Astonishing Read - Abraham Lincoln's letter to his son's teacher

Below poem was supposedly written by Abraham Lincoln to his son’s school headmaster. For generations, millions of parents across the globe have wished that this BIG ORDER from Lincoln was being taught in their child’s school.

“He will have to learn, I know,
That all men are not just,
All men are not true,
But teach him also,
That for every scoundrel there is a hero,
For every selfish politician,
There is a dedicated leader!

Teach him that for every enemy there is a friend,
It will take time I know but teach him if you can,
That a dollar earned is of far more value than five found!

Teach him to learn to lose and also to enjoy winning
Steer him away from envy, if you can
And teach him the secret of quiet laughter
Let him learn early, that the bullies are the easiest to lick!

Teach him if you can the wonder of books
But also give him time to ponder over the eternal mystery of birds in the sky,
Bees in the sun and flowers on the green hillside
In school teach him it is far more honorable to fail than to cheat!

Teach him to have faith in his own ideas,
Even if everyone tells him they are wrong
Teach him to be gentle with gentle people
And tough with the tough!

Try to give my son the strength, not to follow the crowd
When everyone is getting into the bandwagon!

Teach him to listen to all men,
But teach him also to filter all he hears on a screen of truth,
And take away the good that comes through!

Teach him if you can how to laugh when he is sad
Teach him there is no shame in tears!

Teach him to scoff at cynics,
And to beware of too much sweetness!

Teach him to sell his brawn and brain to the highest of bidders,
But never to put a price tag on his heart and soul!

Teach him to close his ears to a howling mob
And to stand and fight if he thinks he is right!

Treat him gently, but do not cuddle him,
Because only the test of fire makes fine steel!

Let him have the courage to be impatient,
Let him have the patience to be brave!

Teach him always to have sublime faith in himself,
Because then he will always have sublime faith in mankind
This is big order but see what you can do
He is such a fine little fellow, my son!

Yours sincerely,
Abraham Lincoln

Astonishing. years of unix administration and never stumbled across this goodie?

SS: The Saviour

The ss command is used to dump socket statistics. It allows showing information similar to netstat command. It can display more TCP and state information than other tools. It is a new, incredibly useful and faster (as compare to netstat) tool for tracking TCP connections and sockets. SS can provide information about:

• All TCP sockets.
• All UDP sockets.
• All established ssh / ftp / http / https connections.
• All local processes connected to X server.
• All the tcp sockets in state FIN-WAIT-1 and much more.

Most Linux distributions are shipped with ss and many monitoring tools. Being familiar with this tool helps enhance your understand of what's going on in the system sockets and helps you find the possible causes of a performance problem.

Task: Display All TCP Sockets

# ss -t -a

Task: Display All UDP Sockets

# ss -u -a

Task: Display All Established SMTP Connections

# ss -o state established '( dport = :smtp or sport = :smtp )'

Task: Display All Established HTTP Connections

# ss -o state established '( dport = :http or sport = :http )'

Task: Find All Local Processes Connected To X Server

# ss -x src /tmp/.X11-unix/*

Task: List All The Tcp Sockets in State FIN-WAIT-1

List all the TCP sockets in state -FIN-WAIT-1 for our httpd to network 202.54.1/24 and look at their timers:
# ss -o state fin-wait-1 '( sport = :http or sport = :https )' dst 202.54.1/24

The source code can be obtained from:
http://devresources.linux-foundation.org/dev/iproute2/download/ and more this is included in CentOS5.2.

Corporate India loses $8 billion in power cut

God save India. Look at this below

The India Inc has suffered a loss of $8.64 billion (Rs.43, 205 crore) in the power downturn in the year 2008-2009, says a study by the Manufacturers' Association for Information Technology (MAIT) and Emerson Network Power (India). The study was an in-depth analysis of the impact of downtime in corporate India due to high occurrence of power outages, loss incurred are scheduled and non scheduled expenses, which is just double the loss incurred in the year 2003, when it was only Rs.22, 000 crore.

More @ http://www.siliconindia.com/shownews/Corporate_India_loses_864_Billion_in_power_downturn-nid-57260.html

DNS Debugging for new ISP

Another very important thing to learn as a Sysadmin working with different ISP's.

We recently got a killer offer from an ISP for a big chunk of bandwidth (You know more bandwidth at cheaper cost doesn't hurt ;) more movies, videos, audio are more fun). I am a big fan of recession at these times.

After installing the MUX in our side we configured a local DHCP server serving requests and moved a small portion of the network to the new connection. This connection was fast initially and generally grew slower and worser. We were not sure on what caused this. Digging deeper i could see a initial name resolution was taking a hell lot of time. After a lot of trouble shooting found a caching name server on the local network solved this problem.

We hit this as a result of DNS requests from all clients flooding the DNS of the service provider, which in turn was delaying using DNS delay for around 4 secs. Taken into account the number of connections the part of the network would make (18 clients connected to one server) almost all requests were being dropped or timed out by the DNS.

This a very tricky problem to solve. With a team of developers breating down my neck, added to the pressure.

Bct team

This is the bct team. Look at sunil digging deeper into the bugs section. Big fish missing here is rams.
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I am wondering is this is true: !!!Istanbul face recog cameras scan 15000 faces/sec!!!

