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December 2001 Archives

December 2, 2001

It's almost Christmas time!

  • Well, I passed the LPI Level 2 combined beta exam, which is pretty exciting for me, and surprising... All I need to do now is pay $200USD to write and pass the two LPI Level 1 exams, and LPI will actually issue both certifications. Yay!
  • Had a good weekend, it was a great shopping weekend! So much for Christmas shopping, but Kelly and I both treated ourselves. Kelly got a fantastic deal on a leather jacket from Danier in Kanata, and I got a grand deal on a new 3-in-1 winter jacket from Bushtukah down the street from Mountain Equipment Co-Op. A great store, with great service, good prices, and discounts for Mitel Employees, so we couldn't go wrong! It's the best winter jacket I've owned, by a Canadian company in Concord, named Misty Mountain, who don't seem to have a web presence. :(
  • Otherwise, up to the usual, I've been slowing down lately with at home administrative stuff... As Tony keeps telling me, I need to hire a SysAdmin to manage the multitude of computers we have here. I manage to break something at least every few days. Anyhow. Got a new gadget a while back, a 3Com SuperStack II 24 port manageable 10/100 switch. Manageable by way of SNMP, web, and telnet. It's a pretty sweet device. That, and the fact that my previous D-Link 8 port switch topped out at about ~3000kB/s, while I've managed to do ~11,000kB/s on this baby. I guess you get what you pay for!
  • Over the past month, I implemented yet more changes on the UT server, including compressing all textures and maps for faster download, co-hosting most of them at Jer's server, and also DNS round-robinning downloads.enfusion-group.com. Also been testing out the MapVote mutator, and HolyWars, a new game type. We've really started to slow down though, there's not much action on the server these days. Ah well...
  • Upgraded IMP/Horde to the latest (2.2.7/1.2.7), to keep up with the latest security patches... I'm testing out IMP 3.0 which is looking pretty darn good... I'll probably force a switch on everyone at some point soon, but I'll wait until 3.0 is released as stable.
  • I've also been running a Jabber server for the past month, which is pretty darn cool... At some point I'll get some documentation and links up. This was in response to ICQ no longer working on anything except Windows boxes... Which was the final straw. At least Jabber's native protocol has respect for firewalls, and was designed to co-operate with them. Something ICQ could learn from after 8 versions.:) Actually, I should add that as of last week, it looks like ICQ is working very well through firewalls. Not sure how, but I no longer have to send each and every message "through server".
  • On an important note, the wedding plans are coming along pretty well! We're pretty sure we've picked our invitations, so now it's just a matter of figuring out wording, text, and font styles for the invitations. If only Paperworld in Westgate Shopping Centre had decent staff working for them.
  • Friday of this week, I'm off to Kingston with Kelly, which should be really fun! Other than that, Christmas is just around the corner. We've got the decorations on our tree, but no lights yet. Soon... Still waiting for the snow!

    • Posted by Adrian Chung on December 2, 2001 11:43 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

    December 5, 2001

    Isn't system administration fun?

  • Spent a few hours this morning cleaning up some of my systems here. Had to complete the move from .home.com to .rogers.com, and in the process of cycling network interfaces, found out that my policy based routes using iproute2 don't restore themselves properly, which is bad, since it pretty much breaks all of my internet connectivity, in and out. After looking for some iproute2 based init scripts, I wrote my own.
  • Decided it was time to start backing up all of the RCS repositories I have on various machines... They're much less handy when you're trigger happy with 'rm'. :)
  • Other than that, there's not much happening. Lucy's going back to puppy school next week, although we're a bit worried, because not only is she not allowed to have treats, she's also been a fair bit more aggressive towards other dogs lately. Hopefully it doesn't stick.

    • Posted by Adrian Chung on December 5, 2001 9:59 AM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

    December 9, 2001

    Kingston!

