Upgraded the webserver to a 500Mhz PIII w/ 128M of ram and other stuffs. It's definitely faster now and stuff and I'm gonna look into fixing up the logging stuff which I think is busted at the moment. NS will be getting upgraded in the somewhat near future, if I can manage to find time for it. School's almost over with, only have one more final this semester and then only two classes next semester and I'll be all done (yay!). Other things are progressing, slowly but at least there's movement. Kerberos/LDAP stuff may happen soonish, Debian AM work is getting done slowly, etc, etc, check the .plan.

Okay, so, yeah, I've been slacking on the website updates. I've been busy damnit! We're into the new house, it's cool, though I have to admit it gets kinda cool in the basement. Need to clean my junk up, still have lots of computers on the floor in the basement. Need to run a power circuit into the laundry room and alot of other stuff. I've got finger working so if you're really curious you should be able to finger sfrost@snowman.net and check out my (rather large) .plan and stuff. The network is doing decenlty now at least. I'm up on an ADSL connection from Speakeasy. My only real complaint is that it's not really fast enough on the downlink side to keep me totally happy and it's RADSL, so the rates change depending on the line quality and stuff, and lastly but probably the biggest issue is that Speakeasy will only give me 10 IP addresses, and they want to charge me for having more than two, and they'll only bridge them to me and not route me any. Pretty sucky overall, oh well, things are working well enough for the moment. I'll try and update sooner than 2 months from now. :)

Megan and I own a house now! Everything went very smoothly with settlement and everything and now we've got keys. :) We don't move in till November of course, but it's still nice to know that it's *our* house now. :) Megan and baby are doing well, we're really looking forward to moving into the house. School is kicking my butt at the moment but my head is still above water there, which is nice. Havn't missed any big stuff yet. Doing some new stuff for Debian (being an AM) which is kinda neat. Work is really busy now since we're short people but that'll be changing before too long with some new blood. Soccer is being fun, we're undefeated so far this season, but we also havn't played against any hard teams yet really. :) Also planning on going to the Netfest is a couple of weeks, that'll be pretty cool, nice chance to get away for a weekend.

Finally, Megan and I have found a house we definitely want. It's under contract and everything already which is really cool. Settling date is Sept. 27th and we're doing a rent-back for a month so we should be moving in either late October or early Novemeber. Yes, that means all of you folks in the area better not be planning on doing anything 'cause we're gonna be coming after you to help us move. :)
The house is a 3 level, 3 bedroom townhouse in Centreville. It has 3.5 bathrooms (one in the master bedroom, one in the upstairs hall, half on the main level, and one in the basement, very cool!). The basement is fully finished and has sliding glass doors out on to the lower deck. There's an upper-level deck as well which is a good size and we're thinking we can probably even fit my 6'x6' table on it. And, yes, we can get DSL there. O:) Megan and I really love the place and it's just turned out *very* well for us that we found it.

The hunt for the perfect house will be continueing this Saturday. When we last looked (two weeks prior) we found two places we liked but they were a bit more expensive than we wanted. Hopefully we'll find something we like more in our ideal price range this Saturday.

Did a keysigning last night with a few folks, including Raul Miller, whose existance was questioned by some. :) Brian Almeida and Aaron Ucko were there as well, we're slowly getting all of the local Debian developers to form a complete mesh. There are a few sets of signatures that still need to happen for it to be complete.

The Debian syslog-ng package has a knack for driving me insane it seems. I don't know that I will *ever* be able to use the actual package. There used to be the issue with klogd but now I think that's finally fixed and all of a sudden this message-splitting junk comes up. Talk about enough to drive you insane. Add to that that the maintainer doesn't seem to like to actually close bugs, even when it seems evident that they've been fixed, and you've got a combination that makes me very reluctant to ever want to even try and use the package again. Oh well, maybe after this latest round of stuff the syslog-ng package in Debian will be useable.

Summer semester is over for me, has been for a couple weeks actually. Got my grades a little while ago, not too bad this round, A in Numerical Methods and a C in Statistics. Fall semester is starting in a couple of weeks (the 26th). I'm taking 12 credits, all of the actual class time packed into evenings Mon-Wed each week. I'll update my 'College' project with the actual classes/times. One nice thing is that this will be the first semester where I only have CS classes. I'm hoping that makes things easier. :) Megan and I are going house-hunting this saturday, I expect that to be fun. We're also going on vacation starting Thursday next week and will be back the following Sunday. We're going camping at Natural Bridge here in Virginia.

