ramblings of a {sys,net}admin…

my name’s jeremy and this is my web site.

enter my world…

i’m a 27-year-old certified computer geek. my girlfriend lindsey would tell you that i spend way too much time in the home office, “playin’ on the computers”. she wouldn’t be lyin’. my first experience with a computer came at age four, when my uncle showed me his shiny new commodore 64. a couple of years later, i had my own and was writing code. by age 12, i had my first real “pc” and, shortly thereafter, was figuring out how to make computers do things they weren’t really supposed to.

my interests gradually changed and my passion isn’t writing code anymore (though i still write the occasionally perl or php). i’ve been using linux since 1997 and spend a fair amount of time messin’ with my linux boxes. i’m a “network administrator” at a college campus in indiana. “network administrator” isn’t exactly all, though. i actually wear many hats. i admin a number of win2k and win2k3 servers and a growing number of linux boxes as well (mostly red hat enterprise linux, but gentoo also). our network infrastructure is made up mostly of hp procurve switches that i’m also responsible for. i’m also responsible for security related stuff as well.

i’m a microsoft certified professional. i’ve passed the tests from the giac to call myself a certified windows security administrator and i’ve passed the linux+ and network+ tests from comptia. i’ll pass the mcsa, ccna, and sscp tests someday…

what you’ll find on this “blog” are my various ramblings and thoughts. it’s not really organized into any cohesive structure, i just talk about whatever is going on at the time — it’s mostly centered on information technology related issues, however. browse around and maybe you’ll find something interesting.

my name’s jeremy and this is my web site.

Okay, so I just uploaded a new WordPress theme called Iridium and I kinda like the way it looks. Give me a bit to customize it to my liking and work out any bugs (a day or two) before complaining, unless you find something actually wrong with it. Thanks!

UPDATE: Okay, I’m happy with it for now. Let me know if you run into any issues. Thanks.

After much debate, I decided to move my web sites yet again. I’ve been renting a server from ServerPronto for a while now, but my use doesn’t really justify the cost. I was running a total of five domains off of it — three were my own, one was for a computer club at the local community college and another for an ex-co-worker.

I’ve no idea what the actual bandwidth usage was, but once a month when I received an invoice/statement from them, each one listed my bandwidth usage as 0%. My “limit” was 200GB, so it must’ve been less than 2GB/mo. January was probably actually different, as I seen a huge increase in traffic over the last month, primarily due to my posts about Blocking WMF at the Perimeter, the Windows WMF Vulnerability, and Monitoring for Sober.Y with Squid and swatch. The final count for January is just over 70,000 hits, I think.

Anyways, it wasn’t really economical for me to continue renting the server and hosting these sites on it, when I could get the same end result for less somewhere else. A year or two ago, I had my sites hosted at 1and1.com. I was really happy with their service and never had a single issue with them, so I looked into their options and finally settled on one.

I’ve started the process of moving the web and e-mail services over and am just about finished up. This web site has been moved already, but I haven’t yet got the photo gallery moved over. I’ll probably have to reinstall that from scratch and upload all my photos again. Oh well, it might be a good time to upgrade to Gallery v2. I remember hearing a few good words about Gallery v2 from weez.

I didn’t bother moving the sites for my little company, LinuxWiz Consulting or the Ivy Tech Computer Club. Lindsey, my fiancee, has been pressuring me to stop doing so much work “on the side” so I’m considering “shutting down” my business. The Computer Club wasn’t really using the website, instead choosing to keep everything on a site that’s only accessible to those who they’ve explicitly given access to. I registered the domain for them out of pocket and was paying for the hosting out of pocket, so to hell with it. They’re still welcome to create a site and use it if they’d like, but I’m done trying to assist and promote.

Anyways, e-mail is flowing, as evidenced by the posts coming in from the SecurityFocus mailing lists and I think I’m about to call it a night.

Three more days until my birthday, four more days until the Super Bowl! Go Colts! Oh… wait… nevermind. =)

Okay, so it’s Google’s Adsense versus Yahoo!’s Publisher Network. Which is better?

I’m already running Google ads on the site here and have been for a couple of months. I didn’t expect to make anything from them when I started, and that’s pretty much came true. I had forgotten all about applying to Yahoo’s Publisher Network beta program until I got an “approval” e-mail from them today. I went ahead and registered an account, but have yet to mess with any of the ads. Since I don’t really expect to make much anyways, I’m not sure it’s worth the time.

Has anyone switched from Adsense to YPN? If so, I’d be interested in hearing a comparison between the two. Thanks.

So yet once again I’ve changed the WordPress theme on this site. This time, it’s Ice by Geo. I’ve done some modifications to it since I installed it today, but it’s mostly his work. Whatd’ya think? I kinda like it.

I was asked privately by e-mail for the mod_rewrite rules that I used to redirect everything from www.gaddis.org to www.jeremygaddis.com. It was a very simple thing to implement, and I did it by creating an .htaccess file in the DocumentRoot of the virtual host for www.gaddis.org. It contains simply:

RewriteEngine on RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.jeremygaddis.com/$1 [R=301,L]

While playing with the just officially released Joomla, I found what I think is a very cool theme for it. I’m a geek and an avid Linux activitist/freak/user/whatever, so it looked pretty neat to me. It’s Bluecurve for Mambo, basically. I really like this and almost considered moving my site over to Joomla just to use this theme, but then figured out there’s no easy migration path from Wordpress to Joomla.

If anyone is interested in taking this theme, redoing it for Wordpress, and releasing it under the GPL, get in touch. I’d make a donation to help account for your time.

You may have noticed the Google AdSense banner ads at the top and bottom of the site. I don’t really figure it’ll bring it in anything worthwhile, and will probably remove them before too long. If people don’t complain, they may just stay. It’s probably pointless, as my site receives nothing like the nearly 900,000 hits per month that it used to (of course, I don’t have 60 GB of MP3 files on it anymore, either). Guess that ’splains it.

So I officially made an assload of updates to web site today. This post makes #11 of the day, and some of these were long overdue. I also changed the default theme to “Journalized Blue”, available from the WordPress Theme Browser on alexking.org. I think it generally looks a lot better than it did before (though I did like the geeky ass theme), and I’m sure there will be a few more “tweaks” made to the site before I’m done today.

About a month and a half ago, I purchased a dedicated server from ServerPronto to do my web and e-mail hosting on. It was pre-installed with Fedora Core 4 Linux (my choice) and has been amazingly reliable. I rebooted it once after making some major changes to the system and it’s been running perfectly since then. You should see a remarkable increase in availability and speed over when I was hosting the web site on my own servers on my home Internet connection.

I’m also offering basic web and e-mail hosting to friends and co-workers for a very nominal fee (mostly to help offset the monthly costs of the server), so if you’re one of those and need a place to put a website or want your own domain name (such as gaddis.org), just let me know.