Category: Computers

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 …

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 …

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 …

Operating Systems … Again

So I did a little web surfing … and another controversy I have been enlightened with … Seems there’s something to Google and Microsoft … *sigh* … I get tired of this stuff … It just doesn’t make sense the amount of attention this stuff gets … There is so much enthusiasm expressed on all sides … and here is it … Gates on Google … Check out the comments left on this article … There are many different voices of opinions that come out of this … I sort of skimmed through the rest of the article not really interested in what Mr. Bill had to say … It’s a bunch of crap no matter what … It also makes me realize that nothing much will change … No matter what … I get that from reading the comments and knowing my thoughts on the matter … I could see starting a huge debate about this as well, but I’m not really interested in doing so … My last debate didn’t really interest me in the end … All that it shows me is that I have an opinion, and other people have their opinion … I think it all can be summed up with the proverbial statement “That’s why there’s chocolate and vanilla.” …

There are many comment on the article and many things described which sound like they’re great things, but the comment I agree with whole-heartedly is the guy that pointed the finger at Mr. Bill’s statement about Open Source software … Something to the … well here … let me quote it without permission:

Gates: The industry will always be a mix of free and commercial software. So there will be a balance between those. I think that we are going to have a lot of both. There are some zealots that think there should be no software jobs, that we should all, like, cut hair during the day and write code at night. Should you take some of those extreme views, I think it’s easy to say that’s not right. There are things like compatibility and 24-hour support and taking big leaps like IPTV or speech recognition. The painstaking work over a decade that you have to do, that costs hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars. That’s the commercial side. It’s good at hiring people and selling licenses and taking the risks that go with that.

I’ve always believed in low-cost, high-volume. It should be a cost that’s so obvious that you should spend, because it saves you on personnel time, hardware, communications costs, which are gigantic when compared to the price of packaged software. That cost is almost a rounding error. The value you get out of the system is a lot larger than that. I don’t just believe in a single model. There’s a lot of neat things that can be done. But I don’t think that someone who completely gives up license fees is ever going to have a substantial R&D budget and do the hard things, the things too hard to do in a university environment. But that’s OK. There will be a commercial software industry, hopefully, with companies that take the long-term approach and make the investments that drive those new breakthroughs.

So you see, he is given this public forum to make anyone think that Open Source coders are hair stylists … He then goes on to make you think that there’s no money behind Open Source and that it is doomed to failure or cannot produce the great things that his corporation can produce … Maybe Mr. Bill should confess what he’s taken from that non-profitable community … and then admit that there are many corporations supporting Open Source software and many others giving grants for development … Do most people know that Netscape went Open Source and remains profitable, it saved their business … Do many people know that IBM have partnered up with Apache … Do people know that Apache is the most used web server on the Internet? Whatever … I typed more than I wanted to about this guy … Now he’s into it with Google … So Google is hurting MSN … blah blah … same thing, difrerent company … If Google would have just accepted Microsoft’s offer none of this would be out there … Microsoft is working on AOL though … Possibly soon AOL will say “yes” and then the people associated with AOL by having a “@aol.com” on their email address will belong to the online service associated with the Microsoft Corporation …

Don’t know if many people know that in most techie forums, the people in the know don’t hold much credibility to those with an email address ending in “@aol.com” … While some discussions may start off innocently enough, at some point their credibility is questioned due to their email address … Now the techie’s that have realized the inadequacies or Microsoft and their blatant disregard for RFC standards in their products will have an even greater reason to be prejudice against someone with an “@aol.com” mail address … Wonder if Mr. Bill would change the domain? Probably would migrate all those aol.com’ers to msn’ers … I guess … who knows … who cares … As long as I am not affected by any of this and FreeBSD is still FREE, I guess I am happy … Well, as happy as one can be about computers and operating systems …

My wife and I were chatting the other night … after watching “Crash” … I think we were talking about the affluence of some of the characters and our lifestyle … She said to me “You should have stayed in computers.” and I’m like … “Haven’t you looked downstairs recently?” … I guess what she meant was that I should have stayed with a high paying computer job … I used to be a Systems Programmer in the mainframe days … That was a pretty prestigious job at that time … Now I do web hosting from my home … Well, now I have no boundaries and I can make whatever decisions I see fit … I kinda like that flexability … I guess I do miss the money though, and if I were making tens of thousands of dollars a year, I wouldn’t care what operating system my company (the one I worked for) was running … I would go home at night and code Open Source on my FreeBSD computer … Or maybe I would run the Microsoft OS I copied from my company’s MSDN subscription? Who knows?

Get Firefox, Thunderbird too!

I can’t stress enough the abilities you will discover if you download and use the Firefox web browser … I look at my site here and notice the differences immediately from MSIE … I have learned to respect the RFCs that the Internet was built and wonder why the people writing web browser software over at Microsoft don’t pay attention to them … If they did, and added their proprietary crap on top, their browser would probably dominate … but Firefox is growing steadily running on all platforms and standards compliant … Firefox has tabbed browsing and a lot of nifty configurables for your web browsing pleasure … It also has many plugins that aid in web development as well as enhancements to web browsing …

I have also switched to Thunderbird for my email client … right out of the box my inbox is much safer from external links that are loaded automagically by other MUAs …

It’s been hell!

