Well, it’s late, but about an hour ago I finished Phase I of the phone project. All the old jacks are working just the same, though none of them need DSL filters now, and everything goes through the new termination blocks. It’s complete overkill for the number of phone lines in the house (one) and the number of phones currently in the house (three), but this will allow for future expansion as well as keep everything neat, tidy and easy to manage. Read on if you care, or just look at the pretty pictures.
Category Archives: Computers & Networking
The Battle Begins
Thought I’d written something here about this already, but I guess not. I ordered (and have received) all the stuff I need to start redoing the phone lines in the house. There’s a lot of complete crap in places – lines that are run to jacks with telephone *cord* (like what you use to plug your phone into the wall) instead of proper cable, places where there’s three splices in a row on the same line for no reason.. it’s no wonder our phones are noisy, though some of that really is the fault of the lines coming in. So I picked up a butt set for testing, a 66 block and two 110 blocks (one 110 will have the phone drops and incoming lines, the other will be a bridge, and the 66 will link the permanent house wiring with the telco lines and whole house DSL filter – overkill, but it’ll be clean when it’s done), whole house DSL filter, punchdown tool, and a probe amplifier for the later inevitable “oh crap which wire is this one” moments. Plus a couple adapters for hooking up to test things. All in all, quite a lot of equipment, and good quality. Photos of the stuff, plus the beginning of the project (namely, the “before” shots) available in the gallery.
I’m hoping I can pick up the plywood this weekend and mount it to the wall, and I can start Phase I – installing the new equipment, having the NID and protector moved over, and reterminating all the existing wires to the new blocks. Then Phase II will happen right after the data network lines are run throughout the house, since I’ll be using the same CAT5e cable for phones and data. Extra benefit is that the telecom network as-is won’t go down, just the jacks will be phased out as new ones come into use.
New WordPress Toys
Over the last few days, I’ve installed a few WordPress plugins, both here and at the radio club’s website. One is Akismet, which as thus far done a wonderful job of snagging spam comments posted here, and not even emailing me about them. They never made it to the pages anyway, because new accounts have to have one approved comment before they can post; but now I don’t have to even see the emails about them, which is nice.
The other plugin is called PHPEnkoder and is related to email. Normally, you’d see an email address like this: Email me! The problem with these links is that they can easily be harvested – a script can read the “mailto” part of the link, and know to expect an email address. There’s ways around that, like using Unicode characters to display the address in a browser but require something to decode them first, but those are easily foiled with a little bit of scripting and not computationally intensive. Instead, PHPEnkoder works by creating a self-referential JavaScript bit that must be executed on the browser in order to display the link. If you have JavaScript turned off, it just shows up with a tag to say “email hidden; must have javascript enabled”. But it keeps spammers away because not only do they not really use JavaScript in their harvesters (it’s CPU intensive), but also because the code itself takes time to execute. Not very long for a single person at a browser, in fact the page where I first wanted to set this up (shown here) only takes an extra second to load. But if a spammer had to load a full Java implementation into their program, and deal with all that CPU load over time.. it’s not worth it to them.
So it’s not perfect.. but it’s much better than it was before.
It Said What?
I’ve mentioned before that Leigh and I run IRC servers. You can connect to irc.srhuston.net (port 9999 over SSL) or wiretap.leighbert.net (same port) if you like. Well, I also have an Eggdrop bot that runs in there, and has an AI module compiled into it (which I ported a long time ago, and some others have taken the reigns for it thankfully). His name is KupaKawfe. ‘Cause everybody needs a KupaKawfe in the morning. And today, he said this:
<KupaKawfe> AstroComp: E) setup the nfs shares in netinfo and ignore the fact that the addresses have to mail things that annoy me regularly :p.
AstroComp is Leigh’s nickname in there.. now, I’m starting to wonder if that bot listening to our conversations is really a good idea…
Uh.. Duh?
There’s some things about computers that still crack me up now and then. Take this photo, for example. I didn’t think any motherboards existed anymore that would still do this:
Now, for those that might not get the “joke” here, allow me to point out that at the time there was *no* keyboard attached to this computer. Now re-read the error message, and see if you can figure out the error in their logic. Hint: Imagine a VCR that comes with a tape to show you how to install and use your VCR…
Oh Goodie!
Looks like spammers have found the site, and are relentlessly hitting it with comment spam. Maybe if they had half a brain (they never do, why else would they engage in this kind of crap) they’d realize that the stuff they’re posting goes as far as my moderation inbox and gets deleted. Oh well… you can lead a horticulture, but you can’t make her think.
In other news, I’ll have photos from the wedding I attended this weekend up in the gallery soon. I don’t have that many, unfortunately – they requested there be no photos during the ceremony, and during the reception I was chatting with so many friends (and only really saw the bride and groom once, which was of course after I took the cameras back to the truck) that I only got some photos of the folks at our table. And while I’m uploading stuff, I should probably upload the ones of a previous wedding I went to, where I did get quite a few shots off – they’re in iPhoto on the laptop, just never made it up to the gallery. Stay tuned; maybe if I bring the CF cards to work with me I’ll sort through them there today.
How It Started
My last post gave some information on ROT13, and why I think it can be fun. This one is for some of the conversations I’d had before, including the one when I decided that this was the way to deal with ICQ spammers.
Fun With ROT13
So every now and then, I’ll get some idiot who doesn’t know me and tries to start a conversation with me on ICQ or AIM. Usually these idiots either try to get personal information out of you, or just want to “be friends”, probably so they can try to come over and marry you or something. Either way, they never take ‘no’ for an answer. So awhile ago, I started having some fun instead. Since I’d tried telling them to bugger off and it didn’t work, I figured it might be interesting if no matter what they say, my reply was unintelligible. So I went for it :>
Oh, Was That All?
In the post “Anatomy of a Disaster, Part 2” the folks at Dreamhost explain what all caused some of the problems seen with their service lately. The problems were obviously complex, considering seven different people from Cisco couldn’t even put their finger on it. But it seems that things have settled down for them, and are running much smoother (I posted before about the low load on the two shell accounts I have, and sure enough I’ve seen my sites loading faster and performing better than they have in quite some time, even before these problems were noticed.)
Not only their solving the issue, but the fact that they’ll come out and say what was wrong for those of us who understand the concepts (and they’re not afraid to say, “Yeah, we screwed up on that one” either) is proof enough to me that they’re deserving of my patronage. And should you be looking for a hosting provider, you should look at them too.
At Least I’m Not Them
The folks at Dreamhost, which is the provider that runs this site, have had a bad month or two. Between router problems, power problems in their datacenter, and people whining about how their baby sister could run a network better then these folks could (sorry, I doubt it). But, with their last upgrade in their datacenter which entailed a rather expensive chunk of Cisco gear, I saw something I haven’t seen in awhile on both of my shell accounts:
zagnut:~$ uptime
19:12:38 up 34 days, 14:35, 4 users, load average: 1.28, 1.46, 1.40
[laurel]$ uptime
19:14:11 up 3 days, 4:40, 4 users, load average: 1.78, 2.31, 2.34
I guess when you’re used to seeing the load averages anywhere from 100 to 300, seeing it below two is kinda scary. But it also shows just how much network issues were causing problems (if I had to guess, and I do since I don’t work there, I’d say NFS issues due to processes deadlocking on I/O).
Whatever it is/was, good job nailing it down. Now go sleep. I don’t think any of you have in at least a month.