Friday 30 January 2004

Alright, Lord. That's it. I'm calling you out.

Do you hear me, you dirty cheater! You may have the "drive drunk into power pole" hack, but you're still a giant loser. Common. Play a legit server. I'll take you down for real. I don't need to "magically" cause power failures at your house at 5 in the morning to take you down. I'll kick your ass. I'll kick your ass even if you get a 4 frag lead, you cock-bite.

So yeah. Power went out this morning around 5am PST. This is bullshit. I'm getting a UPS so I don't have to worry about Dulcea's file system getting trashed every few months. It would be nice to have a battery-backup, but I'm guessing I don't have the bones for that.

On a related note. Dulcea came up fine this time except for IRC. I'll try getting that working but its Dante's server so we'll have to see about that. Maybe I'll have a little luck. Actually, I got it. Only thing that was fudged up was that I didn't start stunnel properly. Its all good now, baby.

Thursday 29 January 2004

Holy MEPIS!

So I installed MEPIS on Michael. Well, "install" may not be the right word. I can't get gnome to run, everything in KDE is either in this illegible cursive script or in Spanish or both, I'm pretty sure I have about 200 packages too many installed and my gig nic doesn't work (expected) and neither does my sound.

Linux rules :D I think I'm going to reinstall mepis when I get up tonight and this time get more with the working and less with the raping. Heck, I had better not go back to some skanky rpm-based distro after this ordeal (though I may end up on Mandrake again).

Brlaraaaargh!

Saturday 24 January 2004

Goddamn Mongorians

Dante and I were trying to get into nikita to change the root password and update roxy's A record but the goddamn mongorians were breaking down my shitty wall! Telus's bloody border on the OC3 connection is pinging 4,300ms. What a load of bullcrap and lies! This is a huge pipe and you just leave some crap-asstic piece of no good stupidness? What is up with that? I am so full of hate.

Thursday 22 January 2004

Excuse Me, Sir. You Can't Park that Zone Here

So been reading up on my DNS. So far I've just slicked up my SOAs for all my zones and such. I've been noting down things TODO in my Digital Organizer (I know, its not even a TLA, but its a piece of crap so what can you do?) and there's a nice long list goin' on now ... And I've just hit the part of the book about DDNS. That should give me some food for thought.

In other news, I booted Knoppix and tried to boot MEPIS. That was fairly sexy to be able to boot a fully-featured and Debian-based distribution from a CD. Knoppix created a 800MB ramdisk, detected all my hardware, and started KDE. It had XChat 2 installed, and, uh, lots of Stuff. Plus I could just apt-get anything I was missing. So neet.

MEPIS failed to boot. Supposedly the main man over there is a nut and wants to hear about my problems so I'll email him. If its half as cool as Knoppix, then I'm so totaly down.

Props to the crews on both those distros for sure.

I started reading TCP/IP for Administrators (or whatever its called) in my "free time" this morning. Ah, there's nothing like overlapping, changing, or conflicting terminology to really get you going in the morning. Between "host", "multi-homed host", "gateway", and "router", the only clear thing is that Dulcea is at least a "multi-homed host" and not a "host". Depending on what year and who's being asked though she might be a gateway since she forwards packets, she might just be a multi-homed host, or she might be a router since she doesn't bridge different network topologies.

Ahh, that will be another fun book. Heh, and Ken said "you know, Dominic, there's only so many books you can read at once."

Friday 16 January 2004

Welcome to Mandrake, Mr. Anderson

Yep, that's right. I've installed Mandrake Linux on Michael. Its, well, fine. Just another full GUI Linux distribution. The installation was fine. I had to click some buttons to be sure networking was going to happen by default. I don't know that I needed to.

The one different thing in the install is that Mandrake has a 'Use free space on windows partition' option for allocating drive space. I looked at it and I guess it would have worked. It didn't say that it was going to cry for FAT or anything. It just advised funning chkdsk c: from windows before using that option. Didn't try it but since Mandrake is one of the few distributions that has read/write support for NTFS compiled in, I'd imagine it would be fine.

Other then that, Mandrake uses a little foot instead of a hat for the main menu icon. I haven't really done anything yet other then downloading Firebird so we'll see. I assume it will be fine.

