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.