ; echo $? > /var/run/whatever.state”
<niqui> then, since snmpd will understand nonzero return to be failure, i think i can do this in my snmpd.conf:
<niqui> exec SOMEARBBITRARYNAME exit `cat /var/run/whatever.state`
<niqui> except it isn’t being interpreted by the shell, and exit is a shell builtin
<niqui> so i write a script called ‘exiter’ that runs ‘exit $1′
<niqui> but then, of course the shell isn’t interpolating the backticks either
<niqui> so now my exiter script runs ‘exit `cat $1`’
* wasy admires niqui’s ENTERPRISE software
<niqui> so i have to have snmpd run a wrapper around exit to check the state written by the wrapper around the actual script that runs the check
<niqui> THIS IS FUCKING FANTASTIC
<niqui> SNMP IS A DREAM
<niqui> there are so many ways for this to break i don’t even know where to start
<niqui> but at least this is THE STANDARD
* niqui coughs
Snow on the abandoned platform
Originally uploaded by sldownard.