My weekend with Octane ended on Sunday morning … I got home about 6am from The Ocean Drive … I left to go there about 10:30am Saturday morning … That was after getting home from Reed’s at about 6am Saturday morning … So that’s what, 4.5 hours shy of 24 hours for The Ocean Drive job on about 3 hours of sleep … sheesh … Sunday was pretty much slept away … So I come down to the computers Monday, and during the course of the day I’m hearing “dink” … “dink” … “clunk” … If you’ve ever heard an IDE drive going south, this is that noise … I had two 40G WD drives in my personal workstation … The original 40 that filled up using W2K and the new one with XP on it that was pretty much full too … How can I tell which drive is dinking and clunking? I run the ol’ chkdisk and determine that it’s the newer of the two drives … The dinking and clunking gets worse, so what do I do? Turn the machine off … Have to get another drive in there and get the data off before it goes away for good …

I get this brainstorm that I ought to just get a new computer … My personal workstation has been a P3 1gHz for a couple years now, so it’s time I should go to a P4 for myself … I’m worth it … So I go to another machine and browse Circuit City’s web site to see if they have any spiffy deals on desktop computers … While I am browsing, I get the message that Firefox can’t find circuitcity.com … I refresh … I force a server refresh (Shift+F5) … It can’t find the site … Hmm … I look to the router … Stuff is trying to go out, but nothing is coming in … Aren’t LEDs awesome?! The phone rings … a guy from a band says he can’t get to his site and another that he knows I host … Yup, the connection is verklempt, I have to place a call … But, the support number is filed away nicely in my Email client in the Savvis folder, but my personal workstation was taking a dive, so I had turned it off … A reseller from the city calls … yes, I know … another reseller from West Chester calls … their customers are calling them, can I email when it’s back … yes, sure thing … (But I don’t have my email working now) … finally my oldest reseller calls and he wouldn’t have called me (cause he hates to bother me) but one of his $ clients called him …

I finally get the support number by firing up my clunky workstation … in loading the email client, it tried to get mail, but with the connection down, I can’t even communicate internally … I actually like this feature sometimes … I call them and they say they know and give me the Master Ticket Number for this issue since it is wide spread … It was ticket# 465020 if you’re interested … In total the connection was down from about 2-3pm … One tiny hour, but it was as if the world had ended … People go nuts without their Internet … I mean, I do too … Anyway, the explanation was that it was some sort of AT&T problem and they had to restart a device or something, but whatever, the connection was back … West Chester called me back and asked me if it was back for good … How can I answer that question? It could go down while I type this entry … I just have to trust that it stays up 24/7/365 … So I can only say that since it has been up more than 5 minutes, it seems they have cleared their problem …

So now back to getting me up and running again … I have an idea what Circuit City is selling so I go to my ol’ reliable local computer dealer and see what he has and can do for me … I usually go in there and buy the bare essentials and come home and piece something together from that … This time, I went full tilt with a complete system … DVD and a DVDRW … two DVDs in one machine … That’s like Surf & Turf for me … P4 2.6, 200G SATA (this new thing he thought I should check out) a pretty case and 1gig of RAM … I also picked up a couple spare power supplies (always need them) and a new optical mouse … The ball mouse that was in the KVM got dirty a lot and I have grown tired of cleaning it … Stupid dust … Everything else is on the motherboard … sound, vga, NIC … whatever … so I plunk $725 in his hand and I am off to install hell … Little did I know the hell that awaited me when I got home …

I pull up to the house and the wife comes running out … ‘You have to come inside right now!’ … okay, scare the crap out of me, what happened to one of the kids … who called … what is going on? Remember that kid who had his 3rd birthday back on October 10th last year? Well this same kid was allowed to go to the bathroom by himself … He flushed the toilet and somehow replayed the events of his birthday party … The same toilet overflowed and the water followed the same path down to, you guessed it, the SmartJack that brings the T1 connection into my location … She said she ran down when she realized what was happenning and felt the box, it was wet … She then said she heard it pop and sizzle … So I am on the phone to Savvis telling them that it’s the same exact thing that had happened 10/10/04 … Verizon has to come out and pop in a new card … Why didn’t they move that box? This time the phone only rang once … Another guy from a different band wanting to know why he couldn’t get to his site … I also got an email when I finally got to emails from a guy at like 11pm … I always kinda think the emails are funny cause you’d think if someone couldn’t get to their site that they might think that I couldn’t get emails … So I replied to this email and didn’t specifically place the blame on my 3 year old son … The pressure would certainly be too much on him …