I'll probably also be releasing a new version of ipt_recent which is just a small change to allow you to set the permissions on the /proc/net/ipt_recent/* files. I also upgraded ns2 to a 486 and put it into a rack-mount case and put that into the rack. It looks pretty good. I tried to put phoenix into one of the same rack-mount cases but it turns out that the motherboard is too big so that isn't going to happen right yet. I'll probably buy a new rack-mount case for it later. For now I'll probably put it back into the case it was in and see about setting it up to be the 'user' server, perhaps with an ircd running on it.

Megan and I have been together for about a year now and things have been going well in general; we have our disagreements here and there but we're happy. We're starting to look for a house in the area to buy together, we're planning to buy around October. We're going to be needing the space because we're expecting. The baby is due January 20th 2003 and we're looking forward to it. So the big news is that, yup, I'm gonna be a dad! :) Megan and I have been spending the past couple of weeks letting everyone know; she's about 14 weeks along now. All in all I'm pretty excited about it. Although an unexpected suprise, we're happy about it and things are going well.

The little news is that I released a new version of my ipt_recent module which you can check out on the Projects page; it'll probably be in netfilter CVS before too long.

The trip to NY was fun and pretty relaxing. I'm back, of course, and back to working like mad. I've got two exams this week and work is keeping me pretty busy as well. Looks like the changes to my recent module got merged into the netfilter CVS tree. Bind9 hasn't been acting *too* strangely so far. Upgraded ns to use 2.4.18 so I've no longer got anything running 2.2 kernels except an older machine here and there. I may be upgrading ns2 before long. It's started acting a little odd and I'm guessing it's just because all the silly programs expect to be running on a slightly faster machine. If it starts acting up again I'll probably replace it with the old gw2 which is no longer in use. I'm going to be begin moving my machines into the rack mount cases that I picked up recently so there may be some downtime here and there as I move things around.

Kind of a big update this time around because it's been a while and I've been busy, as usual.

I'm leaving for upstate NY tommorow with Megan for about a week, we'll be returning on Sunday. Going to be alot of fun, get to meet her extended family and have a happy and fun fourth of July. It will also be a much needed vacation away from work. Of course, as usual, you can probably bet on something breaking while I'm gone, that's just the way things seem to work out for me. Hopefully, if anything serious goes wrong, Paul can fix it or get in touch with me and I'll be able to fix it.

Finally have moved everything to bind9, had to reboot my secondary name server because my bind9 setup needed me to be able to give two IP addresses to it and I didn't have IP aliasing turning on in the 2.2.16 kernel I had installed. ns2 had 630 days of uptime when I rebooted it. It came up cleanly under 2.4.18; all filesystems were checked and no serious problems found. It's back up and performing it's normal duties of relay server, secondary mail server and secondary DNS server. The bind9 setup is nice because it means I can now have my internal networks and CIPE tunnels in DNS. This will also take care of an exploitable hole in the DNS resolver code because all of my machines use ns/ns2 for DNS lookups. I've also upgraded the externally available machines to OpenSSH 3.4 to deal with all of the issues with prior versions of it. Hopefully there won't be another exploitable hole in it until I get back from vacation.

New version of my recent module is out, 0.2.2 which fixes a small (though important) bug in the collision handling. I've sent the update (twice) to Harald, hopefully he'll get the patch into CVS before too long. So far I've heard nothing but good reports about it and it's been running just fine on my firewall for quite a while now.

Got an 'A' in my silly Astronomy Lab, which is now over, thankfully. I'm still taking Numerical Methods and Probability, of course. Numerical Methods isn't being too bad, I'm doing well in the class but it's taking a fair bit of work to keep up. I'm doing 'ok' in Probability, mainly because I'm no spending as much time on it as I probably should. Unfortunately the class is really rather boring and the teacher is hard to follow. The books for both classes in general pretty much suck; that seems to be a common problem in the higher level classes.

Released my ipt_recent module version 0.2.1 as official (it had previously been beta). No actual changes from the 0.2.1-beta version, just packaged slightly differently. It's a patch against the netfilter CVS tree. I've sent the patch along to the netfilter team, hopefully they'll incorporate the changes before long.

I've updated my projects page with my summer soccer schedule for those who are interested. Looks like basically one game per week, usually on Sat. at 7:00pm.

Classes are going decently so far, I'm pretty sure I ace'd my Numerical Methods exam last week and I think I did decently on my probability exam too. Only problem with those classes is actually getting all of the homework done for them. I'm ace'ing my Astronomy lab, and this is the last week of it which is really nice. Starting next week I'll only have classes on Tuesday and Thursday. The lab hasn't been hard or anything, but it does take a number of hours out of my day that could be better spent on other things so it'll be really nice once that's over.

