Ken_macleod_has_a_blog!
28 Nov 2004title: Ken MacLeod has a blog! date: 2004-11-28 10:36:32
Who knew? Do yourself a favour and go buy everything this man has written, and read it all. Then read it again. He's just that good.
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title: Ken MacLeod has a blog! date: 2004-11-28 10:36:32
Who knew? Do yourself a favour and go buy everything this man has written, and read it all. Then read it again. He's just that good.
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title: Hey, is this thing on? date: 2004-11-27 23:34:22
Anyone who can tell me who this is (no fair if you saw the earlier entry) and the name of the song will totally get a link on the right-hand side of this blog. Fame and celebrity await!
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title: Great story date: 2004-11-27 13:10:17
I expected that the contractor would be waiting for me with the cables finished when I got there. Nope. I found upon arrival that the electrical contractor doing the installation was not the same company that Iâd been working with before. THAT company was a highly competent bunch, supplying trained workers capable of doing any task in a heavy industrial environment. High voltage cables were an everyday job for these folks. What was out there installing cables was small-town electrical contractor, apparently some sort of âbrother-in-lawâ deal having been made. And while these guys might be fine installing the 277-volt feeders for a Burger King restaurant, they were over their heads in dealing with the 15,000-volt cable they were installing here.
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The core environment in support of research computing comprises
currently of a 200 processor compute cluster and 140 TB storage
facility, which also functions as the central storage facility for
the Western Canada Research Grid.
and NEPTUNE Canada:
As a member of the NEPTUNE Canada DMAS development team, the
successful candidate will be responsible for the installation,
implementation, administration, management, maintenance and
ongoing support of all operating systems, communications systems
and applications systems including hardware, software as well as
networking components necessary to develop the NEPTUNE Data
Management and Archiving System.
Sigh...someday...
Tags: career
title: That's weird: MX vs A record date: 2004-11-21 11:15:46
I run my own web and mail server: thornhill.saintaardvarkthecarpeted.com. I host 6 or 7 domains right now for friends and family. I'm on Shaw Cable, a big-ass ISP up here in Canuckistan. Thornhill is listed as the MX for all the domains I host.
I recently gave up the SOHO package, which for $120/month gave me TV, internet access, the right to run servers and one (1) static IP address. Now I'm a renegade, hiding from the law and running my servers on addresses ladled out by DHCP. I run a client on Thornhill to update EveryDNS.net's records. (Good folks, by the way, and recommended.)
Today I tried SSHing to Thornhill, and it timed out. The websites were
working, and I could ping the rest of the Internet ("ping
255.255.255.255"), so WTF?. I ran host
thornhill.saintaardvarkthecarpeted.com, and got its old static IP
address - the one that hasn't been in use since the end of October. I
tried querying my ISPs nameservers directly using dig, and got the
same result: both kept listing the old, static IP address for
thornhill, but the correct address for
www.saintaardvarkthecarpeted.com. Meanwhile, querying EveryDNS'
nameservers, or any other nameservers I could think of, gave the
correct, current, dynamic address. I queried many times but kept
getting the same result.
No wonder mail seemed a little thin: no one on Shaw would be able to send us mail, and anything we sent to each other would also get lost, too (since we're both still using our ISP's mail server...still trying to get exim to work for me on Rearden, the new firewall box).
I thought about it, and decided it was worth trying to add another
MX record. I added saintaardvarkthecarpeted.com, which has its own
A record, and set the score/cost/preference to one less than
Thornhill's. I figured that maybe Shaw's nameservers would at least
check the MX when trying to bounce mail, or run the queue again, and
see the updated record. I checked again with dig to make sure that
Shaw's nameservers still had the correct IP address for
saintaardvarkthecarpeted.com (yep), and again to see if it'd changed
its mine about Thornhill (nope). Then I asked what they thought about
MX records. Sure enough, two were listed.
Just for fun, I tried querying again about Thornhill's IP address, and fuck me if it hadn't suddenly changed to the new, dynamic, correct one! And not only that, but five minutes later all sorts of email from folks on Shaw started coming in.
Well, that was one nameserver down -- what about the other one? I
queried it for Thornhill's IP, and it was the old one. I queried for
the MX records -- both were listed. I repeated the query for
Thornhill's IP, and bam -- just like that, it had been suddenly
updated to the correct IP.
