There's lots I'd like to say about the past year, but if I said it all, this post would probably crash my poorly-coded web log engine.  So, I'll try to keep this brief, which shouldn't be too hard.  I've added titles to each section, so it won't seem like one big disorganized blob of text.

Last semester at RPI

The year started out with my last semester at RPI, which turned out nicely.  Schedule is here, if you're interested.  I'd have to say that my Internet Protocols class was the most interesting, partially because I'm currently using many of the topics I learned everyday in my job, now.

This was also my last semester acting as Chair of the Systems Administration Committee of the RPI-ACM.  Looking back, I suppose a lot was accomplished as far as computer upgrades to the ACM's network.  All but one of the systems were upgraded, and the RPI-ACM mirrors service was launched, featuring high-speed mirrors of Gentoo and Debian Linux.

Graduation

In May of this year, I graduated from RPI with a degree in Computer and Systems Engineering.  Robert Metcalfe, the inventor of Ethernet and creator of Metcalfe's Law spoke at commencement.  The weather for the ceremony was perfect, except for the tail end, when the rain came down in buckets.

Even though I may complain and whine about RPI, the overall experience was excellent.  I met tons of people with similar interests, made some good friends who I continue to correspond with, and learned a thing or two about computers.

x86_64

This shouldn't really be a category, but whatever.  I built my first 64-bit workstation (AMD Athlon64 3200+) running Gentoo/GNU Linux.  The only 32-bit applications that still runs on my box is Quake III Arena and Doom III.  I don't play games all that often, so I can safely say that 99% of the time, the CPU is executing 64-bit instructions.

Employment!

Shortly after I graduated, and after posting resumes like mad, I received a job offer at igxglobal.  Considering my job would revolve around networking, security, and Linux, I couldn't find any reason to refuse.  I began work at the end of July.

Was it the kind of job I had expected?  Definitely not, considering I wasn't sure what I was expecting in the first place.  Most of my work takes place in the Hackensack security operations center (SOC), working on projects and keeping servers and firewalls running in tip-top shape.  I've also been shuffled off to Charlotte, North Carolina for a couple weeks at a time, to do some work on-site for a client of ours.  Travelling into New York City was also required at times.  The travelling was pretty unexpected, but I've adapted to it well.  Also, I have to say, the people who I work with at igxglobal are pretty cool, and very knowledgeable about network security.  I'm not crazy about the commute from North Brunswick to Hackensack, but that will change soon, considering the operations center is moving.

Politics

As most of you know, I tend to stick with conservative views, which is why I'm happy that George W. Bush will be in the White House for the next four years.  It's ashame that politics has become so vile; it'd be nice if the slanderous comments by both parties would stop.  Democrats also need to quit being sore losers.

Overall, 2004 was an interesting year.  I can't imagine what 2005 has in store.  And with that, I wish everyone a Happy New Year!

I've added some more photos of Christmas, NYC, and some other miscellaneous stuff.

Anyway, it's almost time to go back to work.  The holiday seemed pretty short this year.  I suppose I'm still accustomed to a month-long break.

Merry Christmas to all!  Enjoy the holiday :)

Looks like the biggest BitTorrent site, SuprNova, just got canned.  No details yet, but I suppose one of the evil organizations is at fault.

For the past few days I've been working out of New York City for a client.  It's an easier commute and, surprisingly, not all that crowded in downtown.  I pass the New York Stock Exchange every day, so I snapped a shot of their Christmas decorations.



In a couple of days I'll be heading down to Sarasota, Florida, to spend the holidays with family.  Should be a good trip.  By Wednesday, I might be considered a snowbird, by then.

Well, I'm finally done with all my Christmas (wait, is that word banned here?) shopping, and as a result, I just had to pay a pretty hefty credit card bill.  But that's ok, since igxglobal gave its employees a nice bonus for the holidays.

I took the time the other night to upgrade my webserver to FreeBSD 5.3-STABLE from 5.2.1-RELEASE hoping that it would fix the oversized framing errors with the rl driver (see previous post).  The upgrade went smoothly, with only a couple minutes of down time for reboots, but failed to address the rl driver issue.  This seems to indicate a potential problem in the NIC's transceiver or the port on the NETGEAR switch that powers the lab.  I might consider switching to the onboard Broadcom BC4401 NIC.  However, the driver for this device (bfe) presented major problems in the past, but might have been cleaned up for 5.3-RELEASE.  I'll worry about this later.

In other news, I tried to add a couple of fans to my file server, and had quite a scare when LVM failed to find three out of four of the physical volumes (physical drives, in this case).  I bitched on IRC, and dilinger help me realize this was a bug, so I filed a bug report against the package, and then downgraded lvm2.  Then I installed my fans, and now my case looks a little freaky in the dark.

Also, in a little over a week, I'll be flying down to Sarasota, Florida to spend some quality time with parents and grandparents.  Considering the crappy weather we've had over the past week, some nice warm weather will be a welcome change.  Knowing my luck, though, I bet I'll miss another white Christmas in New Jersey, just like two years ago.  Ah well.

Yeah, it does, so there.

And, I've been saying this for years.

This weekend, I decided to spend some time, and money, to aggregate all my hard drives using LVM, and create a massive storage array.  It worked, kinda.

I put 2x120GB, 1x80GB, and 1x400GB drives into atlantis, my old windows box, that happens to be a dual processor system running Linux, now.  LVM makes it pretty easy to add drives to an existing logical volume, so I copied stuff over the network, and built a 720GB virtual drive, piece by piece.  After filesystem overhead [ext3] and rounding, the total size came out to around 661GB.  Of course, the fun didn't stop there.

Apparently the IDE controller I was using, a Promise Ultra100, is either buggy itself or has a buggy driver.  Silly things like this kept happening when I put the system under load:

Dec 5 23:55:16 atlantis kernel: hdg: task_out_intr: status=0x58 { DriveReady SeekComplete DataRequest }
Dec 5 23:55:16 atlantis kernel:
Dec 5 23:55:16 atlantis kernel: ide: failed opcode was: unknown
Dec 5 23:55:16 atlantis kernel: hdg: status timeout: status=0xd0 { Busy }
Dec 5 23:55:16 atlantis kernel:
Dec 5 23:55:16 atlantis kernel: ide: failed opcode was: unknown
Dec 5 23:55:16 atlantis kernel: PDC202XX: Secondary channel reset.
Dec 5 23:55:16 atlantis kernel: PDC202XX: Primary channel reset.
Dec 5 23:55:16 atlantis kernel: hdg: no DRQ after issuing MULTWRITE_EXT
Dec 5 23:55:16 atlantis kernel: ide3: reset: master: error (0x00?)
Dec 5 22:44:11 atlantis kernel: hdf: lost interrupt
Dec 5 22:44:41 atlantis kernel: hdf: lost interrupt

I ordered a newer Promise IDE controller, an Ultra133 TX2 card, which uses the pdc202xx_new driver, instead of the pdc202xx_old driver.  Hopefully this will fix the issue.

Tomorrow I'll be heading to the Sheraton Parsippany Hotel in, well, Parsippany, to attend a Juniper Secure Access Training session.  I've heard it's a pretty nice place, and should be a good experience.  I hope it doesn't rain, too much.