Off you go… into the purple yonder!

So I have a poweredge 2800 with some hardware issues (voltage sensors on the riser card seeing things they should not…). The Dell support folks wanted me to run a DSET report with this tool

http://support.euro.dell.com/support/downloads/download.aspx?c=uk&l=en&s=gen&releaseid=R155882&formatcnt=2&libid=0&fileid=208066

Man – what a pile of crap. This thing is a self-extracting archive for rpm-based systems (redhat/suse). Fine – except that [...]

I came across this rather nonsensical message from one of Hotmail’s MX servers:

$ telnet mx1.hotmail.com 25
Trying 65.54.245.8…
Connected to mx1.hotmail.com.
Escape character is ‘^]’.
220 bay0-mc9-f11.bay0.hotmail.com Sending unsolicited
commercial or bulk e-mail to Microsoft’s computer network
is prohibited. Other restrictions are found at
http://privacy.msn.com/Anti-spam/. Violations will result
in use of equipment located in California and other states.
Sat, 25 Oct 2008 09:26:41 -0700

(newlines [...]

From today’s Metro, Boston edition:

I’m thinking someone at the Metro needs a crash course in elementary math.

TDS Telecom lost its lawsuit against the city of Monticello, MN.
Some background: citizens of Monticello approved in a referendum a plan to roll out a city-owned fiber network to provide cheap and fast internet access.
Immediately after the referendum the city was sued by Bridgewater, the local incumbent telco. Bridgewater and its parent TDS telecom challenged [...]

I moved a bunch of servers from one colocation facility to another last night. I had been preparing this move for a few weeks. While everything went well in the end, things took much longer than anticipated. Here are a few lessons learned.
1. preparation is *everything*

I spent a lot of time preparing for the move, [...]