It's like web 2.0, yet far better!

Haven't made a post in awhile, so I'm catching up here.

Just got back from a week-long training session in Atlanta, GA.  It was a pretty good trip overall, and I think I know a thing or two about BGP, now.  A coworker and I took the trip via car, which took around 3:30, or less, I didn't keep track of time too well.  I took a couple photos of the Buckhead area, which is the northern part of Atlanta.  Even though we were far from downtown, traffic was still pretty congested.  Now I can understand the pain of IP packets trying to flow through small pipes.  Lots of traffic lights, too, hmm - those could be interpreted as routers...

During a day off last week, I put up some geeky things in my dining room.  Remember the time when Intel actually made some good processors?

I successfully did a downgrade from FreeBSD 6.0-STABLE to 5.4-RELEASE-p11 on dax last week.  6.0-STABLE kept panicking due to a bug in the fxp driver, which got to be annoying.  The downgrade wasn't too bad, and everything seems to be working properly.  The FreeBSD team says do not do this, but IMO 5.4 -> 6.0 was a trivial upgrade anyway (should have just been 5.5).  The downgrade went something like this:

• Sync sources for RELENG_5_4
• Make world and kernel, reboot
• mergemaster, etc. and reboot
• Manually copy stand back to /
• Remove misc binaries in /usr/bin and /usr/sbin (do a diff between the before and after ls -lR's of /usr)
• Recompile the following ports, if you use them:
  • pftop
  • net-snmp
  • quagga
  • apache
  • perl
  • openssh-portable

If you don't recompile them, prepare for tons of SIG11's and stuff.  Also, don't do this if you don't have at least serial console access, since stuff like OpenSSH might break :)

I've been playing around with NetFlow recently, in my free time.  It's a pretty old protocol, and I'm surprised there aren't more OSS packages that will process it.  I did manage to get FlowScan, CUFlow, and fprobe working together to produce some pretty graphs here, here, and here.  I'll setup the web-based graph generator later.

Picked up two books today at B&N: Understanding the Linux Kernel and OSPF and IS-IS.  Ever since diving into networking (job and all) I feel like I've lost touch with my interest in operating systems, so I figure the kernel book will get me back into that, assuming I even get halfway through it.  The book is around 900 pages.  The OSPF and IS-IS book looks really great, especially since it's authored by Jeff Doyle, who actually stopped by the office last week for a small presentation on IPv6.  I know almost nothing about IS-IS, so hopefully I'll be enlightened.

I think I've found a bug in FreeBSD 6-STABLE.  Every couple of days, dax panics with messages like this.  I'm either going to wait it out and help track down the bug, or try to downgrade to 5.4-RELEASE.  Oh well, at least apache starts at bootup, now :)

I just love power outages, they just make my day!

Got a voicemail from Duke Power this morning, notifying me that power would be out from 10:00 -> 17:00 today.  I then receive emails and messages from apcupsd at around 11:00, letting me know that my systems are powering down, which is pretty nice.  At least my LVM array and data disk were unmounted cleanly, since they're basially the only two filesystems I care about.

#RPI then helped assuage my fears of having a stinky refrigerator upon returning home.  I did resolve to throw out milk that probably was overdue anyway :)

In the afternoon, I do a df on dax without thinking.  dax, even though it's remote, mounts the LVM array over some VPN connectivity.  I start receiving kernel messages relating to unreachable NFS mounts, as expected.  I then stupidly try to umount -f the filesystem, vaguely remembering that it worked once FreeBSD.  Well, I must have been thinking of some other Unix variant, because two or three umount -f's caused all disk I/O to hang.  Serial console wouldn't respond either, but I could telnet into Quagga's ospfd just fine.  (When I did a "wri mem" it hung, of course)  After all routing to the box dropped due to a hung ospfd, I power cycled it.  Yay for Voxel providing this functionality via the web console.

Anyway... I think I'll rebuild world tonight, just so I have an excuse to reboot the bot cleanly, for once.  Bah.

In other news, after taking a pretty lame (and picky) test in the morning, I am now JNCIS-FWV certified.  This means that I can probably setup a little blue box to protect your network from evil.

If you're going to install Debian 3.1 on a box w/one of those nifty Compaq Smart Array 5i SCSI controllers, I suggest you not boot the installer on Linux 2.6.  It does this for Grub and LILO:

Just boot 2.4.  It'll save you from getting sick while standing in the data center w/out a coat.  <achoo>

22:54 <@prox> so, yeah
22:54 <@prox> IM has been around for what, 10-12 years?
22:54 <@prox> and we *still* can't get it right?
22:55 <@prox> *still* being reinvented :P
22:55 < Unprompted> Yeah, someone should write a whiny rant about that in their blog.

People who don't use turn signals ...

• Want to get killed.
• Want to get OTHERS killed.

Don't be a killer.  Use turn signals today!

I'm thinking that I should just sell my Zaurus SL-5500, or something.  This thing used to be hot stuff a couple years back, I remember the first time I saw one at LinuxWorld back in 2002.. Linux on a PDA, wow.  Now, it's pretty much useless, and OZ just gets buggier.

Actually, I don't even think I have a use for any type of standalone PDA anymore.  My original goal w/the Zaurus was to use it as an MP3 player, alarm clock, and SSH/web client when I'm connected via Wi-Fi.  My cell phone(s) let me get online with SSH/email/web anywhere, and also play music (or I use my iAudio).  Also, they last more than 15 minutes on battery.

Any other Zaurus owners?  Is the device still useful?

Took down the tree today.  It was a little tough to get back into the original box, but after sitting on it, there was success.  Duct tape helps, too.

I've posted some photos of Christmas in Florida, trip to Universal Studios and Orlando, and testing the exposure on my new Canon PowerShot S70.  I really need a tripod.  I was being creative finding places to rest the camera.  Any recommendations?  Oh, also, new version of picscript, now with EXIF support.

Also, Debian has been giving me tons of GPG errors lately.  Apt apparently didn't have the necessary public keys anymore:

W: GPG error: http://ftp.debian.org testing Release: The \
following signatures couldn't be verified because the public key is \
not available: NO_PUBKEY 010908312D230C5F

I solved this by looking at this page and executing the following:

# gpg --keyserver subkeys.pgp.net --recv-keys \
084750FC01A6D388A643D869010908312D230C5F && gpg --export \
084750FC01A6D388A643D869010908312D230C5F | apt-key add - 

After spending way too long messing with Perl, nonce and atlantis now have the temperature of some hard drives monitored via MRTG.  I'll put the code up shortly.  It's pretty simple.

Also... this is fun, I need to be at work at 0400 on Sunday for some fun network foo.  If I were in charge, all outages would be at 1400 on a Monday.  Customers, bah!  Good thing this only happens once in awhile.

Speaking of, I think it's sleep time.