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.