Just got back from the netfest, was definitely alot of fun, as always. Had Outback Friday night, played some Q3 and Super Smash Bros., crashed, got up on Sat., had grilled burgers and hotdogs and such, lots more Smash Bros., a little more Q3 and a 4am game of Saturn Bomberman (8 people playing), much fun. Crashed again to wake up around 9:30am on Sunday and left around 11am. Got home at about 2pm, finished counting up my change ($164.10 (w/o the pennies)!), put my box back together and had some food. :) Very fun weekend all-in-all. Looking forward to the next one in Aug., hopefully I'll be able to make it to that one. Oh, and happy father's day. :)

The next netfest is this weekend and I'm making plans to be there. Hopefully I'll be leaving on Friday morning and following Jon up to New Jersey for it and then be back Sunday afternoon. I'm definitely looking forward to it, I've missed a few recently due to school, work, etc. For those who don't know, netfest is basically a game day at Jon's brother's place in Jersey which includes PCs, ps2, ps1, game cube and a bunch of other consoles (Including original Nintendo and Faxanadu! I *loved* that game). Lots of fun.

New version of my recent module is out and that version is now running on my firewall. It's been working fine for about 2 days now, I'll probably submit a patch to the netfilter crew when I get back from netfest if everything goes well.

Oh, yeah, and school has been kicking my butt too, two exams tommorow. The only good thing is that my stupid lab will be over with in a couple of weeks.

I did alot of updates to my IPTables/Netfilter Recent module last night which included changing it to use vmalloc instead of kmalloc, adding alot of debugging options and actually versioning the thing. I've tested it some and things appear to work pretty decently, a number of the bugs which exist in the current version in the Netfilter CVS tree have been fixed. The hash-based lookups are a big change from the prior version and affected alot of the code and so this is still definitely beta code.

Also updated the layout of the website some, I believe I tested everything but if you find any broken links be sure to let me know. Main changes shouldn't really be noticable unless you linked into the machines or projects areas directly.

Worked on my ipt_recent module some, fixed up at least one problem and set up a decent test environment for working with it. The testing environment is, happily, not my primary client machine any more which will probably help alot. I was much less interested in working with the module when it seemed that every time I did something with it, my main machine would crash. ;) I tested the module a bit last night though and it seemed to do everything correctly after I fixed a small bug that wasn't even causing the box to crash anyway. I have a feeling the problem is in the collision handling in the hash table but I havn't tested it yet. What I really need is something that will let me generate a bunch of packets from a bunch of different ip addresses easily so I can test out that part of the code. Gotta be something out there that does that, if not I guess I'll write something but if anyone knows of something feel free to drop me an email.

Changed the machines page for bma's box since he took some issue with my original comment regarding the floppy drive. (Oh, and it has this small 'problem', when capt'n slick (bma) set it up he connected the floppy backwards so now the floppy drive light is on solid and probably will be for the next few years. :) He came over last weekend and fixed it though, so I had to change it for him.

Big changes happened at work last week. Quite a few people lost their job due to promises not kept, or at least that's what we were told. Alot of other people were moved to other parts of the company. The manager for my group was moved to another part of the company and our Oracle DBA was let go. This all basically means more work for everyone who's left, which thanfully includes me.
The SDSL modem started having some annoying issues last friday and, unfortunately, it wasn't under warranty. Ended up having to replace the stupid thing because it was getting errors at 768k. The new one has a warranty of one year though so hopefully everything will be good, havn't had any problems yet at least.
Had a very cool cook-out on Memorial Day (this past Monday). Picked up some patio furniture over the weekend for real cheap (60"x60" table and 8 chairs for under $300) and that worked out very well. Also got to use my new grill (finally). The grill worked out very nicely and I managed to cook up some burgers and chicken without killing anyone. I expect to be using the grill more in the future, it's pretty fun to grill up burgers and stuff.
My second set of summer classes have started and I'm afriad they're going to be rather evil. The books for the classes cost around $100 new, each. It appears that there's going to be a fair bit of calculus used in each of the classes as well. We went over set theory in the probability class which was pretty simple but I'm afraid it's just a trick to lull us into thinking the class is easy. I hate it when they do that.

Taking classes at GMU this summer and they just started today, exactly a week after the last of my finals for Spring semester. Gee, what a nice long break that was. :) It was fun, went to a wedding over the weekend for my friend Karen's sister Sharon. Also got to spend yesterday mostly just hanging around at my gf's house not having to worry about any school junk which was nice.
Oh, and my summer school schedule is up on my projects page if anyone is curious.

