mccolo afk

2008.11.14

mccolo getting shut down had a nifty impact on spam at work this week..

smtp connections fell through the floor this week.

spam scores over the week too. highspam is 99-100% spam. this is after we throw away 80k msg/hr due to invalid recipients.

Categories : geek

progress

2008.10.30

i transfered into oakland university a few years ago, taking classes part time.  after two more math classes (discrete and linear algebra) and two physics classes (calculus-based physics 1 & 2), i’ll be an official junior and can take 300 and 400 level classes.

maybe there is light at the end of the tunnel.

oh. crap.  there is that putrid stats class tho.  hmm.

Categories : geek

notch in vista’s belt

2008.10.13

vista’s boot repair is a huge improvement over previous versions of windows.  see below.

i had a couple 120gb sata drives laying around and decided to slap them in RAID-0 with my motherboard’s intel matrix RAID.  installed vista-64 with the normal RAID/AHCI driver diskette.  a 500gb sata disk comes back from warranty and proves to be faster than the two 120’s in RAID-0.  i loaded up my favorite windows PE environment (with associated driver diskette), mirrored the contents from the RAID stripe to the 500gb disk, and rebooted.

vista-64 wouldn’t boot, couldn’t locate some files.  i did get the splash screen though.  so i threw my vista-64 DVD back in the drive and booted from it.  once at the setup menu, i chose Repair Windows.  it found problems with the boot sector and fixed them.  i removed the dvd and it booted just fine.

had this been windows XP, i would have had to reinstall.  instead, it was running again within five minutes.

Categories : geek

portal prelude

2008.10.13

Categories : geek

black holes

2008.09.10

all this talk about the CERN collider causing black holes and the end of everything as we know it reminds me of ren & stimpy’s black hole episode.

i’ll set this space time doohicky to our molecular wave lengths, throw it in reverse, and turn it up to full blast!  we’ll simply implode!

Categories : fun  geek

hussied up

2008.07.15

lim Nick = shirt+tie+slacks
clothes->suit

Categories : about  geek

xinetd per_source_limit

2008.07.03

centos 5’s implementation (probably many OSs too) of xinetd puts a connection limit per source IP, by default.  this causes the service to become unresponsive when there are dozens of queries a second.  in my situation, it caused nagios’s NRPE agent to become unresponsive.  not being able to monitor hosts causes alerts.  alerts cause me angry.  from syslog/messages:

Jun 27 22:13:28 nms1 xinetd[2592]: FAIL: nrpe per_source_limit from=123.456.798.123
Jun 27 22:13:28 nms1 xinetd[2592]: FAIL: nrpe per_source_limit from=123.456.798.123
Jun 27 22:18:28 nms1 xinetd[2592]: FAIL: nrpe per_source_limit from=123.456.798.123
Jun 28 01:38:56 nms1 xinetd[2592]: FAIL: nrpe per_source_limit from=123.456.798.123
Jun 28 01:38:56 nms1 xinetd[2592]: FAIL: nrpe per_source_limit from=123.456.798.123
Jun 28 16:50:00 nms1 xinetd[2592]: FAIL: nrpe per_source_limit from=123.456.798.123

we didn’t encounter this until we hit like, 100 checks every three minutes.

to fix this, update the service’s xinetd config. in my case, /etc/xinetd.d/nrpe


service nrpe
{
option=var
per_source = UNLIMITED
instances = UNLIMITED
moreoption=bla
}

restart xinetd.

Categories : geek

wga54g multiple devices

2008.07.01

the linksys wga54g does not support multiple devices.  you cannot expect to hook up a switch to it, along with multiple devices.  (your xbox, mythbox, network-enabled waffle iron, etc) regardless of cloning mode.

..well, you can, but only one device can be active at any time, and you have to power-cycle the wga54g as you switch devices.

fyi. 😡

Categories : geek

L A N

2008.07.01

mpcon!another mpcon is coming up, end of july.  you should go. 😀

my role as staff has grown over the last few events. i don’t play games much anymore, but it’s nice to help pull something like this off.  based on power, cooling, network, and internet requirements, this has been likened to setting up an adhoc datacenter for three days.

there’s a strong chance of penguicon staffers running some board/card/tabletop games, bringing additional variety to the event.

Categories : events  geek

denyhosts

2008.06.05

denyhosts with its distributed/auto updating stuff is pretty neat.  i would put any known-good hosts in hosts.allow just in case, but looking through the configs, it’d be fairly difficult to lock yourself out.

plus, there’s a debian package.

Categories : geek