Author Archives: mark

About mark

At work, been working on Tandems for around 30yrs (programming + sysadmin), plus AIX and Solaris sysadmin also thrown in during the last 20yrs; also about 5yrs on MVS (mainly operations and automation but also smp/e work). At home I have been using linux for decades. Programming background is commercially in TAL/COBOL/SCOBOL/C(Tandem); 370 assembler(MVS); C, perl and shell scripting in *nix; and Microsoft Macro Assembler(windows).

Darn, time to thow away my shell math libraries

Posted on November 4, 2009 by mark

Over the years I have written many script libraries to handle arithmetic functions, some of them quite messy involving determing where the decimal point is in the string, removing it, adjusting other strings, doing the calculations using the bash inbuilt … Continue reading →

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Doggie pleasure

Posted on October 14, 2009 by mark

I have found a new doggie treat that Fletcher will actually eat (well after he has completely licked the liver flavoured coating off it anyway). A love ’em liver chew, sort of like a tux dog biscuit in consistency but … Continue reading →

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Recipes+

Posted on September 30, 2009 by mark

Have you all seen the Recipes+ magazine. This month it even has cheesecake. The Recipe+ magazine comes out monthly in NZ, and every month has 200+ recipes (with pictures) for NZ $3.90, I have stopped buying cook books. Why pay … Continue reading →

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Nagios in a VM

Posted on September 30, 2009 by mark

Whooppeee. Got one going. There was a virtual appliance for VMWare, but I don’t use VMWare so rolled my own in VirtualBox. Did a minimal install of FC11, which took no time at all as I couldn’t find the blasted … Continue reading →

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Some more playtime with asm370

Posted on September 13, 2009 by mark

Spent the morning adding an extra tweak to my tape automation tool for mvs3.8j. As you all know by know, it there were no scratch tapes left in the pool the a WTOR is posted on the consoles asking the … Continue reading →

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Playing with 370 asm again

Posted on August 25, 2009 by mark

Now a ‘playpen’ mvs3.8j system is available to the public on my website I wanted to automate recovery from any damage a user could cause (even though they don’t have console access). That necessitated a change to my task monitoring … Continue reading →

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Even unknown sites get trawled by hackers

Posted on August 4, 2009 by mark

Gosh, I have published my dyndns website name name to just one person so far, and I have a dynamic ip address. And I still get somebody (probably somebodies) trying to break into the machine. The web access log shows … Continue reading →

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mkCDrec doesn’t support ext4 filesystems yet, bother

Posted on July 14, 2009 by mark

Having finally got my desktops and web server reasonably stable under FC11, I though it was probably time to backup my main server. So I copied across mkCDrec from my Fc10 server to my FC11 desktop, and fired it off. … Continue reading →

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Lotto

Posted on June 23, 2009 by mark

Well theres a bit of exitement over tomorrow nights lotto, with $35mil up for grabs now, that must go. Probably no first division winner again so it needs to be split over the winners of the second division; or third … Continue reading →

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FC11 upgrade progress, webserver upgraded also

Posted on June 21, 2009 by mark

Well I’ve finally moved my web server off FC8 and onto FC11. You will probably find a few issues remaining, but I think I have cleaned 99% of them up. I had a few major issues with the upgrade. The … Continue reading →

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