Coolrazor Blog

God is the strength of my heart

“But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me.” 2 Corinthians 12:9

That is the current theme running in my life right now. No matter what I face, I always have Christ within me with all I’ll ever need to make it through. His grace is sufficient for me to sustain myself and charge ahead even when I think I can’t. Further, it is when I appear weak and He is the one that ends up sustaining me that His power is most glorified. This is because God is doing the impossible, making an imperfect being do a good work or just survive.

That is my current theme because I can’t stand my current job right now. My boss is irritating and I want to quit really badly. However, I have a feeling that I’m supposed to stay put… for now anyway. So, the only way that I am going to make it is if I remember that His grace is sufficient for me.

I cannot make it on my own and thus need God’s help. In that way, God is the strength of my heart. He is the ultimate provider (Jehovah Jireh) and provides that strength that carries me through.

The funny thing is that although I realize my dependence on Him when I am in “most need”, the reality is that I am always, at all times, in “most need” of Him and His strengthening. It is façade to think that I ever need Him less, but my circumstances make me think so. The key is to retain, as much as I can, a state of repentance, lest I forget the cross.

Tags: God, strength

Faith and Promises

There are times in our lives when we are faced with a moment of truth. For me I have had to come to terms with faith. Not faith in God’s existence, for He is too obvious in His existence for me to question it.  Rather, I have had to ask myself about God’s promises. Does God really intend to be faithful to me in His promises? What has He in fact promised me?

“And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.” Romans 8:28

God has plans for us and thus plans for me. If I truly love Him and submit to Him and His will, things will work out ok in accordance with His will and what He determines as “ok”. I must be faithful to Him for Him to be faithful to me, on some level. As the verse stated, “…good of those who love him…”

However, I find that I still grasp on to my own reality as if I could shape it myself. I still, even now, try to bend my own world to my own purposes whereas there is a perfect plan already in place.

“Our wills and fates do so contrary run
That our devices still are overthrown;
Our thoughts are ours, their ends none of our own.” (Hamlet, 3.2.208), Player King

I work against what is set and yet to no avail. I fight what I cannot change, but why do I fight the better purpose set before me anyway? I lean on my own feeble understanding. So, all that’s left is:

“Though I walk in the midst of trouble, you preserve my life; you stretch out your hand against the anger of my foes, with your right hand you save me.  The LORD will fulfill his purpose for me; your love, O LORD, endures forever—do not abandon the works of your hands.” Psalm 138:7-8

I am in His hands and I have a part to act out in the grand play unfolding before time itself. I understand this intellectually, but it is still hard to accept amidst the turmoil surrounding me.

“But he said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.’” 2 Corinthians 12:9a

That becomes my battle cry as I have nothing else to grasp on to. There is nothing in me to save me, but His grace is sufficient for me. Now I must grab hold on to the Faithful One. If I am fortunate He will be El Roi (God of Seeing, who opens our eyes) for me in this season. In the end I must believe he is Yeshua (He will save) and I will put my faith in Him.

Amidst my clouded understanding of what is going on I must have faith despite the thoughts that depict contrary.

“Scepticism is the beginning of Faith.” Oscar Wilde

I must have faith that God will do as He promises and will act out everything to His will. For my part, if I claim to follow Christ, I must put my trust in Him thus having faith even when I do not understand.

“Faith is deliberate confidence in the character of God whose ways you may not understand at the time.”  Oswald Chambers

God knows what is going on in His head, though I do not.

Tags: faith

Where am I? (Poem)

Where am I?  Have I lost my way?

I can’t see if it is the night or day

Maybe I’m stricken dark and blind

A light in the dark I cannot find

Where am I?  Tossed in the cold fray

The past is so distant and the future so far

I can’t make sense of the feelings that mar

The memories that hurt, I don’t recall why

I retreat to my cave and regress to being shy

Remembering the past and hinting a future scar

To what end is it anyway?  This worrisome view

Who cares what might be when I can be new

I’m not stuck, but placed where I am and secure

Tomorrow is tomorrow, for now I just endure

Where am I?  I am here today in one hue

Sometimes I get overwhelmed with memories of the past.  It gets bad when I forget the lessons or reasons behind the memories.  I’ll then focus on the feelings and other negativity surrounding the memories.  Then the past projects a darker future for me.  In these times, all I can see is a dark possibility of things to come.  At times like these, it is sometimes best to refocus on the here and now.  …but, today I forgot about today and lived in a future created by an unclear past.

Tags: Poetry

A computer needle in a network haystack

I came into work on Monday and people were already stirring. I overheard some people saying that they couldn’t connect to their L drive or the internet. It didn’t take long before I found out that half of our users were unable to access the internet, intranet or shared drives. It was bad, real bad. This was likely costing us large sums of money in lost man hours.