I managed to pull a B- in calc3! What's better, that was my lowest grade this semester! I got an A- in CS450 (Database), a B in CS483 (Algorithms) and a B in CS421 (Software Engineering)! Talk about very cool. :) This, of course, also means I will be getting a ton of money back from work in my next paycheck or so. I've been thinking about what to spend it on and have been very tempted by the SunFire V100. Talk about a nice cheap ($995!) Sparc box. They're cheap enough that even CDW is selling them, which is probably where I'd end up buying it from. Other possibilities are a bunch of rackmount cases for the various machines in my house. Even for that, pretty cheap, rackmount case we're talking $700 for 5 of them, equipped how I would want them. Now, I suppose if I wanted to spend all of the money I'm getting back for school on computer junk I could do both... I guess that's something I'll have to think about, that would certainly be *very* nice, but wouldn't help me pay off my CC or anything else useful. Of course, I could just pay off more of my CC from my normal funds this month too.

Star Wars, Episode 2: Attack of the Clones. I thought it was pretty decent. It certainly could have been better and it reminded me a little of certain recent Robert Jordan books where amazingly little really moved forward after a great many pages. Even so though, I enjoyed it and will probably see it again before it's out of theatres, maybe even in a better sitting position than the house-left side of the very first row. I still need to see Spiderman since I've heard good things about it. SW:EP2 definitely set things up in an interesting way for the Episode 3. I hope they do a really good job with it and tie everything together well. Unfortunately my concern is that SW:EP3 is going to feel like a bunch of very loose ends being tied together with duct tape and bubblegum. I guess we'll have to see. Until then we have The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers to look forward to showing up this winter which should be very cool.

Finally finished with GMU and classes for this semester. Summer semester for me starts on Monday. Thankfully that class is just this Astronomy lab thing I have to do and is only one credit. The more annoying classes are going to be the OR481 and the STAT344 classes. OR481 is Numerical Methods and STAT344 is Probability and Statistics. I've also registered to take a bunch of classes in the fall. Hopefully in a year I'll have my degree though.

Okay, the new Matrox Parhelia512 card looks absolutely awesome. There's a pretty detailed Review of it out that just makes me drool. I've been thinking about getting a new card for a while (or a couple of them) to support the 3 21" monitors I picked up but I havn't really found anything I really like. I think that might have changed with this very, very, very cool card. So, in addition to buying that card soon I think I may be getting a desk very shortly and moving around alot of stuff in my basement possibly. Have lots of ideas in my head and little money or time to do things about them.

Through much insanity I managed to get all of my projects finished and turned in. Still have two finals on Monday which are going to suck (well, mainly the calc3 one) but at least that's all I have. I've been trying to study for it this week and havn't been doing a very good job of it. Hopefully I'll be able to get more serious about it this weekend and on Monday. My software engineering final probably won't be too bad, I managed to ace the midterm and I think the project turned out pretty well. Definitely been a pretty rough semester overall though I think, and these last two weeks have been downright hellish. I think my body is starting to tell me that I really do suck for all of this. :)

Okay, you see the timestamp, yes, I'm still up. This weekend has been totally insane. I'm working on printing out and putting together my algorithms project. Then I have to print out my Software Engineering project. Hopefully someone will print out the junk for my database project. I've got 9 more hours on my algorithms project, thankfully I don't believe I'll need them. I've got about 16 hours for my software engineering project but that's basically done except for being printed. Around 40 hours till my database presentation, hopefully I'll be able to get some sleep before it. Not planning on sleeping tonight, don't want to sleep past noon or something and miss the deadline for my algorithms project. Does mean I'm gonna be a little groggy most of the day tommorow but oh well, I did it last week, I'll survive it this week. Anyhow, the basic jist of it all is that school is kicking my ass right now and I might be willing to speak to you again after my finals are all done (5/13/02) and I get some serious sleep.

Woke up at about 4:30am this morning. Showered, got dressed, grabbed all the stuff I needed and jumped into the car around 5am. Drove 30 minutes or so west to Manassas, my gf's house specifically. Stood outside the door quietly knocking on it trying to get her dad to wake up and let me in (without waking my gf up). He had promised to unlock the door at around 5:30am but apparently had a late night. He let me in (finally) around 5:50am, only was out there for about 15 minutes, not too bad. I haul all my junk into the kitchen and start slicing up the strawberries into a bowl (and washing them). Once I get that done I hunt around for a mixing bowl, not finding one I just grab a pot and throw stuff in there and mix it up. Then I slap the stuff down on to a cookie sheet and let it bake. Pull out the biscuit-like things, slice 'em open and stuff them with strawberry slices. Then I slap some cool whip on them and put on some more strawberries, tada! strawberry shortcakes! I take them downstairs to my gf's room and open the door and wake her up w/ breakfast in bed, pretty slick, eh? Okay, while things were baking upstairs I also took the really big bear I bought for her and put it at the top of the stairs (her room is in the basement) and put its arms out and place in its little hands a jewelry box with an emerald and diamond necklace in it. After we ate the strawberry shortcakes I head upstairs in front of her and she comes up after me and spots the bear and is suprised yet again. ;) Mwahahhahaa, it all rocked. I drove her to work this morning and then drove to work myself (30 minutes east, not too much traffic, amazingly). I'm about to head off to pick her up from work for lunch at noon and then I'll head back to my work, do some more stuff, and pick her up from work this afternoon (she loaned her car to her brother for about a week).

