Author: David Pierron

D.I.Y.

So our home phone no longer had a dialtone … We called for service and they came out … I was asleep at the time … Wish I wasn’t cause the guy royally screwed it up … He told my wife that things were screwed up outside … That he hooked it up properly and didn’t know why it wasn’t working … He traced some of my internal lines and couldn’t get to where some of them went and marked where the line came in and was working … That I would have to take it from there … What this guy did was rewire it at the pole so it came in on my defunct DSL connection … WRONG! … Being that that’s where it was, I figured out how to mount those wire in the demarc and get the line working internal to the house … I’m not happy about the connection now coming in that way as it’s now accessible on the back of my house whereas the other 7 or 8 lines come in on this big black cable … I’m not using all those lines anymore, they were for the now defunct BBS I had running when I moved in … The Internet took care of that …

This past Wednesday, February 1st 2006 Octane opened up at the TLA for Pray for the Soul of Betty which is Constantine from American Idol‘s band … Considering all of the concern prior to the show, it went fine for me … I made Octane sound good and everybody was happy … I didn’t meet the guy, but I was in his presence and that was interesting enough for me … I didn’t attempt to meet him either as I wouldn’t have had anything to say to him except that I saw him on TV … Still the highlight of my Octane career has been meeting Gene Simmons whereas I did have a conversation at length with him and he signed a copy of his book for me …

ICUHost.Net Billing went out and I also sent out a newsletter … After reading the letter and rereading it, I emailed it out and I missed a blatant misspelling … Damn! … I have started developing a replacement billing application that will replace the ASP one I wrote years ago … I am writing the new one in PHP … I am also using a different authorization system than I normally use for other sites I’ve secured up … This one does hash checking as well as email address verification through links and stuff … Pretty cool … Needed something like this for keeping tabs on customers and verifying new ones … I can’t tell you how many people I just didn’t set up because they were from out of state … Even though they signed up and everything, when I didn’t get back to them, they didn’t get back to me, so I guess I was pretty good in sniffing out the fakers … So hard to trust anyone on the Internet these days … Anyway, along with the new authorization methods, the new billing application will be able to verify domains via different databases and I’ll have a way better handle on billing and domain management … There have been domains that I’ve set up but never assigned to a user and they got a free site for months … When I started verifying DNS against accounts, this won’t happen … I’ll be able to check balances and anything past due I can update the DNS records and inactivate the site … Writing it in PHP allows me to utilize the command line and schedule the billing to run as I see fit … I think I will end up running something weekly if not daily … It will check many things for me that I have not been able to check on a regular basis … Right now, I have someone who moved their site, name servers and everything, but I see that they’re using my mail server and other stuff that I haven’t inactivated … I don’t think that’s right, and with automation, these things won’t happen …

Anyway … no time … need more time … We didn’t win PowerBall … We will this Saturday though …

Dye it

As I mentioned in the previous post, I was growing hair on my face to see what I could do in the middle of my face after shaving away what I felt was not necessary, or what would be my choice in look … I decided to ask Greg from Octane what to do with my hair if anything … He’s a hair dresser as well as a rock guitar god … His response was to dye it … Been there, done that and I wasn’t very interested in doing that again … I told him I’d have to dye my hair every two weeks or something … He says, “So?!” … I have to tell you, it wasn’t very fun dying my hair in the past, why do that every two weeks? I think I’ll pass on that … I also have this feeling that I will certainly resume shaving my entire face and using the Conair hair clippers to shave my hair down to a 1 every month …

… speaking of dye it … I got the book “The Abs Diet” back before Thanksgiving … Decided to start on the diet after Thanksgiving, but that rolled into Christmas and eventually the New Year … Finally starting trying different foods and consuming different types of food … Types in the way of what the book suggests you eat and such, but not changing from Italian to Indian food or something … I know from experience that if you eat right, you will simply lose weight … When I was 14 years old, I went to Weight Watchers with my father … All that you had to do was eat what was on their menu and you lost weight … In fact, it was usually a lot of food to eat …

