I'm preparing to power-off and disconnect some old Cisco 3550-48 Ethernet switches at a Customer site. For kicks, I jumped on the units and pulled the output of sho ver one last time. I was shocked, and felt like I had to erect some sort of memorial to the faithful service of these devices.

They (and the UPS devices that they're attached to) were installed in early December 2003 during an IP telephony migration. The switch in the maintenance garage (the first one) did well, certainly, but the switches in the wiring closet (the second two) performed beyond my wildest dreams. Looking back at my records, I'm not seeing that any trouble tickets were ever logged relating to these switches (bad ports, etc). They appear to be fully functional.

If you're familiar with Cisco IOS and the output of sho ver then you'll know what's noteworthy about the output below.

(I know that this is silly, but for some reason I find this very touching.)

Good night, faithful servants. You did a great job.

I'm on page 1 of the user list now having been a member of the site for 7 days.Matt Simmons, who has been a member for 12 days, is also on the front page, as is Sysadmin1138, who has been a member for 21 days. Other than those two, everyone else on the front page has been a member for more than 21 days (3 times my current membership tenure).

I'd still love a "Server Fault Leader board" that should show motion amongst the rankings (like the old distributed.net scores!), but I'm not going to go scraping their site just to do that myself.

I'm really enjoying the site. Eventually, I'll get around to asking a question or two. For now, though, I'll continue answering questions and having a good time.

This is a horrible thing for me to get started doing. *sigh* Still, with 3 days membership I'm up to 892 reputation. I don't see anybody else who is as high with as few days membership. I'd love to know how my rate of ascent compares to other users.

I'll be cracking page 2 of the user list tomorrow.

I attended the March meeting of the Greater Cincinnati VMware User Group on Thursday, and saw a presentation on the Veeam Backup product. I enjoyed the presentation, learned quite a bit about the product, and got quite a bit of amusement out of a bit of a 'hack' that the product uses to perform file-level restores from Linux VMs.

When performing a file-level restore from a Linux VM, the Veeam Backup client boots a VMware Player-based VM. That VM boots a tweaked Linux kernel and uses a combination of Veeam-proprietary and Linux built-in kernel drivers to read files out of the Veeam backup image. I find this endlessly amusing. It's a great way to leverage the functionality already present in the Linux kernel, and gives their product a leg-up on the competition. As somebody who has used Linux to read "oddball" filesystems in the past (mounting a hard disk drive from a Commodore Amiga on a PC comes to mind... *snicker*), I really appreciate the ingenuity in this approach.

It's not really fair to say that it does file-level restores from "Linux VMs". It can do file-level restores from a variety of filesystems, some of which aren't even used by operating systems that can be virtualized under VMware (MacOS, as one example). The presenter indicated that they had support for over 40 filesystems as he launched into the topic (and rather stole my thunder, since I was primed to ask the question "You say 'Linux VMs', but what filesystems do you actually support?").

The Veeam Backup product looks like a winner. I'm hopeful that I can find some application in my Customer-base for this product to improve backup / restore efficiency.

I learned that I'm not the only one having problems with the White House "RSS" (really Atom) feeds. My feed reader (a very, very hacked up version of TT-RSS) populated the database with a single entry from the White House blog feed, but never loaded any more articles, though examining the feed "by hand" shows that there are new entries.

After doing some digging around, I found that the same things that Rogers Cadenhead found (before I found his blog entry, of course). The "id" attribute of each entry, used in the TT-RSS schema as the primary key for the row in the "entries" table. Lovely.

I know there are a lot more pressing problems for the U.S. Federal Executive than fixing their "RSS" feeds, but surely it's somebody's job to work on this. Please fix your feeds.

This non-believer couldn't be happier about the overt statement that President Obama made today acknowledging that I am not a second-class citizen. It might sound trite, but there was more "change" in that simple acknowledgment than I thought would happen in the entire Obama presidency. This affirmation that the non-religious are as much citizens as the religious gives me positive feelings that I don't believe I've ever had before, with respect to my government.

The last eight years have actively increased my fear that, eventually, my "kind" would end up being the victims of some kind of tangible, physical oppression-- so much so that the idea of even mentioning my lack of religious beliefs in this blog was something that actively frightened me. This statement in Mr. Obama's address today, simple though it was, goes a long way toward easing the discomfort and suspicion that that the last eight years have imparted.

