Older blog entries for jbowman (starting at number 20)

Did some more beating-of-the-head with my gateway machine last night. For whatever reason the default kernel image would fail to load (it would uncompress, say it was booting, and then just hang there without ever going into the usual bootup sequences). However, my backup kernels worked just fine. Figured the boot sector may have gotten corrupted some how, so i reran lilo. Same problem.

So, I rebuild a new kernel, thinking perhaps it was the kernel image itself that was the problem. After all, I discovered, it was exhibiting the same symptoms regardless of whether it was the default boot image or not. 2.4.0-test5 had been working flawlessly on this machine for over a week, and then all of a sudden it died a quick, painless death after a single reboot. Sigh again.

So, I wound up replacing the hard drive late last night and installing RedHat 7.0 on the darn thing. Things now work like they're supposed to, even with -test5 again, so I suspect it was the old 600mb seagate harddrive I'd been using.

On the plus side, it means I have more space to play with and thus have a system that's less a "well, what can I fit into 600mb of disk" exercise. Seeing 128mb of that 600 total get eaten by swap was less than helpful for determining what packages to install. :)

Iptables continues to impress me with the sheer raw power you have over your packets. I've been playing around with some of the kernel patches included in the patch-o-matic CVS stuff, and if/when they get finished up and included, things will be even nicer than they already are. I need to look up the way the various state flags like "RELATED" actually work with the different protocols, but that's one of the last things left for me to grok in the incredibly complex rules dancer sent me. The other thing left to examine is the tcp-flag checking rules, but that's mostly just working out the logic behind them.

I'm also getting tired of dealing with the assorted oddities of my BP6 motherboard. ABIT just announced their VP6, which is a second-gen BP6-style mobo that's FC-PPGA compatible, so I may go with that. I just plain dislike random segfaults in things that shouldn't segfault. Even a single non-overclocked CPU, it has issues. Sigh.

[ "This is your life, and it's ending one minute at a time." ]

Hrm. Installed RedHat 7.0 last night. Found it refuses to upgrade 7.0 beta installs due to some strange python segfault in the installer. I'd report it as a bug, but I know the response I'd get: "We don't support or recommend upgrading a beta release to the released version". Feh

jlf continues to poke and prod at me in an attempt to nudge me around some of the obstacles he's encountered in the industry. Thanks for being a mentor, Jeremy. In discussing my last diary entry with him, I think I may have described things a bit inaccurately. The "waiting game" I grow tired of isn't the wait time caused by waiting on customers to get answers back, but rather the wait time in finding out where the heck our end of things stands. It's the complete lack of information being handed out that irks me, not the actual act of waiting itself. To analogize it to forked processes, it's the difference between being a zombie child process that gets reaped and a zombie child process that doesn't and just sits around all day...

ahosey and I have been discussing other uses for spinwebd/logwatchd (I really do need to change the name soon). What we want/need at work in the not-to-distant future is a log multiplexor.
For example:
We have several thousand customers hosted on our webserver.
We want to be able to sort their webpage statistics out for them.
We can't do this because, well, the log traffic for that number of users is absolutely obscene.
So, what we can do with logwatchd is setup the appropriate regex and have it append the contents of the line it matched to a specific file based on the regex. This would give us the ability to record all of user foo's log entires into file bar on the system. And the nice thing is that unlike a bulky log-parsing/sorting script, this works "live" as the data comes in.

After saying that logwatchd could already do that with very little in the way of changes, Adrian pointed out that with as much traffic as is being generated, that's an awful waste of cpu cycles. We got into a discussion of LRU caching of open file descriptors, and how best to organize things. Now I just need to get my workstation at home up and working again, and I'll be able to add a new module to logwatchd.

Adrian also pointed out that my feelings of "Surely someone's done this before!" aren't all that unusual. His explanation lay (basically) along the lines of "Lots of people have ideas, few of them actually get implemented, and even fewer are ever shown to the world".I guess that's what I like the most about the spirit of open source software. You get the chance to reuse other peoples ideas (and, assuming the license is compatible, their code as well) to inspire new solutions to problems.

[ "We are the all-singing, all-dancing crap of the world." ]

Hm. It's been a while since I last posted. Ah well. It's been a mind-numbing week.