Recently I heard Bill Maher talking about the food we Americans eat … As a culture, America is getting fatter … They’re widening seats in movie theaters, airplanes, stadiums … The average shoe size has gone up per year … Apparently, we’re basically killing ourselves with the food we eat … Completely makes sense to me … So not only is the decision to eat differently based on a diet, it was simply a guide which seemed to not exactly change yourself completely … The guy that turned me on to the book recently said it’s a “lifestyle change”, I don’t necessarily agree in that I think it’s a decision to change the quality of food you’re putting into your body … There are plenty of things to eat on this diet that “other” people eat every day … I usually just chose to eat different things … I also decided long ago, and even after watching “Supersize Me” that I wouldn’t eat fast food if I didn’t have to … There is a convenience to it, it’s just not the best thing you could do … Think about how you feel about 2 to 3 hours (depending on your metabolism) after you eat fast food …

So, I sorta started this diet, but in moderation … It’s tough to completely get away from what I’m used to, and it’s also tough to try to get the whole family eating right … My wife bought the fries that the book suggested … She cooked them up for dinner and my 7 year old ate one and began to complain saying it tasted horrible and shrieked “Why are you doing this to us?!” … He’s complaining that I am trying to get the whole family to eat healthier … so my wife and I tried the fries expecting the worst, and they were fine … The 4 year old didn’t complain, and after we all gave the fries our approval, my 7 year old ate the fries, and even asked for more … So, I believe also in the mentality that if something is supposedly “better for you” or supposed to be “good for you”, there is already a mental block in place that this is going to taste bad … That’s simply not the case … I am finding a lot of the stuff utterly too sweet … But that’s just me …

I write this just after consuming my “smoothie” … vanilla yogurt, milk, banana and peanut butter … This one was much better than the smoothie recipe my wife followed from the yogurt package … This smoothie was void of oatmeal which you can chuck in there as well, or whey powder for protein … My biggest problem is the weekends in the bars with what to drink and eat, and during the week my wife and I like to have some wine … The author, David Zinzcenko, discourages drinking alcohol drinks … They’re full of calories … In fact, the local news just did a story on how high in calories drinks actually are …

Oh well, I will continue to wean myself into this diet to not shock myself into the change, but there are the success stories of those who committed entirely and lost a lot of weight in a short period of time … I do like the fact that the author is conscious of losing fat, not muscle and the way in which to accomplish this … There’s even a companion book to let you know what to eat when you’re out and about from the fast food joints, restaurants and parties … I will certainly keep this blog posted on the results, and if I see favorable results, then this is the diet for anybody … No matter what, everyone should eat better …

Today is your birthday …

It’s my birthday too, yah! Yes we’re goin’ to a party party … Well, not really … I am going to work though … Tonight Octane is in Watchung, NJ … It is my first show as a 40 year old. Yes, I am the same age as the Superbowl … Born the same year the wonderful Dodge Charger was introduced to the public … (The Dukes of Hazzard adopted the ’69 Charger for their General Lee) …

The bLog application I’m using here was upgraded several days ago. It now looks the same up front, but the backend is entirely redone. They did a good job on the admin interface. WYSIWYG editor (sorta) and a bit more spiffy looking … I upgraded all the bLogs to this release and I linked to some of those bLogs in a new area on my navigation called bLogs … My father recently saw my bLog and wanted one. I had originally set my brother up with one because he had a free site that he was putting alot of text on and it was grossly mismanaged and confusing … I started him on MovableType and when this new version became available, I migrated him over. Also some relatives from Denver were setup with the same thing. I use this bLog application on the OctaneCrew site as well …

I was shown a link to a bLog entry: this one It’s a parody of an old computer game, but the content is amusing.

