/var/log/vadept.log

At 10:00pm on 3/18/09, I went down to the InReach building at 4635 Georgetown Place to move my one lone server out of their colocation area.  I got a call 2 days prior saying that they are shuffling everyone left in the building over to their rack at Pac-West telecom.  They are moving out of that building.  That building that I helped wire, that I helped setup, that I spent more hours there than anywhere.

I got to walk around the vast empty InReach building.  I knew where all of my desks were throughout the almost 10 years I worked there.  Looked at the tiny pieces of CAT-5 jumpers that I wired by hand well over 10 years ago.  My eyes started to tear up to realize that I’ll probably never ever see the inside of that building again.  I spent most of my teenage years confined within that small building working on servers, putting out fires, dealing with shit that now-days I could of never deal with.  Remembering the laughs, the long nights, the sitting at my desk wondering how in the fuck I was going to fix this server (but yet always did), the walks to McDonalds.  A ton of people who read this (or my LJ) worked there and grew up there with me.  That faculity saw the birth and the move of DeadJournal and housed zillions of bytes of data that I could never replace.

I unracked my one server, and followed Mike over to Pac-West.  Considering that over 10 years ago VAdept (this server) started out in the PacWest colo was sorta ironic.  I could still hear the sounds of the Ascend modem boxes heating up the room like huge rackmount hair-dryers.  Visualizing the USR 5+U modem chassis with the HyperDSP cards (that could never work right).  The smell of a real colocation faculity, and how a few times I slept on that cold raised floor hearing the air woosh under it while waiting for an array to rebuild.  Remembering the time Andy formatted a web-server array by accident, then said “See ya!” and left me there to restore from tape (you dick, I still remember that.. ).  It was a very weird and awkward feeling to be there again.  Everything looked exactly how I remembered it to be.

So since I was there, I decided to help Mike rack the gear that he brought over from customers who didn’t care enough to drive down to move their own damn computers.  It was such a weird feeling, that its hard to describe what it was like to be sitting in that colocation again after so many years.  In a way its fitting that my server ended back up to where it was born, with real generator power, real Halon and temperature monitoring, real 24/7 NOC, a “real” facility.

But using the same rackmount screws, the same power cord, and the same piece of cat-5 I’ve used for years and years; I’ve managed to pocket a few handfuls of dirt from the grave of the InReach colo.  Really, my server is its legacy.

There seems to be a lack of good dive log archiving software around. One’s that just plain/generic and logs the basic info.

Oceanic’s software sucks ass.
Suunto seems to have their shit together, but what if you change dive computers?

I’m fed up with searching/payware and windows-only bullshit. I’m writing my own.

Thats right, you heard me. Writing my own.

Import a CSV file with the fields, and data input will be via a stupid simple web-form thats accessable via iphone, blackberry, lynx, whatever. Something simple and uncomplicated so after the dive i can just spend 2 seconds logging the info and be done with it.

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Oh, and the world of watches (dont ask me how I got into this), but Water Resistant 200m is NOT the same as Divers 200m. Huge difference.

Water Resistant 200m means that it can take water forces up to 200m on a non-continuous basis, say falling off of a jetski or bailing while waterskiing. It can handle sudden impacts of force without flooding. Its not meant to be subjected to the continuous force of diving + any external forces by moving your arm underwater.

Divers 200M means it can be subjected to a continuous 200m force + any external forces of moving your arm around while underwater (thereby making force spikes above the continuous water pressure).

Am I the only one who thinks that the “privacy” service that most internet registrars is just a fucking scam? I mean they got themselves into this mess with people harvesting information from our whois info, and yet they have the balls to charge us to make that information “private”? This shit should of been private right from the get-go, and the registrars decided to cash in on it.

Lets make a huge problem that in 5 years we will be able to make a “fix” and rake in the cash. Sounds like a Microsoft product.

So I spent most of the evening trying to find out how to stem the hoards of spam comments i’ve been getting in gallery2. The captcha system sucks and it doesn’t seem to stop anonymous commenting.

Heres a temp solution before version 2.3 comes out that has a ton of anti-spam features built in. This solution assumes that you are using the short-url module which writes an .htaccess file with a bunch of mod_rewrite crap in it.
Put the following code at the very end of all the pregenerated stuff (but within the IfModule and /IfModule statements)

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} .*AddComment.*$
RewriteRule ^.*$ - [F]

Basically all that does is returns a 403 Forbidden error with any URL that contains AddComment.  Yeah, its stupid.  At least this will tide you over since there really isn’t a good way to globally turn off all comments.  This isn’t tested very much so buyer-beware.

Why do major computer problems always hit when you really don’t have the time or need to deal with it?  For example, there was a major local root exploit published on slashdot on 2/10/08.  A real doozey.  Run this program as a normal user and you magically get root access.  Shit like this makes the assholes of sysadmins chew on the leather of their big chairs.  Shit like this makes me glad that I went into pharmacy and not a full time sysadmin.

Since all the major vendors (and even the kernel developers) are blindsided by this (2/10/08 is a Sunday) someone puts out a hotfix.  So I apply said hotfix to my workstation, my internal file server, and a server in an undisclosed location that is NOT at my house.

Everything is fine, until the MOMENT I get into my car to go and do something that will take 4 hours.  Off goes the cellphone to let me know that all 3 machines have shit the bed.  Wonderful, just fucking wonderful.  Cue the terrible anxiety for the WHOLE damn 4 hour appointment.  I get home, just get to fixing the servers that have shit the bed when the pent up anxiety makes my dinner explode out of my ass in 10 min increments.

I read then to see that the hotfix is really hit and miss as to if it panics the kernel or not.  To make things even fucking better, I find a /proc option that will automatically reboot your server if it locks up due to kernel panic.  Go fucking me.

Yes, its past 1:30am, and im still working on this anti-spam thingum.. Did the same last night too. HOWEVER we are making some progress at gaming the beast which is sendmail.. We started at 9 or so, and im just now going to let this server run overnight to see what it does.. I love mx records and failovers.

Did most of my work at the office.. So quiet, so nice.. Nobody there, no hum of tons of computers like at home.. Just me in a totally dark room burning out my eyes via a super high resolution monitor.. Geek utopia.

should be getting to london soon, I hope she had a good flight, im going to miss her..

I forgot my cell at the office too.. I suck..

Why am I in pharmacy again? My bookshelf is full of Orilley books (most of them are network security stuff)… I dont have one pharmacy book in the house.. Im such a tool.