Keith Watanabe * NET 2.0

One noticeable thing about my blog recently is that I rarely complain about my job anymore.  In fact, I don't think I've complained once since joining.  That's because the actual type of work that I'm doing is a lot of fun.  Ignoring the little people games people like to play in companies, I think this is one of the more intellectually challenging and fun jobs I've had in a while.

To start off, having overall 8 years now in the IT business, I have to say that I'm at the peak of my abilities and still going stronger day by day.  Before I used to be a little intimidated in doing something simple like setting up an application server because the documentation was an unreadable mess.  These days, everything comes fairly quickly with reading a good tutorial online, some hands on practice then the actual implementation.

Besides, improving my programming skills, I also try to improve my other skills like system administration.  For instance, this week I got a chance to really work with NFS, IPTables/Firewalls, and more of the security aspects of Mysql.  And just yesterday I got my first chance at exploring mod_proxy because of a technical difficulty we're having with one of our servers.  This is actually some fun stuff, especially considering that I've worked very little with these technologies.

Things never go as envisioned but that's the times where you really learn your stuff, especially after conquering a particularly impossible seeming problem.  For instance, the last two days I was experimenting with getting a remote connection setup with Mysql.  We're going to be doing a three layer architecture with a proxy server + application/web server + database backend (actually, it's even more complicated than that since we'll also be doing some NFS stuff, but more on that another day).  So I needed to get the application server to be able to connect to Mysql remotely.  First, I had to try it on a development/testing server.  I've always said that networks are probably one of the most unreliable and confusing pieces of a computer around and it's hard to figure out what to do when you get a failure.  In this case, I had to really dig into the way Mysql was setup from an administrative point of view.  But I soon ran into problems when I did everything one tutorial mentioned and still couldn't do a simple test remote login with the mysql client.

Fortunately, I'm not the only one with similar problems.  I found that the last issue was that iptables had been blocking almost all traffic.  So I had to configure iptables under /etc/sysconfig/iptables and add a few rules to get port 3306 open and allow UDP and TCP traffic to come in.  This nice tutorial shows how to handle this situation.  After restarting iptables, I was able to login.  I had to bang my head against the wall for a few hours, but those are the times when you literally beat the knowledge into your skull.  After such times you really never forget such lessons.

I hope to be able to do more stuff like this at work.  I really want to get my hands dirty with LDAP next.  Although we only have a few machines, I like the idea of having centralized, unified login information.  After I fix up my home system, I'm going to give LDAP a try.  Also, I'm really looking forward to working with mod_proxy.  I've worked with similar tools before in using the ajp/Coyote Connector for Apache to Tomcat.  But this time, I'm going to be configuring a reverse proxy.

There's always more barriers to breakdown with technology and this is the stuff that I really like.