I have been growing my facial hair (beard?) since New Year’s … When I started with Octane, I originally grew my sideburns long and sometimes made them pointy … It was my way of doing something a little different without permanently inserting something in or on my body (such as a piercing or a tattoo) … A bartender at The Whiskey Tango said that with the sideburns, there was nothing going on in the middle, so I decided to let it grow and see what it was that I could do with it … It comes in both gray and dark, so have to see what I am left with in the way of shaping …

Last night I completed my sons’ room … What my wife said we started over 8 years ago I finished in a couple hours … Originally when we moved in our house, the back bedroom became the “guest” room with an old double bed from my brother, and the middle bedroom was the “computer room” which housed 3 or 4 PCs which made up my multi-node BBS … Eventually I networked those PCs with one in the basement store-front … That old coax wire is still running up there … When we had our first child and the BBS was no longer running, the computers just sat in that room, and at one point, the room was removed of its drop ceiling tiles and we were preparing for a nursery … It never got past the ceiling tiles … The the other bugger came along, and still we did nothing with the room … The back bedroom has since had the bed dismantled and propped on its side and a lot of things have been “stored” in there … So here we are with 3 bedrooms, and we’ve only been using 1 of them for people … I guess that’s pretty atrocious …

So, removed everything from that middle bedroom and I went in with a razor blade and cut the ceiling tiles that were purchased 8 years ago into the ceiling … We purchased a remnant and that was the next thing to go in … I used the razor to cut around the radiator that I needed to bleed to get the heat kicking in there … Then the bunk beds were carried up there piece by piece and I assembled the bunk beds … My wife dressed the bed and we put them in their own room for their first night alone … The wee one ended up in the master bedroom before the night was through though … After this small sense of accomplishment, and how it got done since I pushed it to get done, we’re looking to further our home development back to a sense of order. We have accumulated so much stuff (junk?) in our time here that we’re overwhelmed with it all …

The firewall that I posted about a couple posts ago has been in operation for a month or two now … It is the most efficient firewall I have run thus far … It is utilizing one of the servers I bought off of eBay and it is using the latest and greatest Open Source software … I have a much better definition of my network usage … I even turned on the other direction firewalling and I think some things that may not have been “legal” (legal in the sense of what should be allowed to leave your network) have been thwarted … I have taken screen shots and stuff to put in a newsletter to hosting customers that is long overdue … Another thing that I need to accomplish is a better maintaining of the fees and allowances that I allow to continue on my network … I have been much too lenient on people and have been very free with my time and services … This needs to stop …

I guess this brings me to an announcement that I don’t think I’ve made … I no longer work on the Out On the Town … The owner fell behind in paying me several years ago, and he’d made an attempt to catch it back up but then fell off on the payments … I think I was making money in other areas at the time that it just didn’t matter that he owed me money … Even when I went to work house at Whiskey Tango, money was okay and I didn’t see an effect of this … Then I went working for Octane and I now have more expenses incurred due to having a gas guzzling truck and loans to pay off and eventually pay back … Money became tighter … then he missed paying me an issue entirely … He insisted that he did pay me … We were in a quandry because there was no proof to either of our stories. This led my wife and me into a bit of trouble paying bills … Now we had the previous balance that had been floating for years, and a couple recent issues where now we were seriously behind … He insisted that he paid me on a regular basis, and what this entailed was being paid on a Monday and then being owed that money again on a Wednesday … While yes, we were getting the money it seemed as though I was working for free and I gave the ultimatim that I needed to be paid what I was owed or I was simply not going to do anymore ads … He said he couldn’t pay me in full, so I stopped doing ads the end of November … The guy that was doing the layout is now still using my old ads with the bits that need to be changed simply covered up … I got everything that was OOT related out of my name (domain) and ceased providing all of the free services I was providing … The owner says that maybe after he pays me off (which he elected to do monthly) that I could “come back” and do ads once again for the paper … I have to tell you, after doing that paper every 3 weeks for about 10 years, I dont miss it … The only thing I do miss is the money …

So there it is … The things I want to accomplish in this New Year and becoming 40 years old … Tightening up my relaxed attitude towards people taking advantage of my charity in the web hosting and cleaning up the house … There is a lot of junk that we need to get rid of, and some of it is worth a lot of money … I will sell that stuff off and work on finding new ways to accomplish my goals … Thanks for reading …