That's where things ended last night; my wife and I watched Coffee
and Cigarettes (Bill Murray! Iggy and Tom!). But I set up a cron
job to keep querying the nameservers about Thornhill's IP address. And
you know what? 6AM it was fine. 7AM it was fine. But at 8AM I saw the
same behaviour: get Thornhill's old IP address, query MX, get
Thornhill's new IP address.
'Sfucked up, mang. The only thing I can think of is that maybe there's a crapload of DNS servers behind load-balancing, and I'm getting different ones at different times.
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Here's a few more details on the problem with the new Shuttle. First, the card is a DLink DFE-530TX; the Shuttle is an SK43G. If the DLink is connected to my internal network switch, and from there to the gateway box, this sequence will make it freeze:
Interestingly, if the network cable is unplugged, the problem doesn't show up...so it appears there's something about the response to the three-way handshake is what's causing the problems.
I managed to find some reports of wireless cards locking up hard with the VIA KM400 chipset, including cards from DLink. I tried setting all the IRQs to "Reserved" in the BIOS, and that didn't work; however, the card was grabbing IRQ 17, and the BIOS wouldn't let me reserve that one. I also tried upgrading the BIOS, and that didn't work either.
I'd love to pursue it further, but it's now officially the new webserver; I wanted to get it installed while I had a day to fool around with it and get everything working. So far there don't appear to be any problems.
And now, of course, I've got what used to be Thornhill as my desktop machine: P3 500MHz, 640Mb, and a new 160GB Seagate Barracuda. Once again, I'm going with Debian, God's own distro. Still gotta come up with a name for it.
I'm currently trying out KDE and Konqueror -- usually I use IceWM and Firefox, but I thought I'd give something fancier a try now that I've got a slightly hibbier machine. It's not bad so far, although having to set up all the keyboard shortcuts that come with Ice is a little annoying. We'll see how long it lasts.
Tags: hardware
SK43G, Sempron 2200. eth0: Via Rhine driver -- DLink 350TX? I'll have
to look it up. eth1: RealTek 8139 onboard. ifconfig eth0 192.168.0.1
netmask 255.255.255.0 route add default gw 192.168.0.254 (log in as
self) ssh 192.168.0.254 BAM -- freezes hard, and even the Magic SysRq
key does nothing. Reboot... ifconfig eth1 192.168.0.1 netmask
255.255.255.0 route add default gw 192.168.0.254 (log in as self) ssh
192.168.0.254 Password: BAM! (the good BAM, this time) Yay! No BIOS
upgrade required maybe! (UPDATE: Spelled out which one was eth1 [the
onboard Realtek]. What a maroon!)
Tags: hardware
The sumbitches are at it agin', mother. Comment spam is infecting both my blog and my wife's. So far a relatively small number of keywords -- poker, Texas, debt -- is sufficient to keep 'em away from where Google can see 'em. Well, that and OCD-like running of SELECT statements in MySQL. But the fuckers are gonna be the death of me, or at least blog comments. Although maybe some sort of SURBL plugin for URLs in the post...that'd be cool. Someone must have something like that already.
Not that I notice a whole lot of comments, anyhow, at least away from the Slashdot side of things...although I do notice that I've made it onto somebody's blogroll. How'd that happen?
In other news: I finally decided what to do about new computers: buy a new Shuttle Sk43G, Sempron processor, and make that my web server; then, make my current webserver (older Compaq P3-500 desktop machine) my desktop and firewall: lots of room for ethernet cards, tape drives and whatnot.
I agree, it's a little silly that the more powerful box becomes the horribly underutilized server, but such is life. If there was a comparably cheap shuttle that came with two onboard ethernet interfaces, I'd be buying that instead.
So dive right in, right? I got the new box home last night, assembled it and booted w/o problems. It took little effort to move the hard drive from the web server and put it in the new, tiny box; sure, I had to recompile the kernel (8 minutes! eat that, P90!) to get the right drivers in, but nothing big. Until, that is, it froze. Hard. And only a few minutes after booting. If I ran top and set it to update continuously, I could get to freeze within seconds.
Some fiddling with Grub (boot loader of the GODS, man) showed that the problem seemed to go away if I went with the original Slackware stock 2.4.20 kernel instead of the 2.6.7 kernel I'd last compiled. (I'm a packrat, and that includes keeping every kernel compiled on this damned thing, Just In Case, because You Never Know.) We've got one of these boxes at work with an Athlon XP and it works fine; admittedly, it's not doing much, but neither is my web server. (Ba-zing!)
