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 :>
Category Archives: Computers & Networking
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.
Whaddya Mean, It’s Not Broken?
That was an interesting few minutes.
This morning, I saw that one of the hosts at work, which is not mine (belongs to HVAC for the control system for the building – tells them about the status of the systems in here, and lets them change things remotely like the temperature of various rooms and such) had gone red and then green again. Now, it was red again, but when I got down there nobody was around next to it. Panel was left open, and you could see the ethernet, serial and power cables where the terminal server used to sit. So I waited, and as soon as I saw it went green I ran downstairs. Since the management station only checks every ~15 minutes for a host’s existance, I was hoping that it came online recently and someone was still sitting next to the box. Sure enough, when I got down there, Nate (I think that was his name, I’m terrible with names – and if somehow you’re reading this and it’s not your name, I apologize) was staring at the blinkenlights and wondering what to do next. I said hello, we exchanged formalities, and I said, “You know, that thing’s not broken.” “Well, we can see it’s there, but we can’t talk to it.” “Yes, I know. But it’s working just fine.”
HVAC And Switches And Firewalls, Oh My
Well, this morning was a bit busy. We had friends over who left around 10 something, and I finally got to sleep around 1 or so. Then at 0250 my cell phone buzzed. “Main server air intake too high: 77 deg F” Well, let’s see what happens in the next few minutes… same message. As I’m getting dressed to come downstairs and have a look at things, it continues to buzz every few minutes as the environmental sensor sends new traps to the management station. I login to it, and sure enough it’s warm – and even one of the machines in the room complained that its drives were getting hot inside the case. While I’m looking at things, I get the magical page: “Server room *WAY* too hot, shutting down Hydra” [our Beowulf cluster]. After watching to be sure Hydra shut down properly, I put on my shoes and left to head into the office, arriving just before 0400.
Big Red Check Screws Up Again – Nobody Surprised
Seems my ISP has once again screwed up my PTR record.. not that long ago, it pointed to the proper hostname for my IP address, and I discovered today that it’s back to pointing to some crappy “static-123-456-78-90” type of hostname. And of course, there’s no place to email to get it fixed, so I have to dig out the phone number that someone gave me to call them back and try to get it fixed again. Though at that point I might just demand that I get some kind of email address so I can deal with this on my terms in the future.
C’mon Speakeasy…
Backup? Sure, Where’s Reverse?
This evening marks another landmark in my home computer network setup – I’ve dug out my old tape drives, and am running a backup right now in fact. Been .. hmm, well, we moved to Ewing in October of 2003, so I guess that was my last backup. Never unpacked and hooked up the drives there, ’cause I didn’t have the room. So this evening I crawled behind the desk, again, and hooked up the cables to get the old DLT2000 plugged in. Grabbed one of my tapes and started a backup. Now I have to figure out a backup schedule, since there’s not nearly as much on the home computer anymore to worry about backing it up nightly. Though I could do other funny things, like running monthly and incremental dumps from the laptop over the network, but I’ll worry about that once I figure out what I’m doing with the desktop (Ideally I could backup the laptop to the desktop’s drive, but I don’t know that I have the room on – or faith in – this drive.) Also dug out and plugged in the DDS drive, but I need to tear that one apart like I did the DLT and get the dust out of it. Also hope to leave the drives off when I don’t need them, unlike before when they were on all the time and constantly sucking dust through. Which might explain the strange noises from the DLT right now, but I hope not since I think I got all the dust out of it. And finally I hope to bring home a couple other tape drives that were slated for trash, one of which is a DLT autoloader that holds 5 tapes at once. In theory, I can write a nice live-ish backup script that can shuffle tapes around as needed, and do everything on there.
Oh, and insight to my humor if you don’t know it already – the title of this post? Old BBS tagline. The name of my overkill backup script? /usr/local/sbin/reverse.sh
FileVault Evil
Since my Macbook Pro was giving me some problems a little while ago, I had decided to turn on FileVault for my home directory. This basically takes your entire home directory, and encrypts it to your login password. So if someone gets ahold of the laptop, and they try to access the files in my home directory, they would all be encrypted (it actually does it by making your home directory an encrypted disk image which must be mounted when you login). Since I’d thought I may have to send it in for repair, I figured this was easier than going through and removing SSH keys, sensitive documents, and all things like that which I wouldn’t want someone else to see. Sounds good, right? Well, it was until around Friday night sometime.
One-Click Easyness
So Stephanie wanted to setup some new stuff on her site for her school. Hey, now that I’m not hosting stuff on my desktop PC anymore, this should be simple. And boy was it. Create a new domain, install WordPress on it, and just now created another domain and will setup a calendar there. As Cartman might say, “that was hella easy.”
Yesterday in general, however, was not. Stephanie ran out to a couple teacher stores, and I decided to try to tackle some of the yard work. Succeeded in taking down a few of the small trees that had taken root in various places where they shouldn’t be, including the one semi-large one in front of the gas meter. I’ll have to call the gas company to figure out how we’re going to get that one out – its roots could be close to the pipe, and I don’t want to chance it since it’s on the “hot side” of the shutoff valve. Not worth the whoops. Got most of the ivy from the front of the house out, but not all of it yet. That shit is massively entangled in there, and not coming out easily. Started digging cylindrical holes in the ground around it, and then pulling up bits and shaking off the dirt from the roots. If I’d started that way, I might have got all of it done instead of how I was pulling it out. Oh well. When Stephanie got home, we got all the stuff into trash bags and cans, and ready for Tuesday’s pickup. And some time this week, she might try to finish getting the ivy out. We seem to have killed the most of the spiders, and I even dug out the tree stump that was in the ground there.
As for now, I think I’m going to plug this in to charge, and go setup the Buddipole in the back yard. Time to get on the air methinks – especially since I haven’t done that since we moved here yet :>
All I Have To Do Is Dream
Well, as of right about now, my wife’s website is also being hosted by Dreamhost after having its registration information transferred to them as well. The registrar I was using before was fine in the past, but these last couple times I’d tried to do simple changes (like updating the IP address of an authoritative name server) nothing happened in what I’d call a reasonable amount of time, so I decided to move the registrations over too. Costs less in the long run, since Dreamhost gives me one free registration, and the others are $9.95/year (before I was paying something like $15.00/year for two years at a shot).
So in the next day or so, my home computer will return to being a router, caching DNS server, and IRC server (You do know IRC, right? Good… irc.srhuston.net 6667 (normal) or 9999 (SSL) to visit). Still contemplating either building a new desktop, or replacing joshua’s routing capabilities with a separate box so I can take it down and play with it without killing my Internet connection. Though the idea of leaving it as a server sounds better, since there’s other things I wouldn’t want to have to kill any time I decide to upgrade it.