It seems many of us are carrying around our new best friends.  I bought a Dell Mini 9 and I must admit, its very impressive.  In fact I'm writing this post on it!  I've been using it for a work laptop and have had absolutely no problems. Of course I had to hot rod it as much as it would take. I installed a High speed SSD, 2 GB of RAM and the new Ubuntu NBR 9.04.  Very good performance. I  have even been experimenting with VMware player running XP pro for giggles. Runs fine. The only drawback of course is getting used to the reduced keyboard space and the reduced drive space. The drive space can be taken care of with a larger SSD (up to 128GB) and the use of SDHC memory cards (up to 64 GB). I found that  my installed drive usage including the VMware player OS is still only around 7GB. Of course I have a bunch of KDE apps in there also. I like my music played from Amarok,  I use Quantum+ for maintaining web sites and Ktorrent  for downloads. What I found most impressive though was the battery life. I have actually run mine 4 hours on a single charge. (great for those long airport layovers). Sure beats my 8 pound E1705 for lugging around. While traveling to Chicago on business I noticed a great many netbooks and even had some questions from curious folks about mine. So with all these cool little device out there, who got your cash?

I would like to take a chance to thank everyone for your utmost patience and loyalty. Things have been pretty start and stop since about last Christmas. If you remember I had referred to a bad back in the Comcast post ......Well that turned out to be a bit more intense that I thought. I actually lost the use of my right leg. I assumed years of hard work had taken its toll on my back and lead to disc damage but it  seems the Neurologist is leaning toward the beginnings of Multiple Sclerosis after completing a battery of tests. Needles to say that was a bit eye-opening. But I've been getting better and better and almost have the complete use of my right leg now. Life is getting back to normal ...somewhat. But enough about that, lets talk Linux. I've been promising a new series of How-To's for some time and I haven't forgotten. Lenny has been out since February and I have been working on a whole bunch of stuff. One such session lead to an entirely new site package.


I've been working feverishly on this new package for several months now. It seems the old site had some security issues and I found some holes that folks were repeatedly trying to exploit. You'll remember the Forums were pulled down. They had done a bunch of obscure attacks and compromised one table in the database that lead me to set-up a honeypot and actually watch them do their nastiness. So that table was pulled from the database leaving the Forums non-functional. In the mean time a new package was sought out. So what you're seeing now is the result. Some new goodness was also added.

Along with the new site, a brand new server load of Lenny was implemented. I have to admit, its very very tough to outdo Debian for server builds. The new server build How-To will reflect all the measures I have taken to secure this box. We'll cover them in-depth in the new Web server builds. We'll also cover some more that I found for the Mail server builds. Its going to get pretty busy and I expect we'll be that way for some time.

So once again, Thanks everybody and welcome back to our little corner of the world.

PDR60

It's a Great weekend!!! The Debian Team has unleased the next version of our beloved OS. Debian 5.0, codename Lenny, is ready for your downloading pleasure. This has taken 22 months to hammer out and it is really a welcome update. Not only is hardware support expanded but there is also the new kernel. I can see allot of busy admins for the next several weeks and months. I have been looking forward to this for some time as we have a whole boatload of How-to's in the wings just waiting to get put up. Things are looking up!!!

Let me count the ways...... For a supposed tech driven company I am always amazed with Comcast's ability to screw up. If you have noticed recently we have been having some connectivity "issues". We've been down!!! I managed to get some diagnostic software for the "router" that I was running and it revealed a failure on part of the physical ram. I called Comcast and told them I think my router is having some problems. Of course we're not supposed to be in the routers at all so I couldn't tell them the diag messages I was receiving. Well the "tech" on the other end wanted to do the usual "Lets try rebooting your machine. I blew her mind when I asked her, "You mean the router, the firewall, the Cisco switch, the servers in the dmz or the workstation I'm on the LAN with? Do you want me to try a linux or windows?" She referred me to level 2 tech. This genius starts with, "Llets try rebooting the "modem". I told him I don't have a modem I have a router. His response baffled me. "Same thing",  he said. The conversation went downhill from there..... I was referred to his manager. I told him he might want to let his "tech" know what the difference between a modem and a router was. This guy wanted to have a discussion about the differences and by the time we were done he asked me what kind of certs I had. After explaining that, I asked him if we could discuss my router problem. He ran some diagnostics and told me, "Looks like I'm seeing some bad memory in your modem." After correcting him again I asked what he used to run the test, he told me and I informed him his version of the the software was 3 versions behind. He got a little testy and told me I could either have a tech come out or drive to the Comcast branch and swap my modem. I once again corrected him and knowing their sense of urgency in taking care of customers I chose to drive to the branch and swap routers.

The person behind the counter was nice and polite and took care of me straight away. I took my "re-furbed" router back to the house and plugged er up. No ethernet!!! This was about 1:00pm yesterday. So I get back on the phone and get hold of another tech. I explain the entire situation and this mental giant wants to know what IP address I have configured in my computer. I say, "It really doesn't matter if layer 1 is not there. I need a physical connection first." She get snotty and says "Sir, I can't help you if you won't work with me." Wow!!! I'm starting to loose my patience so I just hang up and dial back in. I go through the entire description again and ask them, "Can I just go and swap again?" I'm told "Sir, you're a commercial customer, I'm going to get a tech out there and have him check the entire connection from the street to whatever you're connecting with." Well I'm impressed, so I agree to let them send a truck and check everything. This was now about 2:15 pm yesterday.