Oh, yeah, it's her birthday. ;)

Yay, we won our game tonight, 5 to 0. Apparently the other team was kind of new though so it might not have been entirely fair. On the other side, they had twice as many people as we did which meant they could substitute in and out alot more than we could. Since we still don't have enough women on our team (this is a recurring problem) we also were playing short a person most of the game.
Sent off some ideas to the bind9 folks on a better method of working with views but havn't really gotten much response. As I mentioned before, the problem is mainly with slave zones, but I've got alot of those. :/ I'm also looking to pick up some cheap, older, but very stable machines for my ldap/kerberos servers. Unfortunately those are hard to come by. :/
My girlfriend and I are looking at building a table for the basement and I may be replacing some of the really crappy tables that are in here currently. The big wood table Megan and I are planning to build would be for most of the servers and head-less machines. The other nicer tables would be for a workbench probably and then there's the possibility of me getting a new desk. Rack-mount cases are also planned, but for farther off. Lots of fun stuff. :)

Brian's been doing some absolutely awesome stuff up at work. Basically it goes down like this: LDAP for account information; Kerberos v5 for authentication; TLS for LDAP connections; LDAP for authorization; nscd to keep things sane; totally transparent (and so fast you can't tell at all) failover for both the Kerberos and LDAP servers to their backup servers. Of course, he's not done yet. Next steps: OpenAFS for home directories and some data partitions; LDAP for mail aliases, etc; Winbloze 2000 clients logging in with Kerberos and having mount AFS home directories; sync between the labs we have. Possibly some other things. My role in this has mainly been to let him know what I'd like to see and then interject ignorant comments and he's done all of the real work. He gets to do it up at work, I'm going to be the one doing it all at my house once things at work settle down some. :) Basically I'm going to try and mimic much of the setup we're going to have in the end here at home. It's all stuff I've wanted to do for a while and just hadn't really gotten into it. For those curious, the LDAP + Kerberos combination is actually 'LDAPv3'. Additionally, the authentication is kind of tied together using SASL from my understanding. All-in-all, very cool stuff. :) Think that's enough for the moment. This stuff is totally da bomb tho. :)

Felt like doing an update from class, just because I can. Going to be registering for fall semester tommorow. Taking four classes in the fall and another four or so in the spring which will hopefully be the last I need to get my degree. Finishing my Bachelor's degree in Computer Science will be very nice. Only about a year more to go till I finish it up. Definitely a pretty nice feeling that it's all coming to a close. We'll see if I survive it. ;)

First DMZ user, Ken (friend from work) showed up today. Amazingly we had him up and working on the network in only about 2 hours. I also set up a box which he installed over at his place which is going to be my offsite DNS/mail server. Pretty nice arrangement overall. Next big network change is very likely to be the move to bind9. I've been working on it for a little while but it can be a royal pain getting all the different views to work the way I want them to. Unfortuantely there's not (yet) a way to say that you want one zone (the *same* zone) to be in two different views. This isn't so much a problem for master zones because you just list the same zone with the same file twice. With slave zones it's trickier though because if you specify the same zone in two views with the same filename there's a distinct possibility the file will get corrupted when a zone transfer happens from the remote master since it'll try and do the zone transfer for both views. This also means twice as much network usage and whatnot for the zone transfers since it's happening twice. There really needs to be a way to say "This zone should apply for these views." Oh well, work with what you have I suppose, maybe we'll see some improvment in this area in a future version of bind.

I just finished (mostly) restructuring the network by removing gw2 and having everything hang off of gw directly. You want to talk about a SPOF... Oh well, it makes some things easier. Hopefully gw will be reasonably stable, if not life will suck. This does free up an interface on gw which is going to be a dmz-type network. Basically it'll be where I stick people who can't stand to be behind my firewall. This way I can still muck with their routing, do traffic shaping on them and montior the network usage using mrtg w/o forcing them to deal with my firewall rules. gw is a bit cramped now though since it's got a total of 7 physical interfaces with just about 10 virtual (CIPE) interfaces. Makes for some interesting firewall and routing rules.