God only knows what's going on there, but it didn't last: I left it on overnight to see if it'd keep going, and sure enough it froze again around 10pm. I put the HD back in the P3 and left it. I'm going to see Wilco tonight (Whoo! WilCO! WHOO!), so this'll take a back seat to some serious RAWK. Except I'll probably be speculating about crappy memory or badly applied heatsink paste the whole time. No. No, I won't. It's Wilco.
Actually, I'm thinking I may have to upgrade the BIOS in order to get it to work properly with the Sempron; originally it was detected as a 900MHz Athlon, and I had to tweak the bus speed and whatnot to get it to run at 1.5GHz. (Interestingly, this seemed to have no effect whatsoever on how quickly it would crash, compared to the difference the different kernel version made.) (God, that's an awful sentence. I'm sorry, everyone.)
Anyhow, there's probably lots wrong with the settings; I never really wanted to learn about memory spacings and CPU voltages and I don't know what-all.
In other other news, I mentioned that I moved last week, but I didn't mention that I came back to two, count 'em TWO dead computers. (Before you ask: Support contracts are for the weak, and I suspect I'm about to get very weak.) One was a Linux box whose hard drive gave up the ghost. Stupid IDE hard drives in a dusty, hot environment anyway! But the other was was an old Duron whose motherboard's capacitors yearned to be one with the cosmos (ie, they blew up real good). That was running Windows, so the whole let's-just-throw-the-hard-drive-into-another-box-and-see-if-it-boots thing was good for a very, very bitter laugh but little else.
Instead, I reinstalled not only Windows but Cygwin, too. That proved to be harder; we use Cygwin to compile very particular things that depend on version 2.2 of Python. Version 2.3 makes things cry. And no matter how much you tell the Cygwin installer that you don't want to upgrade Python, it goes ahead and does so anyway like some hyperactive sugar-fueled kid who's certain he knows how to fix things.
After far too much experimentation, I did what I should have done in the first place: I found an old archive of Cygwin, with the right version of Python, and I mirrored it. One gigantic, nine-hour long sucking sound later, and I had a local copy to point the Cygwin installer at. Thank god.
Finally, just got in the first 19" LCD monitor at work. This was, of course, two weeks after assuring someone that they were too expensive to get past the boss. My bad. I'm going to get a lot of mean looks, I think. But then, if I was a people person, why would I have become a sysadmin?
Recommendation of the Day: Vicious Battle Rap, by DJ Format and Abdominal. Bow down, baby.
title: Who really won? date: 2004-11-09 18:37:43
This made me laugh.
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title: TODO: Utilize Port 43 date: 2004-11-09 14:56:46
I want my own WHOIS server! Completely made up stuff, of course, and back to its original purpose of white pages for th'Internet. Something like:
$ whois liddy
LIDDY: Dark God Of This Universe. The Black Goat
of the Woods with a Thousand Young. Your ass is grass, and He is the
fertilizer.
$ whois Tom Petty
TOM PETTY: Evil underling of Liddy, and His adopted son.
etc...Listen on port 43 and away you go. How cool would that be? Generate random responses (output of babble, perhaps?) to queries.
TODO: Find a Free WHOIS server post-haste.
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I decided this week to get Amanda working properly at home. I've got an old DDS3 tapedrive in Francisco, my FreeBSD firewall box, but all I've been doing so far is tarring to it once a week.
Setting up Amanda wasn't much of a problem, but I kept getting short write errors -- the damn thing was giving up and saying the tape was full after only about 3GB. I decided to run amtapetype, which takes about two hours per run with my hardware, in order to figure out exactly how much space I had. The first time, it said 2GB. WTF? The second time, the drive crapped out with errors about how a power reset had been detected. I decided to shut down Francisco and reseat the cables just in case. No problem, right?
Wrong! When I brought up Francisco again, it refused to boot -- lots of scary errors about how the hard drive couldn't be read, or found, and maybe the LIES about having a hard drive present should just stop now, huh? Francisco is old: it's an old P90 scrounged from an old job, stuck in this black case with non-working LEDs and a Punisher logo someone poked out in toothpick-sized holes on the front. No cooling fan, four ISA slots and three PCI, and I had to jiggle the BIOS so that it would boot from a 100MB partition at the beginning of an 80GB hard drive. Seems like as good a time as any to simply replace the damned thing...
...but first, a firewall. I tried booting it from an old laptop hard drive I had around, but that didn't work. I tried getting it to boot from a Slackware Live cd, but the whole concept of booting from a CD just made Francisco huddle in the corner in the fetal position.
