Ajitabh Pandey's Soul & Syntax

Exploring systems, souls, and stories – one post at a time

Author: Ajitabh

  • First Month At New Job

    The first month at new job was hectic and I was so busy during the weekdays that could find time for my family, let alone creating a blog entry. Annanya, my 4 year old daughter missed me a lot as by the time I used to come back home, she was already asleep and next day morning again the same routine. Situation has eased down a bit as I have started understanding my servers and the organisational systems a bit.

    On the first day itself on 26th Sep 2005 I was asked to move an LVM filesystem to a seperate physical disk. Not a difficult task, but since it was to be done in production servers, out of core business hours after 18:00 BST. I reached home at around 22:00 BST. And since then  I never reached home before 19:30 BST. Some people might think that this is normal in a SysAdmin’s life, but I got used to the luxorious life at British Airways where I used to leave dot at 17:00 BST.

    Quite surprising that no proper monitoring system was in place except the HP Insight Manager and RRD-TOOL. The first few tasks which I initiated was to establish a HA monitoring station in place using Linux-HA project , Nagios, RRDTOOL , Cacti , Cheops. To start with I have been configuring and building Nagios in my development box which runs Slackware 10.1.

    I also found that the only method of remote access to office network from home is using Cisco VPN client as we have Cisco Pix firewalls. I was finding it difficult to compile the Cisco VPN client for my  linux box at home due to I using the latest kernel and the client demanding 2.4. To provide myself a remote access I had to make use of OpenVPN without opening up any additional port on the Pix firewall. You can read more about that in my techlog here. Since my role was Linux Systems Administrator I decided to use Linux desktop for my self. I quickly installed Fedora Core 4 on one of the desktops and Slackware 10.1 on another. I decided to use the slack box as a test/dev machine to try out various new things.

    Overall things have eased down a bit and I am really enjoying my new job and see a lots of opportunity.

  • End of Journey – 4th Jan 1999 to 23rd Sept 2005

    Dear Friends,

    I wanted to take a moment to let you know that today is my last day at NIIT / British Airways. I will be joining a new position at Broadcasting Data Systems (a BBC Broadcast company) on Monday, 26th Sept 2005.

    I have enjoyed my 81 months tenure with NIIT with the last 22 months at British Airways and appreciate having the opportunity to work with all of you. Thank you for the support, guidance and encouragement you have provided me during my time at NIIT / British Airways. Even though I will miss my colleagues and the company, I am looking forward to this new challenge and to starting a new phase of my career.

    Please keep in touch, I can be reached at my personal email address
    ajitabhpandey (at ) ajitabhpandey.info.

    You can always read about me and my whereabouts at my website http://www.ajitabhpandey.info/
    Thanks again for everything.

    I seal it with a kiss,
    because you I will miss.
    I’ll sign it with a sigh,
    because we went so high.
    I wish I could tell you with a touch,
    Why I care to write this..,
    and why so much.

    Yours truly,
    Ajitabh Pandey

  • A laptop for me

    Yesterday I received my IBM Thinkpad R50e. R50e is a solid IBM machine and cost me around £750. The specs are

    Pentium M 735 1.7 GHz

    RAM 512 MB

    HD 60 GB

    DVD-Writer

    Mdm – LAN EN, Fast EN 802.11b, 802.11g – Centrino

    15″ TFT XGA (1024 x 768)

    It came preloaded with WinXP Pro. I made a recovery disc set of 7 discs and replaced WinXP Pro with Ubuntu Linux. Almost everything has worked out of box and it is nice to see that Ubuntu recognized the Wireless chip as well.

    As I am writing this, another window on this box is running debootstrap to build  a pure Debian Sarge system. Further plans are to install a Linux from Scratch system on this laptop.

    I am still playing with it.

  • Cracking attempts on my PC

    Since the day I switched on ssh server on my home PC I saw a very increased number of people attempting to crack into my PC. For few days I kept quite as I saw clearly that none of the attacks were able to go anywhere near my user-id. But then I realise that the log size of the auth file is increasing and number of desperate attackers is growing day by day. So I installed a software called Denyhosts from http://denyhosts.sourceforge.net.

    Denyhosts is a python script which can be run as a daemon or as a cron job to analyse the auth log file for invalid number of authentication attempts. This blocks the ip-address of the machine from which successive invalid authntication attempts are coming. To block this ip-address it creates and entry in /etc/hosts.deny file. I have so far blocked 23 different hosts. Let’s see what happens next.

  • I am looking forward to joining BBC

    Yesterday I got a call from BBC HR that my Work Permit has come through. Today I finally resigned from NIIT. Nothing much to say here, its just another milestone passed in life.