So as I sit and wait, I figure I can begin the installation of the new machine and stuff … I have no Internet to get updates and stuff, but no matter … I now have the spiffy firewall in place where I am already protected from the nasties before I even install whatever operating system I choose … Since this is my workstation, I still use a lot of Windows based software, so this will be a Windows based machine … I have to complete hooking up the internal wires and things … The computer guy did most of the mounting of stuff … I had to hook up the LED wires … the external USB ports that are on the front of the box, etc … So I get it all together and boot it up … Setup goes through its normal startup and when I get to the part where I tell the installation to begin, it tells me there’s no hard drives to install Windows to … What?! Hmm … guess Windows doesn’t know about SATA when this was released … Okay, no problem, I will press F6 when the Setup begins and let it know with the SATA drivers … So, I do that and when I select to read the drivers from the CD that came with the motherboard, Setup informs me that I have no floppy drive to read the drivers in from … Uhm … I didn’t get a floppy drive cause I never use them anymore, and I have about 30 machines that have floppies in them that I didn’t need one in this new machine … Bah! Exit the setup again … so I figure I will go to Microsoft’s web site and look up how to install onto a new SATA HDD … Guess again, I have no Internet … So what to do? Screw it, I steal a 6G IDE out of another unused machine and decide to install the Op/Sys there and once up and running get the 200G up and running for storage … and that’s what I ended up doing …

Almost 7 hours after reporting my 3 year old’s adventures, Verizon shows up and I am running within 5 minutes … I asked the guy if I could cover the box or something and he said that would be fine … He didn’t seem into moving it or anything, so I will have a plastic bag covering that bad boy within 24 hours … Maybe some gaff tape with the plastic draped so anything will run off and I can leave the sides and bottom exposed … If I tuck it over, I think something may be able to get into the back of the unit, so I will create sort of like a gutter instead … This box is locked and I have no access to it at all … So there you have it, I knew it would only take 2 minutes to put that card in cause I knew what the problem was … Of course he had to go through his diagnostics and pinpoint the problem … It’s also always nice to have someone come in and admire my mess … It’s neat to watch someone else climb through all the boxes and crap that’s all over the place …

So I have the Internet, I begin Windows Update … While I update, I play some Counter-Strike to pass the time … I also moved some machines around since I was down and there was no one accessing them … Some of the machines that I recently developed, and when I say ‘recently’ I mean within the last year, I moved into more permanent spots and got them out of my way … I was also going to replace the firewall’s power supply, but it seems to have lost that rattling noise that it used to make … It was blowing air just fine so I will just keep an eye on that one … In the coming days I will re-vitalize the old Windows MySQL server into a new FreeBSD server with one of the new power supplies …

After all the updates are complete, I immediately go for the essentials … Firefox and I had always been meaning to switch from Eudora to Thunderbird, so here was my chance … got those both installed and working and I started getting the email accounts set up … I am using POP3SSL and SMTP-AUTH TLS for sending … all using the main hostname of the mail server … so far so good … I installed my CorelDRAW 12 upgrade, and it didn’t even ask me for an old disc … Weird … I know both DVD drives are working as I played Revolution-OS in there (a fitting first movie in this Windows machine) … I resurrected my brother’s old Creative Labs powered speakers for this machine … I decided I wanted better sound than the little cheapo speakers I’ve had on my workstation for some time … Already I am getting used to Thunderbird … I had over 350 messages to root from the BSD machines … No complaining from the Windows machines … I don’t think they even knew the Internet was unavailable …

A couple hours of sleep in my chair here, and I am back at it … Typing in this entry a reseller called for a new domain and asked about yesterday … They didn’t even realize the down time from last night … See, it only matters between 9 to 5 I guess … Although I am sure there were many puzzled faces during the outage last night … Right now the mail server is being converted to the SCSI drive that was installed almost a week ago … It spun in there just fine for that time, so now it’s ready to go into production … I also bought EditPadPro for the new machine … It was about time I got a registered version of that … It’s the best editor I have ever used, and I was getting tired of the slow response times of the older version … This new version is much better …

So! With the power outage from last week, and the AT&T outage coupled with my 3 year old’s potty training outage and my workstation’s hard disk crash, this has GOT to be it for a while, yes? I most certainly hope so …

Mail Server SCSI Install

Figured I couldn’t do any worse by installing the SCSI devices I got from eBay into the mail server at a mid-peak time … They had been sitting here since Monday and there was the power outage so I figured I would get them into the machine so work could begin transferring all the mail server data to it … The IDE will remain in the machine to serve as a backup/spare for the mail server’s files … While I went into it blindly not knowing whether there was anything on the drive, it all worked out … Worse case scenario would be that I would have booted into something I would or wouldn’t be familiar … Maybe even have gotten some free software? But that wasn’t the case … the mail server booted from the IDE and now PHPSysInfo displays the drive as being installed, just nothing on it yet …

New Forum

I have posted a forum application for use here on my site … If you’re interested in starting a little online community, please sign-up for the forums and begin to forge what is ours … The link to the forum is under the links section on the right … I like having web applications such as these, and maybe it will stimulate more of a conversation than what this bLog actually does or doesn’t do …