I've finally put together a slightly good Linux/Netscreen VPN HOWTO for Linux.  Check it out.

And, if you're eligible to vote, get to the polls!  This will most likely be a fun election, I don't anticipate knowing who's going to be the president for a couple days.  This site is proving somewhat handy for tracking electoral votes.

Naps are a dangerous thing, always remember to set your alarm clock!

Ok, anyway.  I suppose I don't have much to say at this time, perhaps I should go back to bed.

Halloween this year was particularly quiet.  Of course, this fits the trend that I've noticed over the last couple of years; the volume of trick-or-treaters has been on a linear decrease.  I'm wondering if parents have been watching too much news, or maybe nobody cares anymore.  I could do without the toilet paper draped over the trees on mischief night.  Now, I have to figure out what to do with all this candy.

After working in Charlotte, North Carolina at a client's site for a little over a month, I'm back in igxglobal's security operations center.

I've released a tiny howto for Linux to Netscreen VPN connectivity using the KAME tools.  Take a look.

I had a really weird dream last night.  I wish I had gotten up early and had written it down, since I think most of it has slipped away by now.  From what I remember, I was either back in high school (ack!) or I was just with individuals from high school who I haven't seen in awhile, and somehow weren't aged.  Ok, nevermind, I thought I would remember more.

Tip for the day is ... always specify the vrouter when adding routes on Netscreen devices.  I wasted around 15 to 20 minutes before a collegue pointed out my stupidity.

In other news, my right alt key on the IBM T42 seems to want to print extended ASCII characters when combined with any other alphanumeric key.  Odd, but interesting.  I should see if there are Gnomes fiddling around with my keymap.

So, my new IBM T42 is working out very nicely.  All the features (bluetooth, wireless, graphics) worked out of the box, and without a hitch.  Battery life seems to be good, too.

In other news, I'm getting sick and tired of all the deprecation that seems to be happening in Gentoo GNU/Linux.  Deprecation is quite common in the open community, especially in the Linux kernel, and tons of software packages.  However, when Gentoo deprecates a feature, it becomes increasingly difficult to reproduce the previous functionality with the new recommended methods.  Two examples, the -U (upgradeonly) flag is now deprecated, and requires the user to create files in /etc/portage for each package they don't want downgraded.  This is annoying, when there might be a couple dozen of those packages present on a system.  Another example is the emerging by path feature.  Apparently, you need to make a PORTDIR_OVERLAY and maintain your own portage tree (or something like that) to retain this functionality.  This is drastically different from other examples of deprecation in open source, like the replacement of devfs with udev, which was an easy switch.

Ok, I'm done ranting now.  Maybe I'm just annoyed because I can't seem to get some old (important) data off my old laptop, which I need for work tomorrow.

I got my RPI 2004 yearbook today.  It wasn't exciting at all, and I'm disappointed that the RPI-ACM was conveniently omitted from the list of clubs.  How's that for a short post?

It looks like I'll be doing a bit of travelling this weekend.  I fly back to New Jersey tonight, and take a day trip to RPI on Saturday.  Then, off to grandparent's place on Sunday, and back to Charlotte, NC on Monday.  I don't mind the flying, but the driving can get boring, especially when it's around three hours in each direction.

Also, there's a slight possibility that starfire (the system that hosts this website) might be moving, and/or being offline for awhile.  I'll keep you updated, though.

Alright, I should get back to this eBGP configuration I'm working on.  I haven't worked with Cisco gear since the CCSP course I took at school in the spring.  I suppose this is a good refresher.