So, one of my big fears on my home network is a virus outbreak. Granted, my wife is an incredibly paranoid web surfer, and in the 12 years we've been together there has been just one virus issue (and that was after our niece used her computer to surf some "ooh, I'm a vampire...I sparkle!" type of social sites). Sigh.

So, why the rekindled fear? My daughter is old enough to start using the internet, and she hasn't had time to build up the same paranoia that her mother...

Long story short:

Me. Rackspace cloud. Start timer.

Spin up Ubuntu 13.04 cloud server (512 MB size is perfect for this), start downloading Ventrilo Server for Linux. Edit Cloud DNS in the Rackspace mycloud portal to add A/CNAME/PTR after the assigned ip's show up...

A few moments later, login to server. Change root password. scp Ventrilo installer to server. Install the Rackspace cloud monitoring agent.

Create vent user. Untar...

We never learn.

Google Play All Access Music? Great idea!

Flash player required? Ugh.

I want off this planet.

Spent a bit building out an Oracle RHCS cluster for a customer. So Oracle Engineers install Oracle 11g, I configure the RHCS cluster, and I notify the Account Manager that all that's left are a few tests.

Simple tests. Like, "clusvcadm -R oracle-svc". Ok, passed that. "clusvcadm -r oracle-svc -m db2". Passed that one, too. Now to the fun tests...

sync && sleep 10 && sync && ifdown bond0

Watching rgmanager logs...looks...

I've hit that point in my career where I cannot hide behind a technical manual all day. I've hit that place where, regardless of where I go from here, I will hit layers 8 and 9 of the OSI model (if you don't know the joke, that's finances and politics, respectively).

Who drives finances and politics? Unlike the other layers, which are driven by physics, electronics, and computer logic, layers 8 and 9 are driven by humans. In my typical quest for understanding (and perhaps for the...