The Checkpoint SecureRemote / SecureClient package was the source of our woes. We were using "NGX R60 HFA1". Upgrading to "NGX R60 HFA2" caused the problem to disappear immediately.

Shame on me for not thinking about eliminating this common factor between all the crashing machines sooner. I'm dumb.

I just saw another Ashton Nikon commercial-- this time for the D60. Mr. Kutcher's performance was, of course, shudder-worthy. What really threw me into shock, though, was the pronunciation of the brand name of the interchangeable lenses. I've always pronounced Nikon to rhyme with icon, and Nikkor the the same long-i sound as I would use in Nikon. To hear the commercial, though, Nikkor is pronounced as knicker-- as in, say, The Power of Orange Knickers.

Ewww!

Nikkor with the long-i sounds bitchin'. Nikkor pronounced like knicker sounds like underwear. Strapping a pair of underwear onto my DSLR doesn't sound good at all.

Still, I don't think I'm going to be buying any Sigma lenses over this. In fact, I'd like to get my hands on a Nikon AF-S Nikkor 50mm f/1.4G lens. It would be a lot nicer to use than the 50mm f/1.8 AI-s Nikon Series E lens that I'm currently using on my D40. I can't complain about the Series E lens. It was $25.00 from eBay and it's sharp as all get out. I'm getting sick of shooting in manual mode w/ manual focus, though. I keep trying to tell myself that it builds character, but I'm beginning to feel like my character is sufficiently built.

Hey, lazyweb-- do you know anything about Sierra Wireless Compass 597 USB CDMA adapters causing NT kernel "STOP" errors (aka "Blue Screen" or "BSOD") on Windows XP Professional installations?

I've got three (3) of these adapters, and four (4) different laptop computers, and I can reliably make all of the combinations of adapters and laptops stop just by plugging-in the adapter after the drivers are loaded.

The adapter has this hokey function where it appears initially as a USB CD-ROM drive (called "TRU-install"-- used to load the driver w/o requiring outboard CD media), and that functions fine. Some of the Sierra Wireless k-base articles relate to problems with this installation process, but that's not my problem.

After the drivers are loaded, though, plugging-in the adapter results in an NT kernel stop to the tune of:

DRIVER_IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL
STOP 0x0000001D (0x305f6469, 0x00000002, 0x00000008, 0x305f6469) 

I've managed to replicate this on a Dell Latitude D630, a Latitude D430, an Inspiron 6400, and an Inspiron 710m. All the machines have Symantec Antivirus 10.1.5.5000 installed, but I uninstalled it one one computer and observed the same behavior. Other commonalities between the machines are user-land software-- Microsoft Office 2003, Adobe Reader 8, etc. There's no other software in common between all the machines that should have kind of kernel-mode driver loaded.

All the machines were installed with Service Pack 2 and all current updates, but for kicks I installed Service Pack 3 onto two (2) of the PCs and saw no change in behavior.

(Our wireless carrier on these, BTW, is Sprint. I've downloaded the most current version of their hideous management software from their web site, and also tried to install the device without the Sprint software, just using the Sierra Wireless drivers to make it appear as a modem. No dice for either of those attempts... *sigh*)

I'm preparing to install a white-box desktop computer with a clean installation of Windows XP and Service Pack 2 (with no additional software) to see what happens. I've got another Latitude D630 to try, as well (one with a software load I can wipe with impunity).

I've been loading the drivers provided with the device in its USB mass-storage profile. Given that I can't get the PC to operate with the device plugged-in, it's difficult for me to report on version numbers of drivers. Plugging-in the device while booted in "Safe Mode", I see a driver that "cannot start" provided by Sierra Wireless dated 6/20/2008, version 2.1.7.1, signed by WHQL.

I've searched and searched, and I'm not coming up with much in the way of similar reports. Hopefully, I'll attract some other poor souls who are seeing the same behavior with this post. We'll just see...

I know that the problem isn't any of the following:

• There appears to be a conflict between the AirCard modem and the Texas Instruments PCI GemCore-based SmartCard controller.
• There is a conflict with older versions of some CD burning suites (like Roxio) and the software they install...
• Intel Centrino chipset can freeze laptops trying to run AirCard Watcher software...

I watched television tonight at my parents' house, and saw a Nikon ad hyping the D90, w/ Ashton Kutcher.

I don't know if I can continue using Nikon cameras now.