Charles The Technician

The cost of incompetence

Posted by Charles | Filed under Network Issues, Rants

Recently near one of our customers who we run a point to point T1 line too there was a transformer that shorted out and started arcing. After about 30 minutes of a bright purple and white color like someone was welding, temporarily blinding people driving by, it was shut down.

15 minutes later a storm rolled in and the transformer went to arcing again. 30 minutes later instead of SWEPCO turning off the transformer lighting struck the 12,000 Volt money sync and put it out of its misery.

My question is why….why was it turned back on and then left to be turned on when it doesn’t take an idiot to see a line at 100% capacity and not powering anything south of town?

Any other day I would have sat back and enjoyed the light show which was pretty interesting as lighting also struck the nearby church (SINNERS!~) and the remote building of our customer before taking out the entity that was a bigger waste of electricity and money then the local community college’s business major wing (if only a bigger waste for a moment in time).

So electricity comes back up and low and behold…about $3500 in networking equipment, burnt, fried. If you haven’t had the chance to experience a $700 stackable piece of equipment the term used is “Brick”. I now have 2 Cisco switches, one of which was purchased 2 weeks ago, 3 24-port and 48-port hubs, 2 dinky $50 Linksys wired routers, one wireless access point, and a crappy old HP computer that belongs to the customer to stack and make designs with. Don’t laugh, that’s a $3500 sculpture….

The beauty of all this? SWEPCO is probably not going to pay a dime.

Imagine this: You offer a service mowing lawns for old people and fat bastards too lazy to mow their own lawn. One day your lawn mower hits a rock and since you’ve not been keeping up with maintenance on your mower and making sure the nut that holds the blade on is tight, it slings the blade into a neighboring car.

You know what SWEPCO would say in this case? “…there was a rock involved, therefore this is not my responsibility it was a force of nature.”
Their faulty equipment broke down, caused damage to many locations within the local area, and eventually attracted a very impressive light show by letting off plenty of positive ions to attract all the negative ions built up in the lower portions of the clouds hovering over during the storm(commonly called lighting/thunder by the way). Because of a side effect of the destruction of transformer brought about a reaction from good ole momma nature. The whole episode will be labeled as an “Act of nature”.

Welcome to America, where no one, including criminals will be held accountable for their actions, incompetence, stupidity, or complete disregard for common sense…except in extreme situations.

It’s people like the case workers at SWEPCO that make me be all for free, unrestricted abortion…up to and including people at the age of 85.

PHP, Apache, user groups, and Linux

Posted by Charles | Filed under Network Issues

Sometimes the problems that drive us crazy just so happen to be the simplest fixxes.

For example: using SSH, FTP, and Apache.

My webserver runs Linux and being a fairly new linux user I’m still used to performing all functions as the administrator…or root in this case. It’s a very bad habit even for Windows users (though one hard to get around on Windows).

Lets say you SSH in as root, SU to your apache account and WGET a blog program, then un-tarball it and install it. What usergroup now has ownership of the completed php files? Well you might guess the apache account, but you would be wrong. Something else has ownership.

What happends when trying to use apache to open up a .php file that it doesn’t have executable writes on? It displays a blank page…no warning messages, no error messages…a blank page.

But that ownership issue wouldn’t be in the front nor back of your mind because you downloaded the tarball under a restricted account, which would technically give that account ownership right? Well that’s what I think so, so yes. Then you unzip it which happends to create new files and new directories, and you did this under the apache account so it should be owned by that account right? makes sense but no.

[bash ~] chown [apache account] /var/www/htdocs -R

new users of Linux, memorize that command…it’s been the bane of my existance and my saviour. You can think me later.