Happy New Year

Hello everyone … It’s been a while since I’ve written … I promise to put some updates up here and let you in on what I’ve been up to … I’m sure there has been a void in your days since you’ve not got something new from Dave here in a while … I have rants to rant, and stories to tell … Oh do I?! Please don’t be upset with me if I don’t post for another month though …

It’s all in the config

After a couple weeks of toying around with the installation of a FreeBSD 6.0 PF firewall using PF, the key was unlocked by a member of the freebsd-pf mailing list … It was as I suspected a simple couple lines in rc.conf to bring the interfaces of the if_bridge “up” … I have documented this installation on my projects page here …

Maybe FreeBSD 6.0?

FreeBSDHmm … Maybe FreeBSD is the way to go with this project? FreeBSD 6.0 was “released” November 4th … That’s the new logo over to the left there … I had played with it a bit after setting up the FreeBSD 4.11 firewall, but I wasn’t satisfied with the results … Also, when upgrading the source, it didn’t seem there were any updates available … So it’s still pretty new …

Working on the OpenBSD machine, I was getting frequent errors … The machine would halt, and I would be left with booting … This was an intermittent problem, and seemed to be related to the network interface although I did seem to get a video error once or twice … I am just speculating as I have no idea what the error messages are reporting … I can only guess by Googling and sampling like results … Waiting for the machine to boot and go through the Raid controller boot was a pain too …

I built the OpenBSD machine on a Proliant 1850R, so rather than blow away my work, I simply swapped out the drives to try the FreeBSD 6.0 solution … I am using two 18G drives in a Raid 0+1 setup … This will save my ass down the road … As you can see, I sort of go back and forth in my work … Each time going through it, there may be something new I find or an option that I may have changed my mind on … I currently have the FreeBSD 6.0 installation to the point where it’s a working server … Running an SMP kernel and having Apache 2.0 with PHP4 installed …

My ultimate goal is to have an IPless filtering bridge with a network card behind the bridge for machine management. I mapped out this configuration in a drawing here … I sent this off to the freebsd-pf list requesting advice … Many of my searches didn’t return reliable information, and the stirring on that list didn’t bring back definitive answers, but that it’s possible … It seemed to me that OpenBSD was going to be a better solution … So I will go back and forth and see which works better for me … I think I know how to thwart the OpenBSD halts now since I had a similar situation on the FreeBSD install … I installed FreeBSD 6.0 via FTP … It also seems to me that FreeBSD is sort of getting comparable to OpenBSD in its distribution in this manner as well as attempting to implement tried and true solutions only available on OpenBSD until the release of FreeBSD 6.0 … I think I am on the bleeding edge, and I am documenting this as I go and have already started a document on it in my testing area …

There are three reasons to get this working in this manner … One is that having the card in there that can talk to the network will enable me to keep the machine current with easy access for cvsup’ing my ports and source … Two would be that the firewall will report to me nightly … Previously having the IPless firewall without network access, I didn’t know if there were problems developing on that machine since I didn’t receive the nightly maintenance messages … and finally, having access to the machine and running an Apache installation on there, I will be able to produce pretty graphs to display the firewall’s activity …

OpenBSD 3.8

OpenBSDI’ve been playing with OpenBSD again … This time I hope to get further … When the FreeBSD firewall machine went down, I created a brand new one using FreeBSD 4.11 … I upgraded the sources to p13 … Almost immediately after, I received the notice that FreeBSD 6.0 was officially released, and a visit to their web site showed that there is no more FreeBSD 4.11 …

I started building an OpenBSD firewall, but gave up pretty quickly since it wasn’t comfortable … It didn’t feel like FreeBSD, so then I started working on a FreeBSD 6.0 solution which has ported a lot of OpenBSD features over … I have been running into some walls there, so I decided I would try OpenBSD again and see just how far I could get even though it doesn’t have conveniences that I’m used to … I’ll keep this bLog posted with what goes on … It’s just starting …