Now back to the important things in life: hacking DNS and getting my NIS back up.

Thursday 15 January 2004

That's My Name and Don't Wear it Out

I've just finished the "configuring bind less like a suck-ass" chapter and am into the "clients need lovin too" chapter. There's a *lot* of cool stuff that can be done with dns.

First of all, I really need to just sort out what I'm going to do with the dl.nibble.bz zone. Single NS is fine but I think dulcea should resolve to both her routable and her non-routable ip addresses inside and outside the network.

The matching deelio to that is that I need to start setting my search domains and search lists correctly. This is tricky since though I know it can be done, that information needs to be distributed automatically to clients and I don't know how to do that yet (eg via dhcp). Not to mention my NIS server is still down for lack of troubleshooting...

Also there was the "Mail is Doom!" chapter. Lots of good stuff in there too. I think I may want to get dulcea to join roxy as a mail exchanger.

Hmm where was I? Yeah, DHCP and DNS. Fun stuff. I think I'm gonna go kill things for a little bit and go to sleep.

Wednesday 14 January 2004

DNS: 141 Archangel: A Handful of Half-Points

In today's fun of fun fun DNS fun stuff, I tried to see if I could delegate my child zone from Nikita to Dulcea.

I don't know why. All the ip addresses are non-routable so they won't resolve outside that network anyhow, but I even tried to have Dulcea do a zone transfer back to Nikita.

I think I'm huffing gas. I'm definately going to sleep now. BYE!

Monday 12 January 2004

Holy Uptime!

Dulcea:
up 6 days, 14:39
Nikita:
up 61 days, 15:56

Now Nikita has an uptime. And she's basically doing no traffic too. 750 MB out since last time the firewall was zeroed which may well be the 61 days ago. Actually, it would be whenever we shutdown port 80 which is going to still be around 45 days ago. Nice and light.

The weak part is that she shouldn't be put under much more load then the handful of apache, mysql, and bind processes. Anything external is being encrypted and getting Nikita to load a webmail page is fairly unresponsive and spikes almost the entire CPU for about ten seconds... Ouch.

Ah well. One of these days I may end up cleaning up Dulcea and then switching the two. Depending how how much traffic I'll use and how much is I'm allowed, of course. But having most of the work done by Dulcea on the OC3 leaving only routing, cacheing dns, and samba for the lan which Nikita would be fine for. IO heavy processes good!


And in related news, Roxy, my uptime nemesis (or something) is now down. Dante is moving back to the island so Dulcea has a unique opportunity to gain a lead on her. Bwahaha!

Ergo the IRC server has been moved again. Its going under the more permanent name "irc.nibble.bz" though is going to move around a bunch yet. Should make connecting to whatever the active server is a bit more transparent though. Once everyone gets to using that name, I rekon they won't have to sweat it no matter what since I'm probably going to cast my vote for renewing the nibble.bz domain and I think we can easily get the nibble to unanimously for for renew (which comes up a ways away anyhow, but I'm just saying).


Screw you guys! I'm turning the ramble right around. So help me, God...

Tuesday 6 January 2004

Smoted Again!

Must post more ... posting muscles so weak...

Yet again, God, that bastard, smote my power out. He cast a furious snow storm and then slammed some stupid fucking idiot into the power pole outside (or something) leaving me without power from somewhere in 8am to 10am right up till almost 2pm.

What a bastard.

While booting stuff up, most everything was fine except Dulcea's turbo power supply wasn't all that keen on starting. I'd press the power and she'd chug and whir like a helicopter going down and then she'd switch off. Figuring it was that she didn't take well to the cold, I tried several times and each time the sound was a little different. Eventually she did come up and now she's her usual stealth-fighter engine sound level.

The nice part was that despite getting dumped, there were almost no filesystem errors. She recovered the journal in a few places, dropped some dirty inodes here and there and that was it. I was very proud.

Today's Word Origin is:
Bash: Boxing is responsible for this term. It dates the the 1800s, when pugilists were sometimes called "bashers", referring to the action of the fists.

You just gotta love the way these words are written up on this calendar. Must be Americans.

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