Michael King

My family loves having a live Christmas Tree every year.  What does a live tree need to stay alive?  Water! The Base I have for the Christmas Tree has a pretty good well in it, but with a live tree, it needs to be filled at least twice a day, and four or five times a day the first few days. For years, I've been using a dipstick / funnel combo to check the water level, and refill it without having to bend over and crawl under the tree. It worked really well, especially when I had presents under the tree. I've always wanted to purchase one of the external reservoirs, but I've never seen one that I've liked. This year we're leaving for the weekend a few weeks before Christmas, so I needed one to try to keep the tree alive. Read on to see how I made one.

I spent a while looking how to configure an HP to interoperate with a Cisco switch using VRRP. While doing this, I found that HP likes to use the physical address of the Primary router as the virtual IP address.   This wasn't something I was entirely comfortable with, so I wanted to find how to NOT do that. I found this guy's webpage http://crackedtech.blogspot.com/2012/11/hp-procurve-vrrp-with-different.html

Recently I had to move 80 or so virtual servers from one subnet to another.  The server's all have their IP's assigned via DHCP, and they keep them via DHCP reservations.  I also need to make the IP's reserved in the new scope. This should be easy peasey.

A long time ago, I found this article , which had a great graph with the speeds depicted on it. I lost the graph in an office move, and took a long time to re-find it. Here is the graph I was looking for:

On of the tasks I routinely do at work involves firewalls.  Create configurations for them, Administer them, design deployment strategies for them. Scott Adams posted  this , this week. It neatly summarizes the sentiment the guy deploying the firewall has.