I finally decided to do it and it took less than an hour. I love Debian. Everything seems to be working correctly and happy. I'll probably upgrade the kernel on the box before too long. If anything isn't working the way it's supposted to let me know as soon as possible. Just a little fore-warning, I'll be moving to bind9 before too long since it has some capabilities that I've been wanting to play with for a while. Once that's done the world will be a better place. You know where to find me when shit breaks. :)

I went and bought a grill yesterday. They didn't have the model I bought in a box though so I ended up having to make them order it, hopefully it'll be in next week sometime. This is the grill I bought over at Sears in Manassas Mall. It was on sale for $159 and had an additional $20 rebate which made it a really decent price. Also picked up a lamp over at Target. Pretty cool lamp, really needed one for my room and now I've got one.

Wow, that was very cool and very much a suprise. bma and I have birthdays close to each other. Mine is April 16th, his is April 14th. Our signifigant others decided to suprise us for our birthdays and they managed to do a damn good job of that. Megan (my gf) and Karen (bma's wife) treated us to an awesome time down south, a little west of Richmond from my understanding. Now, we had no idea about this, and in fact they BLINDFOLDED us for the entire trip down south. Talk about an awesome time though. We stayed at the Best Western Governor's Inn in Richmond. Very nice place, jacuzzi bathtub, nice big bed, etc. We had an awesome steak dinner at Ruth's Chris Steak House where they have got to have some of the best steak on the east coast. An unbelivable weekend and a total suprise. Thank you for such a wonderful weekend Megan. So you all know, Megan's birthday is May 3rd and I fully intend to make it a memorable one. ;)

I'm strongly thinking about dist-upgrade'ing ns to sid. In the event that this happens lots of things will probably break. Hopefully they won't break for too long. I'll also probably move over to bind9 and set things up for it. Hopefully this will all happen this weekend on Sunday evening but don't get your hopes up too much. Added another tunnel for James (moss) which is on mrtg and whatnot. Up to 8 or so running I think. Need to work on my firewall rules some more I think.

webfreak's users decided they didn't understand the concept of 'log into the box and then scp *out*' so I've decided to encourage them to learn. I set up a cap on webfreak's CIPE tunnel to only allow about 10KB/s through. The traffic shaping you can do w/ Linux is really quite cool. The LARTC Howto is quite useful too and has a bunch of very smart people working on it. I'm not entirely sure I did it right but that doesn't really matter since it's *working* and doing exactly what I want it to do. It might even be nice and give interactive sessions higher priority than downloads and whatnot but I didn't really experiment with that.

Schedule change for soccer, looks like I'll be playing this Sat. at Poplar tree park at 7:30pm or so. At least I don't have 2 games back-to-back now which is nice but I'm sure I'm still going to be hurting. Maybe I'll post my soccer schedule online here somewhere sometime. Okay, put my soccer schedule on the 'projects' page because it was easy.

Changed a bunch more stuff on the site, added some more stuff to machines and projects, moved the links on the right around and added some links to both the left and the right lists. See? I'm actually keeping this website somewhat up-to-date and doing neat stuff to it. :)

The season has started again. I won't be playing this weekend but I've got 2 games next weekend, one on Friday at 7:45pm and one on Sat. at 7:30pm. All of our games this season are at Poplar Tree Park off of Stringfellow just north of 66 which is nice. It's not *too* far from my house and it's about half-way to my girlfriend's house where I might be able to seek some sympathy after the game. Of course, she's playing softball now so that might not work out so well, plus I'll stink. Oh well, hopefully I'll still be able to walk next Sunday. Joseph (my gf's little brother) has a T-ball game this Sat, that should be quite fun to go to.

Yay, I did up a machines page finally. I'll add it to the sidebar here shortly. It's kind of cute, does some simple shell scripts to generate the 'Details' and whatnot and parses out some information about each box. It'll get nicer as I find time to work on it (hint: I shouldn't be working on it now, really) but who knows when that will be next.

Apparently people are actually visiting this site so I suppose I'll continue to update it with my random thoughts and whatnot. I think I'm going to try and do some more stuff with the projects page since it's pretty bare right now. I really need to get a machines page, maybe I'll do that first since that really shouldn't be all that hard. Perhaps I'll update my .plan and make it available on here somewhere as well.

I got to hang out w/ Alison this past Sunday, that was cool, been a while (2 months or so) since I last got to see her and her bf Ros. Cool folks, we grabbed some food over at Mehak's which is a very cool Indian restaurant near my place and then my gf came out and we played pool over at the Shark Club nearby. Really need to try and hang out w/ her and other folks more often. So many things to do, so little time.

gw died a little while ago. Think it may have been the extra 3com card that was in it. It's back up now, of course, or you wouldn't be able to read this. :) Makes me more interested in getting:
a) rack mount cases or something,
b) some new hardware for it so the damn thing is stable since everything depends on it and
c) around to setting up a user server so the only thing gw does is routing/firewalling.
Of course, this all takes time and money, both of which are in short supply these days. There are also other more important drains on those supplies like my girlfriend, work and school. Maybe someday I'll have my own business where I have an unlimited supply of money, people who work for me to do the mundane and boring things and I can do the cool stuff as part of my job. :) Oh, and I'll also have unlimited bandwidth. ;) Ah, the dreams of the dot.commer, okay, time to go get some sleep so I can go to my real job tommorow. :)

