05.10.07
Posted in Work at 11:37 pm by iosakwe
So as I have been focusing on Systems Administration in the past years, the current that propelled my stream of passion to embrace technology is running dry. Its becoming more and more mundane, build a server to standards, hand it over to Developers or Application folks who design it to match a business logic which morphs into a product that is either generating revenue or calibrating analytics. I guess that infrastructure work exists to initialize the processing of raw material. I detest the notion of not knowing the specifics of what purpose the application serves, especially if I built the server. I am now interested in being closer to the final product, the business as some say, further down the value chain instead of at the beginning. In light of this, I am considering switching my major to Quantitative Methods and Modeling from Computer Information Systems. Incidently ,to my vantage point, Baruch University has a policy mandating all undergrads to complete liberal and business requisites before stabbing at your major. This affords me to divert majors without sacrificing any credits — sweet. “Who moved my cheese” advocates welcoming change with open arms and past experience also thought me the same, but that’s another blog. The short end of this babble is that I don’t want to be another ignorant IT chap. Being technically sound, its time to I understand the industry that employs me, diversify my experience and contribute to solving complex business agendas - not just routine actions. You can say I got inspired by working for a mid size leader in Algorithm Trading; furthermore, financial markets aren’t what they used to be and with regulations like Reg NMS, the industry is reshaping. As I embark on this path to QMM, I hope it will avail me to new opportunities. I very aware that this is not walk in the park but more like a hurricane however I will just have to weather it. The discipline basically comprises of Financial Mathematics, Algorithms, Statistics, Mathlab, R, S and SAS Programming. I have lots to learn but then again, the adage says ‘little by little is how you eat hot soup’. I recall telling a mentor back at Merrill Lynch that, “I am on a mission” and he called me “mission man” - indeed, that I am.
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04.02.07
Posted in Random at 2:04 pm by iosakwe
Well, not exactly what i expected, but our new addition, Bagel, is no longer with the family. Not that she wasn’t quite a charm, I kind of enjoyed playing with her but there were a few caveats. The first and most important of all was “the housebreaking” issue. As much as I thought she was adorable, i could not stand the elimination process. Nope, not one bit, this invoked two types of feelings in me.. disgust and vexation. Disgust because the urine was so THICK, and she passed water nonchalantly on the floor, which if unattended would leak under the stove, cabinets and be impossbile to clean. This really stunk up our tiny one bedroom… and vexation because she somehow could not learn to use the wee pad, no matter how many times i tainted it with her urine.Yes I know, “Give her time”, Rome was not built in one night, but nope, I really did not have the bandwidth to squeeze in household breaking. Not with my current schedule of school and work, it would have been too much of a sacrifice and not mention disgrunt when I returned from school and work to a urine reeked apartment. I wasn’t the only one impacted, as calm as Chiaki appeared, she was in the same boat with me inwardly. The URINE, yuck :-(, the URINE. The stench it imprinted on our apartment really thwarted our typical romantic weekend together. I was sleep deprived, because I wanted to catch Bagel in the act and try to acclimate her to the weepad. The other end of the stick was my male cats, Lilo and Moshi, who were totally whacked by this. I think it was a combination of both fear and jealously. Initially they did what every animal would do if you trespass into their territory. They hissed and snarled at Bagel various times, who just returned an innocent look to them. Then the jealously sort of morphed into stress, They were not eathing at all, very unlikely of them - not even accepting Cat treats from me, which they historically never turned down. Those 3 elements put a lid on the bottle and she had to go! Factually, Bagel the bulldog, was a doll at heart and very loveable, I am sure with time, the boys would have got used to her but at this period, I prefer a urine free apartment over her. Hence, she was returned to “Pets on Lex” the following day in less than 24 hours.
Lessons (re)learned:
(A) Never act on emotions, be as well informed of any decisions.
(B) Lilo and Moshi are very very jealous animals.
Goodbye BAGEL, I am very sure that you will find someone who can appreciate your charming personality, warm loving and urine.
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03.31.07
Posted in Random at 10:16 am by iosakwe
So this saturday was unlike every other for Chiaki and I. Around 10:30am, we got up with intentions to have the laundry done, eat breakfast, watch some HBO show, nap for about 3-4 hours, wake up either go the gym or study before talking about Dinner. I called to cancel an appointment with an accountant for tax preparations, we did get the laundry prepped and dropped off some dry cleaning and then decided to hunt for breakfast. We initially stopped by Sables on 78th and 2nd avenue to get our seafood favorite, lobster salad with tasters, and then ventured up to Lexington and 77th for salad from “Pick a Bagel”. Once we got up to Lexington, we hit up the salad bar and got fixed, the waitress so kind of slow, took like 10 minutes to process my credit card, then we decided to grab soup on Lexington and 78th. Now this is when things get interesting. Half way between 77th and 78th on Lex was a Pet Store called “Pets on Lex”. So we decided to peep around for some puppies, something that we had planned on once when I finished school and when Chiaki finished her CFA exams. While in the pet store, we spotted a dock leaf bulldog puppy. We asked one of the store employees if we get in a closer proximity of the pup and that was all she wrote. She (the pup) started jumping on us and literally put my finger in her mouth. I was intrigued by her bullish characteristics, ugly grin with genuine eyes, her palate was so soft too, she was extremely friendly and immediately started jumping at me. Chiaki fell love too and asked “can we keep her?” and so we brought her home, making our current family of 2 Cats, Lilo and Moshi, and now her. We were a bit slumped on what to name her, some names we thought of was Haru, Patch, Chloe, J, Eve . Even my nephew, Jason, suggested that we make use a name that composes of our individual suggestions… But we decided that we call her “BAGEL”. why Bagel, cause we initially went to get food from “Pick a Bagel” and ended up getting a pup. Therefore, that seem to be the best choice.. So.. “Welcome BAGEL, our new addition to the osakwe family. We will see how long this lasts 
”
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11.28.06
Posted in Work at 5:08 pm by iosakwe
So following up on Part 1, we actually know a little bit more about LDAP now, but in this post, we will include an Automounted home directory. Before we delve into the notes, I just want to cover some essentials. In LDAP vernacular, A schema is a collection of object classes and attributes that define your entry. In Posix standard, a user account entry must have certain characteristics such as a shell, uid, gid,.. In this case, the attribute “shell -> /bin/bash” will be provided by the “objectclass: posixAccount”, ,while the attribute “userPassword: -> xxxxx” will be stored in the objectclass shadowAccount. This can be applicable to any entries you want to store in your directory, such as People, hosts, groups, netgroups, printers, etc. These are usually stored in a hierachical form of . See Getting Started for more details.