So this is Christmas

I haven’t written in a long while … So many things to do … I will catch up at some point … so many things to ponder and post for all the world to see, even China … but there is one thing bothering me that is timely …

What happened to the unwritten rule that Christmas came to town when Santa Claus served as the caboose to the Thanksgiving Day Parade? It’s been a couple weeks now that there have been commercials on TV for Target, Walmart and others that they’re opening Christmas presents Christmas morning … There is a local radio station playing Christmas songs 24 hours a day, 7 days a week … I think it was the Destiny’s Child commercial that I saw first and then it seemed all the other advertisers were like ‘Hey, we gotta get our Christmas advertsising out there NOW!’ … The jewelry commercial followed … Kay Jewelers I think it is with Santa buying Mrs. Claus a diamond present … While okay, let’s completely commercialize Christmas and make sure that the advertisers get the word out to shop at their place of business, it has affected the population as a whole …

When I had seen the first commercial on television, I joked with my 4 year old if he’d like to go out and get a tree now? … He was excited, but Halloween was like yesterday … He was Superman … My 7 year old was The Red Ninja … However immoral, I’ve been letting him play Mortal Kombat … Just across the street, I can see a Christmas tree in my neighbor’s living room … Driving around at night, there are actually houses decorated for Christmas … My brother tells me that there’s already the Photo with Santa places set up in the malls and stores … I haven’t even eaten my Thanksgiving turkey yet (well, sort of … we did have turkey just this past Thursday) … I guess I can understand that businesses are just trying to make money, but my kids are going to suffer from this …

When I was kid, I remember it being an agony waiting for Christmas to come … and that was when they started with the whole holiday bit after Thanksgiving … At my age now, time flies … But now since Christmas is already in the air, I can see this affecting the kids stress level … It’s going to take much too long for Christmas to come for them even though it’s being advertised every day on TV now … My wife was putting my 7 year old to bed just the other night, and he seemed upset … almost crying … and he wasn’t going to sleep … My wife asked him ‘What’s wrong?’ and he replied ‘I’ve just got so much on my mind!’ … 7 years old, and stress is keeping him up at night? This scares me …

I didn’t even touch on the politically correct way to say “Merry Christmas” in certain discount stores … “Happy Holidays” is what has to be said in order not to offend anyone … Just ignore that guy in the red suit over there …

Segmentation fault

My week spent mostly on the Out On the Town, I have been trying to get some things in place that I have wanted for some time. I originally started with the web server that mysteriously stopped working for me … Portions of a site (such as OctaneCrew‘s Gallery) or entire sites stopped working … The only thing realized was a Segmentation fault (11) in the Apache error log. The quick and easy solution was to move the sites to another server. The offending server has since become a new CounterStrike Game server … Much as it did in the past, the CounterStrike server remains barely used so I decided I would like to throw some things onto that server. I decided that stats gathering may be better suited to a faster machine that can render RRDTool graphs quicker … A fresh install of the graphing application shows the same problems as the other web sites … So, on my road to fix this thing …

First I deinstalled Apache and PHP4 along with the PHP4-Extensions … I also realized that I was running Apache 1.3, not 2 … No matter … Reinstalling all of these applications did not fix the problem … I then decided to upgrade the box … It was running FreeBSD 5.3 so I brought it up to FreeBSD 5.4-p7 … This didn’t fix it either … After Googling like crazy, I didn’t find a specific solution … This is very frustrating … I then decided to go into the actual PHP code and I found that when I use session_start that’s what craps it out … I found my session.so file and saw that deinstalling and reinstalling left me with an older file so I deleted it … When reinstalled I now had all fresh .so files … This still hasn’t fixed it … I have been trying various deinstalls and reinstalls and this hasn’t fixed it either … This is driving me crazy …

Fixed! The final solution was to of course deinstall everything … After the PHP4 installation was complete, I went and deinstalled Aapche2 individually … (When installing PHP4 it also installs Apache for you) … There was some extraneous errors left over in the Apache error file which turned out to be duplicate entries in the PHP4 extensions file … After they were removed everything is working …