Yay, the webserver has been up for 4 days now and appears pretty stable again. Hopefully the good luck will continue. I'm back to looking at rack-mount cases. I'm *very* tempted by the $80-$100 cases I've found but then I want to add rails and a quite power supply from PC Power & Cooling and the cost starts to get a bit much (Near $200 per case, >$1000 for 6 of them) so I'm thinking about it. I could just buy 4 of them this round and get more later. That would rack-mount ns, www, gw and debian at least. It would also give me more room, maybe enough room to put in a new desk which can actually support the 3 21" monitors I bought a while back. Of course, the intelligent thing to do would have been to buy the rack-mount cases first and the monitors later. :)

I have an ITP (Intent To Package) on Majordomo2 and looked at it some more last night. Gah. I'm still going to do it but I'm really afraid it's going to be something of a pain in the butt. Things like the suid programs to be built depending on the MTA you're using make it a pain because I can't expect a compiler to be on the end system and I can't know which MTA a user has installed prior to installation. There are other annoying things such as having to know the 'special' seperator for the specific MTA (ie: '+' for sendmail and '-'?! for qmail, which is quite evil in my view, isn't this stuff in a RFC somewhere?) so that the From addy can be set in such a way that a bounced message can include the list and user and whatnot that bounced. That's my understanding of it anyway. The Makefile.PL asking a whole ton of questions doesn't help either. I also need to be able to install it and *then* run through the majority of the config. Wheeee. So, anyhow, brought up some of these things to the authors a while back and they're working on some of the stuff anyway. Wish I had more time and was more familiar with the code base, I'd get in there and help out myself if I thought I could really do some good. It being all in perl doesn't exactly help since I'm not exactly in love w/ perl like the rest of the world is. :)

Went to a keysigning last night w/ some other Debian developers. Cool folks, always nice to meet up w/ some other developers and add sigs to my key. Analog finally finished its marathon run and generated the initial DNS lookup cache so future runs don't take nearly as long. It's back in the crontab now running nightly. Looks like I may be doing another keysigning sometime so if people are interested feel free to email me. Keysignings are good things. :) I'm also (hopefully) going to be doing a project for my Algorithms class which involves doing stuff w/ the public keyring similar to M. Drew Streib's keyanalyze work. Initially my plan was to attempt to more parallelize his analysis work since when I ran it on a keyring I found off of a european site it appeared to only actually use up one processor but I'm afraid the problem may have been with the data. I've sent a request to Drew for the public keyring he uses but I'm not sure if I'm going to get it and I'm also not sure if it's already available somewhere. If anyone knows where it's available for download please email me.

My gf forwarded me some funny stuff from her brother, you can check it out over here. I may actually make a page out of that and add more funny stuff over time. Of course, I might not too.

I played with cricket some and determined that it's just too bloody slow for some reason. Worse, anyone looking at the stats feels that slowdown. I like having the information gathering seperate from the graph generation but if it can't generate the graphs fast enough in the cgi then it shouldn't be doing it as a cgi. Honestly I think there is a problem somewhere and that it could be fixed to at least come somewhere *close* to the speed of mrtg but no one seems to know what the issue is. Of course, it doesn't help that I like the layout of mrtg more than that of cricket as well. I also added gw2 to the monitoring which is kind of neat.

Multi-Router Traffic Grapher. It's quite cool. I had been running it in the past and something or other broke it and so I didn't run it for a year or so. Finally got around to fixing it today. Also added some interfaces that I didn't have before. Unfortunately I can't get information on aliased interfaces or I could get pretty MRTG graphs for each of the virtually hosted sites on my web server. There may be something else I can do to get that information but I havn't bothered looking into it yet, at least I can see how much bandwidth the webserver is taking up now.

You can check out the MRTG Goodness here or by using the nifty 'Traffic Stats' link on the sidebar.

Fear my awesome analog skills. Turned off a bunch of the more silly reports (5 minute summary?) and turned on DNS lookups which makes it take a *lot* longer to run. Hopefully that'll get better once the initial DNSLOOKUP cache is built. For those who have websites hosted here, I run analog every night for all the virtual hostings and the output it put into the /analog/ directory under your virtually hosted site. It's still running now so if that directory is (mostly) empty at the moment don't be too suprised, it'll get filled in eventually. Runs start at around 6:30am and are done sequentially (analog doesn't support having DNSLOOKUPs done by multiple analogs and written to the same file so I'd end up with lots of duplicate lookups probably otherwise). Those of you interested in statistics for this site can check out my analog stats. There will also be a link on the sidebar showing up eventually.