I'm convinced some of my coworkers are clueless. It's to be expected, really, when you consider the general statistics. But why is it that the people that I'm forced to rely on for beta-testing things are also the ones that cannot remember what they were told the week before? *Sigh*

Spent most of last week poking and fiddling with my account-tracking system. For unknown reasons, last week was completely mind-crushing and depressing. I really didn't accomplish all that much, which is disappointing.

Feeling better and hopefully out of last week's funk today. I spent the weekend completely slacking off and sleeping, which helped a lot I think. Poked and fiddled with my iptables firewall rules last night to get a silly MMOG from Micro$oft working through my NAT setup. dancer provided me with the shell script I use to create the rules from, and it's been nice walk into some of the more advanced things you can do with iptables.

Getting tired of the coporate waiting game here at work. "So, how are we progressing with asking our colo customers to upgrade their RedHat 4.2 machines to something more reasonable (and supported by RedHat?' -> "Yeah, we're working on it." Feh. The portion of my brain that likes to champion lost causes is starting to come around to the fact that I may need to lower my expectations a bit...

Need to get back to hacking on spinwebd. Tonight sounds good, yes. I had a nice idea for how to handle targets over the weekend, I'll see how that pans out...

[ "It's the perfect time of year, somewhere far away from here. I feel fine enough I guess, considering everything's a mess." ]

Hrm. It's been a couple of days. Spent most of Saturday recovering from Friday night's escapades. No real hangover to speak of (lucky me!), but the entire event was physically exhausting for some reason. The rest of the weekend was nice and slow, a very relaxing break. Accomplished surprisingly little of value this weekend. Ah well.

Spent a chunk of today hunting down problems with my scheduling software. It just doesn't want to go away and leave me alone it seems...

Found wetdog had gotten himself an account on here. Cert'd him to apprentice, since he's got a lot of potential. Now if he'd just GPL that tic-tac-toe program... ;)

Got in touch with not one, but two old friends in the past 24 hours. Wow, talk about flashbacks.

[ "Do you remember the time we first met, girl?" ]

The Morning After Report

Oog. That was an amazing evening. Definately a night to be rememered always. Fortunately, I didn't get so hammered as to not be able to remember it. :) Discovered I have a particular fondness for cinnamon schnapps. Definately need to get some of that stuff for around the house.

Realized I hadn't certified dancer yet, so I did. Dancer, my personal -test8 expereince here at home has been quite stable on my workstation. No crashes/lockups/errors in 3 days straight so far. No iptables though, but that's what the gateway machine is. YMMV, I guess.

[ "We are the Cartoon Heroes..." ]

15 Sep 2000 (updated 15 Sep 2000 at 07:01 UTC) »

Got my dialup gateway machine finally up and running this afternoon (Thursday). The advanced features of iptables, like DNAT and TOS mangling, are just an absolute blast to play with. I wish 2.4.x would hurry up and get here so we can roll it out at work or something. :)

I worry that I'm becoming something of a work-a-holic. I think part of the "problem" is that I love the work I do. I should clarify this though. I love the *work* that I do, but not neccesariy the job that I do it for. While my working environment may not always be the greatest, the past few months have been filled with projects and things that, when you substract the "job" away from them, are things that I really enjoy doing. I wonder if loving the work and hating the job is the same as hating the work and loving the job. Or are they two completely opposite ideas?

Then again, maybe my problem is that I'm masochistic. A psychologist would have a field day with my brain, I'm sure...

So, it's Friday now, so I'm 21 now. Where are the flying cars? I was promised flying cars! Or at least omnipotent power or something, darn it. It's the least the world could do.

[ "You load 15 tons, whadda ya get? Another day older and deeper in debt..." ]

Ah. Security auditing customer servers. Nothing fills me with such a mixed feeling of sadistic glee and utter revulsion as diving into a customer's server for the express purpose of identifying and cataloguing security vulnerabilities.

Fnord

Been listening to a lot of Ben Folds Five this week for some reason. Guess my musical mood has shifted again.

