I finally did some work on my website today.  You can now add comments to my site news (read: web log).  It's been awhile since I did any real programming, and it probably shows, if you could look at the code.

My Mac Mini arrived at home this past week.  It'll be another week before I get to mess with it.  I'll probably bring it (along with a spare LCD monitor) down to Charlotte, and plug it into my 2nd OpenWRT-ed WRT54GS.

Other than the coding, it's been a pretty lazy day for me, so far.  I should probably head out and get something to eat, as well as do some wandering.

Again, feel free to submit a comment!

And this is why I lost connectivity with tacolinux earlier this week.  Gotta love Linux 2.6.

Glad I'm not home, otherwise I'd have to deal with this:



Unfortunately, I still have to deal with cold and rainy conditions down here.  I can live with that, though.

This has to be a sign that I'm getting old.

Today I upgraded Quagga on all of my Linux/Unix network servers to version 0.98.2.  Looked like all was well, until I realized that all of my IPv6 tunnels to starfire (FreeBSD) were stuck in a ExStart/PointToPoint state.  In OSPF, this means that the OSPF protocol has started talking, but has stopped due to some problem with the link or configuration.  I restart the daemons repeatedly, since older versions of Quagga/Zebra reacted to this.  No dice.  I turn up some OSPFv3 debugging, and see "2005/02/27 13:04:42 OSPF6: I/F MTU mismatch."  I check out the MTU settings, and find out that for the last two years, I've had the MTU on starfire set at 1280 and the MTU on the other peers set to 1480.  Lovely!  At least I fixed a problem that's been around for ... awhile.

On a side node, you may have noticed that I referred to these boxes as "network servers."  I figured this was appropriate, since they do almost everything under the sun: routing, firewalling, vpn, dhcp, mail, dns, etc.  Whatever, you get the picture.

Have you ever been in an online chat and wonder if the other party actually laughs before typing lol?  Don't bother wondering, I'm sure most people just type this overused acronym without uttering a sound, or even thinking the subject matter is funny.  It's even better when you start a conversation, and the only thing the other person can say is lol.  Ok, if you couldn't tell, this annoys me.  Whatever.

This past week was interesting, considering we had some hefty downtime at work, due to an electricial snafu.  Typically, the 1/4-acre data center is nice and loud, cool, and filled with flickering LEDs and status indicators.  After the power in the room I'm in goes out, I take a trip to the data center and am greeted with a quiet and dark room.  Heh, scariest site ever.  I still wonder what's going to happen to the electrician who made the "mistake."

I also ran into a nasty Linux 2.6 bug this evening.  I try to create a temporary IPv6-in-IPv4 (type SIT, proto 41) tunnel between my laptop here in the hotel room to my IPv6 network elsewhere.  (Ok, it's over OpenVPN, as well)  Setup the tunnel devices on both side, add static routes on the hosts, add a static route on the router and have it redistributed through OSPFv3 ... fine so far.  Then I realize I messed up the addressing, thinking it was a physical link.  (Prefix length should be 128, not 127, for point-to-point links).  I do "ip link set prox down" to remove the addresses and routes with one command, where prox is the tunnel device.  In Linux 2.4 this would have worked fine ... too bad the kernel felt like hanging up on me, causing iproute2 to consume 100% CPU, and enter the D state.  The syslog daemon also let me know that the kernel was trying to unregister the netdevice, and waiting for me to remove references to it ... which I couldn't do due to every route/ip/ifconfig command entering the D state.

I had to reboot.  I hate rebooting.  Someone should fix this, thanks.

I went skiing again this weekend, and took some [better] photos.  Unfortunately, I also seemed to have bruised or strained everything in my body, due to poor balance.  At one point, I think I was the bowling ball, and other people were the pins.

I also bought a Mac Mini online.  Since it wasn't all that more expensive, I got the 1.42GHz unit with 512MB of RAM, and both wireless options.  I ended up selling one of my other computers, partly so the list doesn't get too long, and rediculous.

I need to stop booking flights at the end of the week.  The last two flights from Charlotte, NC to Newark, NJ were delayed by a minimum of two hours.  Today's flight seems to be on par with this pattern, due to wind, or something.

So, yeah, sitting in the airport for hours on end kinda sucks.  Getting on the internet via Sprint's data network isn't too shabby, too bad it's slower than molassas uphill, in a snowstorm.

I'll be heading to Camelback tomorrow morning for some skiing.  Hopefully I won't fall asleep on the way down the slope.