I went to our datacenter and took a look at our Catalyst 5500 multilayer switch (the critical piece of equipment that connects 90% of our computers, printers, servers and other network devices together). Our Catalyst 5500 had solid green lights on all its used ports. This meant that we had, presumably, enormous broadcast traffic. Something was flooding the network with data. This is like having a person in a crowded room with a bull horn at full blast; no one else can communicate or at least communicate well.

Next, I went to a problem computer and found out why it wasn’t connecting to the network: bad IP address. The computer had an IP of 192.168.1.77 and our network doesn’t use that IP range. The computer was set to acquire an IP dynamically via a DHCP server. We already had a DHCP server that was setup and working correctly. There must have been a rogue DHCP server on the network.

My boss and I started calling suspects who may have setup a new router or switch (which they aren’t supposed to do) on our network. Either no one we called had installed a new network device or they weren’t being honest. So, my boss and I started walking to parts of the network where there are known devices that have DHCP server capabilities. We checked a few and none of them were the cause of our network woes.

My boss had an idea: trace route. He asked if we could trace route to the DHCP server. I said no, because there aren’t any hops in the way to it. You would just get an immediate response back saying, “hello, you found me, right next to you somewhere on your network”. This would not have helped us locate the device.

We went back to a computer with a broken network connection and decided to try some sleuthing. I first tried to get the IP address of the rogue DHCP server. To do this all I had to do was open up a command prompt and type in “ipconfig /all”. This showed me that the IP of the DHCP server was 192.68.1.1. I thought that I’d then figure out its MAC address by using the ARP command. ARP correlates IPs and MAC addresses. What’s cool about MAC addresses is that they don’t change and the first half of the MAC address tells you the hardware vendor of the device. So, we could figure out if it was a Linksys, D-Link or another brand.

I typed in “ARP 192.168.1.1” to make the computer look up the MAC for the IP. Then I had to display the ARP table to see what it resolved: “ARP -a” This was a good start. Then my boss brought up the idea of trace route again. I again explained that it probably would not help us. But, I realized that I was there at a command prompt and it would not hurt to try it, so we did. I typed in “tracert 192.168.1.1” It came back showing that it successfully made the trace, which is what I expected. What I did not expect was for trace route to bring back the hostname of the device. On our network, for computers we always set the computer name (hostname) to the serial number of the computer. What is cool is that we had just finished an asset audit this summer where we wrote down all of the serial numbers, hostnames and locations of all our devices. So, I looked up the hostname in our documentation and found the device: a desktop computer in a certain room.

After this discovery we went down to where the computer was and found it. We immediately unplugged it and I took it back to my cubicle for diagnosis. Once we got it off the network, we had a user with a bad network connection reboot and then their network connection worked. We had found the culprit: this blasted desktop computer. We let everyone on the network know that they needed to reboot their computer (easiest way to get them to release/renew their IPs without help) for their network connections to be fixed.

I booted up the problem machine at my desk without connecting it to the network and started to poke around. At first we were theorizing that it was a virus, a really nasty virus. I ran a full blown virus scan and it turned up nothing. Then, I started to go looking into the network settings on the machine. I found something very strange: Internet Connection Sharing was enabled. At this point it all started to become clear. Internet Connection Sharing (ICS) is used to share an internet connection between computers when you don’t have a router. To do this, ICS sets up a DHCP server on the computer to issue out IP addresses. This DHCP server component was hijacking our network.

In the end, this is what we determined, someone had tried to setup ICS on the desktop to get on to the internet. That desktop was not supposed to be connected to the network at all, which is why we hadn’t set it up. So, someone who was confused tried setting up ICS (which would not help no matter how you did it in this case) to connect to the network to browse the internet. ICS setup a DHCP server which brought down a large portion of our network. Since there were lots of computers with bad IP address out there and everyone was trying to connect to the internet, lots and lots of bad connection queries were being sent and that was why our network was being flooded with data as well. The computers that had the right IPs were experiencing extreme network latency and that was why.

The amazing thing is that out of 400+ network devices, we were able to find the one that caused all the problems and do it in about an hour. Talk about a computer needle in a network haystack.

Did Jesus take risks?

One of my assignments for school this week involved writing about how Jesus was supposedly a “calculated risk” taker.  The teacher opened up the topic for discussion and here is an excerpt from my response to the idea:

Jesus knew what He was doing [in life and ministry] and knew the outcome beforehand. In a large way, His foreknowledge of future events makes it even more amazing that He went through with the plan of our salvation. Opening the door to the concept of risk means that there must have been a possibility of failure. However, if you follow God, you will NOT fail. There is no risk in submitting to God, in a sense. You may not get what YOU want or desire, but God’s will is perfect and He has you in mind: “’For I know the plans I have for you,’ declares the LORD, ‘plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.’”Jeremiah 29:11 We risk missing out on a “full life” (John 10:10) by grasping on to our desires and to our wills. When we submit to God we really get what’s best for us, even if we don’t understand it. Who knows better than we do about what’s best for us? God. There is no risk in following God, just the illusion of risk brought on by our human understandings and desires.