  • Took a day trip to Kingston on Friday, which turned out to be fun! Kelly had some business to take care of down that way, so I went with her, and toured around town while she did what she had to. Drove through Queens University, which looked pretty nice, and then downtown Kingston, and then found a Chapters, and a Costco. After Kingston, we went to Brockville, and ate dinner at what's turning out to be a pretty popular spot for us, Swiss Chalet, and then headed home, where we skipped out on the work party. :)
  • Saturday morning turned out to be an interesting morning... I haven't heard an official report from IStop yet, but I have a feeling there was some connectivity turbulence early on Saturday morning that lasted for a few hours. During that time, I wrestled with iproute2 and it's alleged built-in "dead gateway detection", which isn't all it's chalked up to be. Details are sketchy, but I found that the best result I could come up with for redundancy was to set up two default routes on wolverine and have it automatically figure out which gateway to use for outbound traffic. This actually worked fine, except that it meant during regular operation, I'd end up load balancing between Rogers and IStop, which is less desirable since Rogers offers less bandwidth. Using iproute2's 'nexthop' syntax I can assign two default routes, and give them different 'weights' which in theory looked like it should do what I wanted to -- use IStop in preference to Rogers when it's up, and Rogers otherwise. In practise, it ends up not being that way at all, since when IStop is down, connections are all over the map, sometimes working, to most often timing out. As if that wasn't bad enough, BIND feels the need to send DNS queries out with a particular source IP, and it looks as though it *needs* to be a source IP that it's bound to. Bah. That was the last straw. Surfing over to DJB's world, I grabbed djbdns and started to set it up.
  • It was pretty easy to set up, all I wanted was 'dnscache' which provides a local/external cache for LAN DNS clients. Seemed easy enough, and I thought I'd leave BIND running on the external interface to publish my public zones, and provide AXFR's. Except that I had to either migrate my local zones to 'tinydns', or run another BIND daemon on a different interface to service delegations for local domains. Well, if BIND is running on the external interface, and dnscache is running on the loopback and local interface, where was I going to run another BIND daemon? Enter BINDv9. :)
  • Downloaded and installed BIND 9.2.0 as well, which supports split DNS with one daemon, through a new concept called 'views'. Turns out to be really, really, handy, and I'll get around to writing some info about it sometime. With BIND 9.2.0 configured to run only on the external interface, provide zone transfers, and also provide an internal 'view' for LAN clients, I was set, and started up dnscache on the local interface.
  • So far, everything's still running, and I've been pretty happy with dnscache. We'll see how things go, but DJB doesn't usually leave much to be desired with his software. :)

    • Posted by Adrian Chung on December 9, 2001 11:46 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

    December 15, 2001

    LARTC!

  • Well, after doing some reading, patching wolverine's kernel with patches from Julian Anastasov, and following some instructions from Christoph Simon, wolverine now fully supports dead-gateway detection and alternative routes properly. This means that if one of the links goes down (well, actually, if the kernel discovers that the immediate next hop goes away), all routes through that device are marked as "dead", and alternative routes (if defined) are used to route traffic instead. Once the link comes back up, it can then be used again. Yet another doc to write. :) Although the two links above are a good source of information, I'd still like to find time to write up what worked for me.
    I haven't tested extensively, but I pulled the plug on my DSL modem, and waited about a minute, and then found that traffic was all subsequently routed via my cable modem. w00t!
  • Went to play some pool tonight with Tony, which was fun. Played 8 ball for a bit, and then he took me to school when we switched to 9 ball. Ah well. It was a good night.
  • Have some errands to run tomorrow morning, and we're planning to try to get out to see "Vanilla Sky".

    • Posted by Adrian Chung on December 15, 2001 2:39 AM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

    December 27, 2001

    Welcome to Sarnia -- Merry Christmas!

  • Welcome to another year of Christmas cheer, and holiday spirit! I've been enjoying my holidays so far, they've been pretty busy! After arriving in TO on Friday night, spent Saturday morning shopping at a Rockport shoe outlet in Thornhill Square, which had some great deals on shoes... Between Kelly and I, we got 5 pairs of shoes, courtesy of Mom & Dad Chung. Then, at 1:15 we rushed off to try to get down to the Royal Alex to see Mamma Mia -- we got there just as the curtain was rising, and the ushers were pretty much yelling at us to run. What a great show, I love Abba, and the show was entertaining, plus we were sitting right beside the orchestra pit, so it was doubly fun to watch them playing.
  • Sunday night, we had dinner at my Aunt Donna's house, which was a good time, got to see some people I hadn't seen in a while, and meet some new ones.
  • Since Monday, we've been in Sarnia, visiting the future in-laws, and family. Had a huge dinner on Tuesday, and today, we met up with some friends, and went to the mall in search of a Palm hard case amongst other things.
  • Sarnia's been fun, I enjoy coming here. After all, where else can you find a full size motorcycle in a beauty store display, and five kids who couldn't be over 10 riding in the back of a pickup truck in the middle of winter? :)
  • Back to TO tomorrow!

    • Posted by Adrian Chung on December 27, 2001 3:30 AM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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    About December 2001

    This page contains all entries posted to adrian's home in December 2001. They are listed from oldest to newest.

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