Nothing else for it: it was time to do The Bad Thing. I grabbed one of the ethernet cards from Francisco, shut down Thornhill (P3, 500MHz, web and DNS server, Slackware and 2.6.7 kernel) and threw it in. A quick module recompile for tulip^Wvia-rhine and that was up; some judicious editing of the firewall set it up for NAT. Ph35r m3!
(Side note: Man, it's been far too long since I set up NAT on Linux; I still don't really understand what I've done. I've worked with FreeBSD for firewalls almost exclusively over the last four years, and I have some serious catching up to do.)
So now the question is: what do I do to replace Francisco? I know, finding a Pentium similar to Francisco is not that hard at all. But dammit, I'm tired of big, noisy boxes that are just waiting to die. I want something small, quiet, and reasonably new; I don't want to be fiddling with it, or worrying about it running out of memory (I tend to run far too much on a firewall, and 92MB of RAM just aggravates the problem).
It's complicated a bit by the recent heat-death of Hardesty, a 300MHz Celeron that had, 'til recently, been my desktop machine. I'd been hoping to replace or upgrade that, too; I've gotten quite used to a fast processor and lots of memory at work, and 15 seconds to render Slashdot's front page seems less like acceptable and more like a sign that civilization is in decline.
So...one option is a VIA Epia Cl6000. Dual ethernet, fanless goodness. That, and a case -- unless I decide to build my own Bubba can computer -- and some memory, and maybe a hard drive or maybe PXE booting. Whee! That'd make a pretty decent firewall and fileserver, no question.
But another option would be to let Thornhill keep doing the firewall thing, even though it's a webserver and should, like, rilly be outside the firewall, or at least in a DMZ. I could do something really funky like run Apache inside User-Mode Linux. Or maybe my own stuff, although I'm sure X would be a bear to get working.
A third option would be to keep using Francisco, but w/o a hard drive: let it PXE boot and do all the firewall stuff that way, totally stateless (well, hard drive-less). That could be interesting: almost no moving parts at that point. That would let me get a Mini-ITX something-or-other to use as a desktop machine. They're not the most powerful processors around, but when you can compile a kernel in 6 minutes, who the hell cares? Or maybe a Shuttle, so I could keep using my video card. Hm...
Well, enough of that for now; my cat needs chasing. And anyhow, King of the Hill season premiere tonight! @Woo!
title: Not nearly paranoid enough date: 2004-11-05 12:35:47
While looking for an article on Windows XP's SP2 firewall doohickie, I came across this article. Check out these gems:
When you check Donât allow exceptions, XP won't accept incoming connections for network services that appear on the exceptions list. This feature is handy when you suspect your machine is the target of malicious activity, as well as when youâre connected to the Internet using a public, possibly unsecure, connection.
When you suspect your machine is the target of malicious activity, as well as when you're connected to the Internet using a public, possibly unsecure, connection. Holy crap, did I miss the return of 1986 or something? It gets better:
This mode also is useful when a Trojan or worm attempts to propagate across a network. If detected early, you might be able to prevent a machine from becoming infected by disabling access to local shared resources and services. When the threat has passed, you permit XP to accept incoming requests for applications on the Exception list by clearing the Donât allow exceptions check box.
Believe it or not, I'm speechless. Yep. Out of speech. No speech for me, thanks -- I'm full.
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title: Stupid, stupid Purolator date: 2004-10-28 08:46:01
Want to track a Purolator shipment? Getting that stupid error message about how you can only use Internet Explorer?
Fuck that noise! Put this bookmark into Mozilla or Firefox:
http://shipnow.purolator.com/shiponline/track/moredetailsFramesetWeb.asp?pin=%s
Edit the properties of the bookmark so that the keyword is something
like "purolator". Then, when you get a shipment ID -- ABC123, for
example -- just type purolator ABC123 into your location
bar.
Stupid, stupid IE only sites.
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title: Hash ne mix pas avec Cygwin date: 2004-10-23 19:55:06
Top Tip #1: You can set up SSH under Cygwin so that you can SSH into
your W2K box and make it useful. But when you want to allow people
with domain accounts to do this, you need to add the appropriate
entries yourself into /etc/passwd. Here's how to do it:
mkpasswd -d | perl -ne'@line = split /:/, $_; @line[3]=545; print join ":", @line;" >> /etc/passwd
As part of a much larger problem, I had to get one of these SSH-enabled 2K machines to rejoin its domain. The SID had changed, so that meant I had to recreate the password file entries. Not being one to dive in where a more careful approach might do just as much harm, I ran the line above with a subtle variation:
mkpasswd -d -u foo| perl -ne'@line = split /:/, $_; @line[3]=545; print join ":", @line;" >> /etc/passwd
This got the info for my account alone. I then commented out the original entry for foo with a hash, then tried SSHing in:
ssh bar -l foo Password: //bar/foo: Permission denied
WTF?