Okay, so the webserver dieing wasn't totally due to those annoying user people. Turns out that one of the CPU fans in the box decided to crap out on me so now the web server is down to 1 processor but back and running again and probably even stable. No clue if the proc fried itself yet. Not sure when I'll actually go out and buy some PPro CPU fans since this is the second one that's died on me recently. One of them in ns died some 147 days ago and the box has been up and running since. Of course, I told myself I was going to buy a PPro fan for that box and get it back to dual proc sometime in the near future around 147 days ago too. Anyone wanna buy me some PPro heatsink/fan sets so I can make ns and www dual proc again? ;-)

This weekend was fun. Got to hang out w/ my girlfriend all weekend, her very cool sister Jill, their cool dad and their little brother. Of course, I'm now very tired. Went out on Friday to 'Sharkies' (probably spelled wrong) w/ Jill and Megan, pretty nice bar with some cool pool tables. Most of Saturday was spent at the park having a blast. We cooked up some hamburgers (well, Megan did the cooking, the rest of us did the eating) and hotdogs; good stuff. Played catch, ran around on the playground chasing Joseph (Megan's little brother) and just generally having fun. Saturday night Megan, her dad and I went out to the Hokie House (again, probably spelled wrong) and had fun playing a whole ton of Air Hockey there. We spent over $5 on games total I think and they're only 50 cents each. Sunday we went out bowling which is always fun and then had a huge dinner before heading home around 5:30 or so.
Apparently while I was gone the webserver decided to crap out (again). A kernel 'oops' in swapper or some such according to Paul. Went back to the old kernel and it's been okay so far. I'm thinking I may just swap most of the system over to some new hardware. Unfortunately it has this nasty habit of dieing shortly after I leave for a weekend. Maybe it's just lonely, Paul not being one to give tender love to machines and all. Can't say I blame him I suppose, though I've heard strange things from richlowe on his interests...
So it goes, I need me some sleep, exam in calc3 tommorow, blah.

Going to be gone this weekend, going down to Virginia Tech. My girlfriend got her degree from there and now her sister is going there. Lots of days when I wish I had gone to VTech instead of getting a job around here and going to NoVa and then GMU. For one thing it would have been nice to get that whole 'going away to school' experience. Oh well.
By the way, I have got plans to actually implement a spelling check in this thing before things get posted so maybe I can pretend like my spelling isn't *that* bad but, no, it hasn't happened yet.
Also, kudos to Panda Express, their drive-through rocks and the fact that they're very close to work is even better. Anyone hungry for some decent chinese quick should give it a try. :)

Modified my setup so that it's easy for me to add news items, guess it sucks to be you all because now I'm more likely to actually update my site with junk. Enjoy. :)

Okay, so I decided to change the website finally to be more 'news-ish' so we'll see how this works out. Of course, it's uber-lame at the moment because I don't know dick about html, php, asp, or any of that shit. I'll do neater stuff later with it if I ever find time. Of course, it may also never get updated again after today knowing me.

So I have to kill Freud today for taking out my web server (again, I think) with his silly slash.php junk. Decided to be nice and fix it up for him but if you happen to see him you might tell him to hide from me for a few days.

What great fun. I'm updating my website some more. Hopefully it'll look slightly better for having more content on it instead of just the junk that was on it. I added the links and friends sidebars in an effort to be 'cool' and modified it so I no longer have the menu code in every page. Now when I update the menu (or the links/friends for that matter) I won't have this issue of having to go through every page to do it. I bet most of you were more or less going "Uh, duh." to that but hey, it started out as one page, so this is progress.
Also going to be fixing up the 'traffic info' so that, I dunno, maybe it'll start updating again. It appears to be something over a year since it was last updated, whoops. Story of my life and all that.
I have to say that MRTG is very cool, btw.

Okay, so I'm working on fixing up analog on the webserver. Hopefully I'll get it set up so that all the virtually hosted sites and the main site will have analog running and even doing DNS lookups now. I'm going to be nuking some of the more useless reports generated by analog as well because they're just silly. Just keeping you all updated on it and whatnot.

So I get to work as part of a group for my CS421 class. What a blast, bleh, talk about an annoying class. Turns out I'm the 'Team Leader' too which isn't too bad, just means I get to try and coordinate meetings and reports and make sure everyone gets their stuff in. At least my group seems to be pretty active and willing to do things. Certainly better than some of the horror stories I've heard from people like bma who took this class a year or so ago, iirc.

So, I've also worked out my Summer/Fall schedules and I'm gonna end up being pretty busy it looks like. Oh well, that's just how it goes I suppose.