1.) So we are going to setup a directory server and add a user account.
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11.20.06
Posted in Random at 5:42 am by iosakwe
Its been a while since I last updated this, many things have come to pass, I left the Department of Info. Tech. & Telecom. in June 06, and now work for the Investment Technology Group, UNIX Engineering team for about 7 months. ITG is a specialized brokerage leader in Algorithm Trading, Transaction cost analysis and a range of other services that span the entire trading process. Its a medium sized company with over 1000 employees globally. I must say that thus far, I am impressed with the environment and company’s policies, (lots of perks). I have been working 2nd shift, which works well with school and hopefully, it will augment my bachelor degree conquest. so.. lets see, what else happened since my last blog, .. I got married. My (then) girlfriend, Chiaki, and i have been together for 6+ years, and now, we are officially a unit, once school is under my belt then kids are next.. and on another plate, I am now wrapping up on Fall 07 school session… by the end of this year, this will be 2 more classes (JPN 1002 + STAT 2000 = 6 credits) completed. so I have about another 60+ credits to go making me a lower junior.
That sums up my catch up session, hopefully, I will have time to update this diary more often. Also, look out for my follow up to the LDAP article soon.
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02.23.06
Posted in Work at 5:54 am by iosakwe
In my environment, we have about 400+ Sun servers, mostly Sun fires that range from v210s to 15k domains.Managing these servers individually could be an nightmare, especially for user, device and host management.. Can you imagine, editting >400 servers just to add a user.. Oucch! In order to streamline such processes, a reliable and robust method to attaining such tasks was necessary, which brings us to the meat of this discussion.
For the past couple of months, I have been designing an infrastructure that will scale reliability to meet our needs, henceforth. For naming services, we chose LDAP because it’s much more flexible, extensible (most ISV’s have builtin API support), better security model and built-in replication framework. Most establishments that i worked at such as Morgan Stanley and ML, NIS was the name service of choice but these environments were built many years ago when LDAP was not even ratified. Some even incorporated kerberos to get over the security setback in NIS. LDAP, on the other hand, is ideal for newer shops that just building out an Infrastructure from scratch and even those mature environments that currently rely on the Yellow Pages (NIS). One of many attributes of LDAP over NIS is the replication mechanism. In NIS, when the master makes a change, the slaves need to explicity pull the specific map or the server pushes the entire database. In other words, if you add a new user, you need to update at least 3 maps, password, shadow and netgroup. To add insult to injury you need to make sure the slaves are aware, say you have a password database of over ~100000 users, that means you are pushing the same database that already exists on the slave just to update one attribute. This can costly because of the load on the network especially during business hours. One solution I saw to this was to store the changes in a database that gets propagated to the clients during off hours. While this was an ideal solution, it had limitations. If you needed to build a new server or add a new user, you needed to wait until the 24 hours for the user to be globally defined. LDAP, unlike NIS, will replicate only the deltas thus minimizing the load of flooding your production network to update one attribute . Another cool feature of LDAP, based on the x.500 uses a hierachy name space whereas NIS uses flat based name space. Extended security framework (ACL) that can applied down to the attribute level via aci (access control instructions). Lastly, Sun One Directory 5.2 allows you to have 4 multi-master servers now. This boosts service availability because password updates, syncs, new attributes, etc.. can be applied virtually any one of the RW (read write) Replicas even 3 masters are down.
These are just some of the nice features about LDAP, there are many more than the minute points i mentioned here. Stay tuned for my follow up to HA computing.
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02.14.06
Posted in Random at 9:10 pm by iosakwe
Hey there,
Welcome to my humble contribution to the Virtual Galaxy. My name is Ikenna Osakwe but most people call me Ike, especially my American friends. Currenly I am a UNIX administrator for DOITT and a full time student at Baruch City University of New York. I am majoring in Computer Science with a focus on the business side. Not really looking to delve into management but I believe the best technologists understand business processes and can mesh both to solve problems. At this stage, I actually enjoy tackling, integrating and solving problems… Possibly many years in my career, this perception will change. It’s left to be determined.
My journals will encompass different things that go thru this mind of my mine. I love technology but will also be talking about Politics, Ethics and Aspirations. Please come back and visit me some time, hopefully you can enjoy my thoughts.
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