I uncommented the old entry and tried again. This time it worked: mounting my home directory worked a treat. This was not good. Going back to the old domain was not the best of options -- certainly not one that could last very long -- and this was supposed to be a routine prisoner transfer anyway. What the hell was going on?
I tried rebooting. I tried rejoining the new domain again. I tried restarting the SSH service. I tried tweaking the SIDs for the Administrator and ssh privilege-separation entries in the password file. No luck. I got desperate enough to turn on Samba debugging, and that gave me a clue about what might be happening.
I compared the output in Samba's logfiles for two machines: the one I was migrating and another that still worked. When it came time to try and mount my home directory on the machine, the working one was trying it using my credentials, and the non-working one was trying it using the credentials of the guest account. Since we don't allow guest access to home shares, this was a problem. But why the hell was the machine losing my identity along the way?
I decided, for no good reason at all, to see if I could mount my home
directory by hand using Windows' net use command. I went up to the /
directory and thought about typing:
net use /user:domainfoo foo
which wouldn't have worked anyway, but I was (as mentioned) desperate. I decided to see what was there, first, and where in God's name I might actually mount this thing. And I saw it:
# ls -l /
drwx------ 16 #foo Users 544 8 Oct 14:15 bar
I'm sorry, who owns that directory?
I deleted the line in /etc/passwd that began with "#foo", and tried
SSHing in again:
ssh bar -l foo Password: Success! You are logged into this server!
...which I'd never been happier to see.
So as far as I can tell: Top Tip #2: Using a hash to comment out a
line in /etc/passwd in Cygwin doesn't really work. Thank you, and
good night.
On a lighter note, this post was originally written outside Waterfront Theatre in Vancouver's beautiful faux marketplace, Granville Island Public Market ("GIPM: Authentic(tm), but still with parking!") while waiting to see Neal Stephenson, along with two other writers who I'm sure deserve more from me than being lumped in with the rest of the non-Stephenson world. I could not get wireless access at GIPM on this iMac. There is no justice in this world. But at least I was first in line.
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title: One wire == One wire. More than one wire == rat's nest. date: 2004-10-22 06:09:00
Q: Why did the Romans lose their empire?
A: Poor cable management.
I swear to God, if I get an ulcer and heliobacteria are not responsible, it'll be from cable management. All this week I've been trying to install a new managed switch so that we can keep test equipment from, say, making FreeBSD cry by claiming the broadcast MAC address as their own (whee!). And all this week the job has been utter, thieving hell.
It's a lab, of course, so that means test equipment and its attendant cables: USB, power, network, RS-232, phone (two kinds), RF, and telegraph (I swear I've found the last gutta-percha telegraph line in existance). They have mated and nested and raised more cables and set them free to find their own fortune. It's a mess of Darwinian proportions.
Slowly, very slowly, I've been separating them and attempting to organize them. It's difficult, but I have many sins to atone for. Finally, I'd reached the point today where I could consider hooking up test equipment to the managed switch: separate VLAN, traffic logging, port mirroring in case of trouble...oh, it was gonna be sweet. And then my cables didn't work.
I'd crimped five 18-foot cables, tested them with the brand-new cable tester, then carefully stepped behind the rack, threaded them underneath, across a floor, up a table leg, then through a channel underneath the table using old telephone cables tied together in a double sheet bend that I'd carefully practiced following instructions brought to me via Google. I'd poked 'em through holes in the table, brought up the port in the switch, then plugged 'em in only to find that they didn't fucking work.
I checked the ports again: good. I checked 'em with the cable tester, putting the detachable bit at one end and running to the other end to press "AutoTest": good. I checked 'em with the iBook: bad. Tried 'em again on the workstations: bad. I tried another cable, purchased long ago, in the same ports that were giving me trouble now: good, and the iBook began again to work.
