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.