"Istanbul's popular (and crowded) Istiklal shopping, cafe and restaurant street is being outfitted with 64 wirelessly controlled, tamperproof face recognition cameras attached to a computer system capable of scanning 15000 faces in a moving crowd per second for a positive match. The Samanyolu article (badly translated by Google) states that 3 cameras are in place so far and that if trials are successful, this will mark the first time such a system, previously used by Scottland Yard and normally reserved for indoor security use, is put to use in a public outdoor setting. It also notes that each camera controlled by the system is capable of "locking onto" the faces of known criminals and pickpockets detected in the crowd and "tracking" their movements for up to 300 metres before the next, closer placed camera takes over.

While the article doesn't state it outright, it would appear likely that the outdoor face recognition system, if "successful", will be expanded to other crowded areas of Istanbul as well, which has already seen a dazzling increase in the number of installed plain-vanilla (non face-recognizing) CCTV cameras in recent years.

This comes after Istanbul's two signature Bosphorus bridges have become passable by vehicle with a mandatory vehicle windscreen mounted electronic pass only, subway and bus tickets in the city have gone electronic, vote tallying in municipal and national elections has become fully computerized and future plans for mandatory biometric ID cards for all Turkish citizens have been announced by the government.

The ruling "moderate Islamist" AKP party appears to frame these and other e-government initiatives as "keeping step with the times", "keeping step with other major world cities" and "making living safer, easier and more efficient through the targeted use of electronic technology".

Its secular critics on the other hand argue that everything and everyone under the sun is rapidly becoming "electronically trackable" thanks to the omnipresence of mobile phones and gratuitous overuse and overapplication of these installed electronic systems, and that these systems will, eventually, form a dense surveillance grid that could turn daily life for Turks (and secular Turks critical of the current government in particular) into living in a veritable Big Brother House.

Is the historic city of Istanbul, which will be the European Capital of Culture
in 2010, turning into the new London?"

Lunch time

This is my bay being used as lunch room, personal conference room cum technical resolution area ;)
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Blog from bb

Blog from blackberry
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Stay Focused - Good reading

I was reading about staying focused. On this monday morning i was shuffling between projects and plans for this week. Diverting away a bit from things to do and thing to complete before the end of this week. I read a very good book about staying focussed. Though it took 3 hrs of my time i think i would achieve better results by the end of this week. Below are summaries.

Staying focused can be very difficult. In a book titled, 'As a Man Thinketh' by James Allan, the problem is front and center. The book is short and right to the point. The author describes the process of how thoughts determine our life. We bring about what we think about.

This leads to the question on how to stay focused on results we would like to bring about, and to keep the mind right on target.

1. Exert your willpower. It's the hardest thing in the world to stay focused, but you must force your thoughts to stop straying and return to your point.
2. Discover a purpose to help drive you. We usually lack motivation or a purpose. Have you ever thought that a purpose is like a driving force just like fuel for a car? Without a reason that is big enough, you will hardly make it. If the purpose is big enough, then the how always takes care of itself. Failure is not even a consideration.
3. Clarify your goal. Is it the million dollars you have in mind or is it the boat you can buy if you accomplish the goal? Work toward your stated purpose in incremental steps - boat today, a million dollars tomorrow.
4. Repeat your "focus mantra." What you think about is what you bring about, just as explained in the book referenced earlier. Your mind is affectionately occupied with the boat. You read about it, you dream about it, you check in newspapers, you visit boat stores, and slowly but surely create enough thought energy in this pervasive thought to materialize all the things, people, opportunities and money necessary to bring the boat into your life. Along the way, you did not dream of having 1 million dollars, you dreamed of the boat as your first focused goal. The thought of the boat becomes tangible to you in an emotionally charged way that the million dollars does not yet.
5. Be sure your desire for the purpose is strong enough. The most important question to ask before you try to achieve any goal is, Do you really have a strong desire to make it, a powerful purpose that motivates you, that magic glitter in your eyes when you think about it, the certainty to make it? If not, the effort will be futile. Just search deeper and keep looking for that which really sparks you.
6. Don't be afraid to dream a big dream. To keep your mind focused you need big, bold goals. The bigger your purpose the less trouble you will have to achieve what you have in mind.
7. Take a break every so often. This help you maintain focus and refresh your mind. It is recommended you take a 5 minute break every 30 minutes of work.

TIPS

• Do not make a goal out of something you do not have already as a great passion in your life. Use something that inspires you and gives you certainty and confidence. Then plan it much bigger and go for it.
• Do not mistake envy with a desired goal. Envy makes you weak. Inspiration and passion makes you strong.

Sources and Citations

http://www.marcusfreudenmann.com/books.html

My first post

At last getting into this new habit of blogging. I am telling myself to be consistent.

I wanted to blog after reading a lot of useful blogs about howto's and a lot of information. I have always been at the receiving end, debugging issues and finiding solutions by googling around and looking at others posts. Alas wanted to be a contributer. Whew writing is not simple.

My friend Sree's blog was very good(slashgnu.blogspot.com).

Will write more, once i am done with my day job.