I got mad. I unthreaded the cables from the table and table leg, unhooked 'em from the switch, then ran to my desk. I loaded up the web page of one of our many suppliers, and searched for "Ethernet Cables", "10baseT", "Category 5", "Network Cables", "Wires", "Network", "Ethernet", then found them by browsing to "Computers : Accessories : Connections : Switch/Hub : Wired : Misc : Uncategorized". I shook the cables angrily at the screen, shouting, "Do you see how much those cables cost? It's still worth it to me, you worthless pieces of shit!" Then I saw that they were selling 10 15-foot cables for $22.95. Then I ordered 5 packs.
It's said about Linux and circumcisions, but it's really true about network cables: crimping them yourself only saves you money if your time is worth nothing.
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title: Now that's what I call quite good! date: 2004-10-17 21:30:32
Just going over the alerts from ACID and Snort tonight while listening to The Housemartins, which really is the perfect accompaniment (sp?). Sure, I could have a life, but what fun would that be to write about?
Interesting to see how many things Snort twigs on, like all the stop-doing-that ICMP messages that come back at 3 in the morning. After a bit of digging, I noticed that they were almost all triggered by an initial UDP packet to port 53 of some host -- which in turn is caused by the web stats program trying to figure out what country everyone's coming from. Not sure if Webalizer (which rox, btw) is being too aggressive in its timing or what; I've got it set up to do 35 concurrent queries, which now that I think of it could probably be scaled back a bit...what else has my server got to do at 3am?
Next step is to try and come up with a rule to catch WordPress comment spam; my wife's blog has been hit by gambling site spammers a couple times already this month. The pattern may allow me to watch for it -- a quick POST, followed by a GET two to three seconds later, with the User Agent set to look like IE 4.0 on Windows 98 -- but the question is how to get Snort to watch for a two-part signature like that.
Actually, the real question is how to build automatic weapons fire into Snort's flexible response options, but that's another point.
Mmm, The Housemartins. I'd forgotten how good they were. Drop down, baby, drop down dead tonight...
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title: No cascading netgroups please date: 2004-10-11 13:56:00
Top Tip: Red Hat and NIS groups
A while back, we ran into problems with netgroups and FreeBSD. I've
lost the links, but it turns out that NIS groups can be a total of
1024 characters, not including whitespace. Lemme tell you, it doesn't
take many entries like: (foo.example.com,,) to fill up that limit,
and it's pretty stupid.
The solution, such as it is, is to create container netgroups like
this: master.netgroup @subgroup1, @subgroup2 @subgroup1
(foo.example.com,,) ... It's a crock, but at least it's a solution
for FreeBSD.
Well, last week it caused problems. We've got a RedHat machine, and guess what? Yep, doesn't recursively expand the netgroups: if you tell it to export to master.netgroup, it'll say it's doing it, but won't actually do it. It'll happily export to subgroup1 if you list them explicitly; it will not expand master.netgroup into subgroup1 and subgroup2.
Bollocks. Bollocks, I say.
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title: bcwireless.net date: 2004-10-10 19:34:11
I've been meaning to do some reading at bcwireless.net for a while now; instead of packing for the move, I'm reading up at last.
It seems pretty damned cool, especially the idea of links between different free wireless networks. For some reason, the idea of rebuilding FIDOnet or the Internet just seems really cool to me.
I'm going to be moving downtown in a few weeks. I've got a wireless access point I inherited from a friend of mine; I think I'll point it out the window and join the network once we're settled in.
On another note, I finally got Snort and ACID set up on my web server. It's interesting to see what it catches, like formmail access and special CyberKit pings and whatnot. Nothing drop-dead scary yet, which is good.
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title: Oh my date: 2004-10-07 19:51:01
It's Udo. He's got The Groove Cave and a Boney M page. Be sure to check out his room. Oh yes.
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Network problems again last week. Cheap switches will be the death of me, I swear, unless cable management gets me first. (Actually, it was both this time...cable looped back on itself + cheap switch == lots of embarassing explanations.)
But there are bright spots in this morass -- 48 of them, to be precise, in the form of 2 x HP 2626 Procurve Managed Switches. SSH login, VLANs up the wazoo, and much muchness. The only thing I'm not sure about is whether or not it does port mirroring (which I can live without, but it'd be nice). (UPDATE: Yes it does. Weeoo!) If these work out, then I think it'll be 2 x 2650s to replace the DLink unmanaged ones that keep crashing. The Ciscos seem nice and all, but the cost...oh my. And the respondents to the recent Ask Slashdot seemed to like HP a lot. Plus, we used to use 'em at my old job, and everyone was pretty happy. We'll see how it goes.
Just bought Neal Stephenson's The System Of The World at Big Hair Bookstore. Twenty-two pages and I love it already. God, the man can write.