My birthday's tomorrow, and I'll be partaking of that ages-old tradition of going out with a bunch of friends and coworkers and getting nice and legally drunk off my ass. Or at least, that's the plan, anyway. I'm glad my birthday's on a Friday this year. :)

[ "Three sad semesters... It was only fifteen grand spent in bed..." ]

13 Sep 2000 (updated 13 Sep 2000 at 19:36 UTC) »

Ack, I'm blue! I think I'm in agreement with jlf in that I don't feel like I'm a Journeyer. Then again (as I just mentioned to him) Advogato certs are based on the opinions of others. If others think I'm a Journeyer, that makes me one by definition, I guess. I dunno, it's a strange system we make diary entries in. I should probably send jrf an email and ask him why I'm a Journeyer in his eyes. It'd probably be an interesting discussion of the cert system on here and what qualifies one for what posistion in the cert tree.

Grr. I wish people wouldn't use crappy software in environments it wasn't designed to operate in. That sort of things leads to code and feature bloat, and then all of a sudden you wind up with Windows 98 SE Collector's Edition... Sigh.

Basically, several months ago while I was getting my feet wet with perl, i wrote a little CGI/perl scheduler for one of the guys here in the office. It was quick, it was dirty, and it was designed as merely a scheduling aid, not as an actual replacement for the pen and paper schedule the guy was keeping.
3 guesses as to what's happened since then, and I'm sure you won't need more than the first.
So, today I get the first complaint, of which I'm sure there will be many more, about a "bug" in the system that is, in fact, a problem with the way they're trying to us it and has nothing to do with actual code. *mutter*

On the positive side of things though, the Anne over at SSH responded to my reminder email today, apologizing for the delay (she'd been out of town for the past week) and saying that they'd be taking a look at my patches, hopefully on Friday. So, the SSH counter in my diary gets to go away, at least for now. :)

I also sent a inqury off to the amcl developer and got back a nice, positive response. So I'll be touching up my RPMs for the thing and shipping them off to him for inclusion as part of the project.

A coworker's installing new software on a Windows machine, and mentioned something about having to reboot. I just laughed and snickered and made snide comments about Windows. Does that make me a Linux elitist, or am I just demonstrating better taste in OS's?

[ "If you really wanna see me, check the papers and the TV. Look who's telling who what to do..." ]

You know, trying to trim a RedHat install into the bare minimums neccesary to compile a kernel is a PITA to do after it's installed.

Was on an RPM packaging kick today for some reason. Probably had to do with having to do it for a couple of packages at work and my brain getting stuck in the same train of thought. Aside from the stuff I packaged up for work (a CGI/Perl scheduling system for our Tech Support department that a coworker originally wrote and that I maintain now), I managed to cook up a quick specfile for amcl, which is a spiffy little Mud client.

The TV repair guy blew me off today. I'm annoyed, but have been too busy to call the repair center and complain. Grr.

Been having a nice exchange of emails with dancer about development kernels and iptables and firewalling and stuff. Advogato has officially made it worth my while, since our whole conversation started as a result of my diary entires. :)

Number of days since SSH was notified of bugs in scp2 and specfile: 8

I think I'll resubmit my patches again tomorrow, and include a more broadly-targeted email. Maybe tech support will know who I should talk to...

[ "In Sumo, your body must be like stone, and your mind like meatloaf." ]

11 Sep 2000 (updated 11 Sep 2000 at 14:55 UTC) »

Today was a fairly uneventful day. New kernel available (2.4.0-test8) gives me something to poke at once it finishes downloading. -test5 is the most stable on my home system (a dual 366mhz Celeron Abit BP6 system). -test7 locked every about once a day, which was unacceptable as compared to my week-plus uptimes with -test5 (no crashes, but reboots due to moving and networking changes kill sustained uptime :).

I'm finally feeling settled into my new apartment I think the new TV actually helps, since it represents such a large investment. I figure by the end of the month the feeling of sleeping in someone else's apartment will have finally gone away and I"ll be able to sleep more soundly.

I've been doing more spinwebd hacking this evening. Cleaning up the regex handling stuff so that you can pass a single-value storing regex and have it work. Previously you had to have a regex that stores at least two values. One is the minimum though. Have to have something to change, otherwise the program doesn't do much, ne?
suso keeps threatening to take a hack at spinwebd. I'm still waiting for patches, Mr. Banderas. ;)

Saw an artcle on Slashdot talking about encapsulating IP over DNS queries. Now that is some damn innovative thinking. What next, TCP/IP tunneling over whois records?

I should start an SSH delay counter.
Number of days since SSH was notified of bugs in scp2 and specfile: 7

[ "Breakin' the law, breakin' the law.... Breakin' the law, breakin' the law..." ]

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