I called them back at 6:00 pm to see where the tech was. "Sir, that ticket is still active for today so he should be there. He may be running behind" Mind you, all I really needed was to swap the router for one with a working ethernet port. This morning I dragged myself to the car and drove to their office to swap my router. The only reason I'm home is I have a blown disk in my back and went to my doctor yesterday and she told me to stay home Monday and Tuesday and "rest" after a couple of steroid shots and a prescription. (This is a whole other matter for another time.) When I get there, the same branch office I was at yesterday, I talk to another woman.

Here's the conversation,
Comcast:"Is this a commercial account?"
Me:"Yes"....
Comcast:"We're not supposed to swap modems for commercial accounts. They are supposed to be serviced by an on site tech. You had a tech there last night. Did he leave with the connection down?"
Me:"He never showed, and I have a router not a modem"
Comcast:"It says he did show. Are you sure he didn't?"
Me:"Yes mam. I think I would have seen him if he was in my house. I also think my dog would have let me know if a stranger was in my computer room"
Comcast:"Well I'll swap your modem but we're not supposed to."
Me:"Thank you. Its a router and could you plug it in and see if its works before I leave."
Comcast: "I'll be right back"
She shows up a couple of minutes later with a "re-furbed" router and power supply. "This ought to get you going" So I drag myself back to the car, drive home, and plug it in. Nothing....... Not even a powerlight. I grab a volt meter and check the power supply. Its dead.... I rummaged through my "I might need that someday" supply and come up with a compatible power supply, Plug it in, and watch the router go through its sync up and establish a connection to them. By this time I have hooked up directly from a laptop to the router. Its re-syncing.... I configure my static ip in the laptop and .....Its re-syncing....I reboot the router and....Its re-syncing.....I bless it with a few words and ......Its re-syncing..... I'm back on the phone with Comcast. "Sir I can't connect to the modem could you reboot your laptop?" I said "Excuse me? You want me to reboot my laptop because you can't see my modem that's actually a router?" "Yes sir" CLICK. I hung up and called back and got somebody else. "OK sir I'm not seeing anything from the router. You say its just re-syncing over and over?" "Yes" "Sir, first let me apologize, I see here that this is your second router swap and you had a no show on a service call last night. I'm going to report this to my supervisor and we are going to roll a truck your direction and get this taken care. He will be there between 12:00 and 2:00PM. I'll be calling you back at 2:15Pm to follow up. Would that be OK with you sir?" I almost fell out of my chair..... Eddy was actually taking care of my service request.

The call never came and the tech didn't get here until 2:50 PM. I was about to call when the dog jumped off the couch and headed for the door. I made it to the door and greeted the tech. "Sir I'm here to check your modem....." "Its a router", I said. "No problem, let me switch and get one." He came in went up to the computer room and hooked up. He then called to see if I could get out. I dragged myself upstairs and began pinging the gateway. It wasn't connecting. So he called his support folks and by their conversation, he was getting a little upset. I heard him say "you mean they haven't taught you a trace route yet?" I'm thinking this is going to be a while. Eventually he managed to get the connection up after several more calls and the ping started answering. It was now 4:25 PM. He left and I hooked the firewall back up. We're back up and all is well??? I think.

To make a long story short....Comcast has some issues!!!!

Update.... I just got a call from Comcast asking me if I want to try Ip Phone service........The last thing the operator heard was my hysterical laughter as I hung the phone up.....

PDR60

Wow!!! What a start to the new year!!! Some of you may have noticed we were off-line from Jan 3-6. There is a very good explanation for it... Let me explain. It seems shortly after a daily backup, the Web server that I host this site (along with many others) had a drive failure in the RAID 5 set up. No big deal, right?? Pretty standard stuff really, I replaced the bad drive with a new one from my on hand stock, rebooted the box, and repaired the array. Apparently all IBM Raid cards are not created equal. After the raid rebuilt, the box rebooted and all kinds of disk errors, mount problems, and read only errors were coming up. Needless to say the server became as they say "non responsive". You know, like Windows....That's when the fun started. After working some hardware and file system magic along with some judicious file restores I managed to get the most recent config files off the box. In the mean time I had a few phone inquiries as to what was going on. This machine also hosted part of an email cluster....... Now running a single node. Big trouble coming down the line. The websites were already backed up from the night before and the mail was all on a separate drive array. The biggest problem was no webmail. That was a simple solution of moving it to my VMware box.

At the time I had a sneaking suspicion of what was going on but wasn't sure yet. So the process of building a new node for the mail server began along with a separate Web server. The web server is not too big of a deal I was just short some parts. Getting on EBay, the parts were here in 2 days after some convincing phone conversations with the sellers. So the mail server was back on line on the 6th. I built another VMware box and brought up the web sites. But what was the real cause of all this??

There is a problem with the code that runs the IBM-4MX Raid card. The problem is that when the drive failed the card didn't recognize it as failed and tried to write data to it. Catastrophic volume failure!!! I've seen this problem before in some older Dell cards but not IBM. I found an article on IBM's site about this old card. Its a bug in their code. Nice!!! Well the new web server will be getting a Compaq 5300 Raid card and a set of new drives. The 5300 is very, very stable. Needless to say its been kind of busy here in the lab. The new mail server node is buzzing along (also on a 5300 Raid card) built from a fresh CentOS 5.2 load. Nice distro. The web server will be my old friend Debian. Right now this site is being served from a virtual on a VMware machine. Both Debian Etch! I should be done with the new webserver pretty quick after the new motherboard gets here.....