The Inner Circle

Ahum, this weekend I was bad, I was very bad, naughty… and it’s all Richards fault at work. I now have an Xbox 360. It’s oh so shiney, I got the full system, with an extra wireless controller, an extra wired controller and most importantly a HD VGA cable.

I first ran the box via composite through my nebula TV card, it was fuzzy, playable, but fuzzy. But now with the HD VGA cable, it’s at 1280×1024 (yes you can set the res), oh my god, it’s a fine picture.

Had a small issue with voice chat from a wireless controller, it sounded like there was feedback and curruption. Once I plugged a cable in (with the Play & Charge) it went away… how odd. I need to play with that.

Burnout Revenge for the Xbox 360 is sweet. I need more games through. Whoooo. It’s also on the network, it’s firewall must be strict or adaptive, as it can’t even pinged. Very impressed even if it’s a Microsoft product, although saying that, their mice and joysticks have always been very good.

More games needed!

D.

‘t has been a while since I last blogged, not a huge amount going on really, just getting on with life.

I’ve decided to pickup Horizon again, I’ve pretty much decided on functional PHP and MySQL again. While I’d like to try J2EE/Struts for it, I also want to be able to use it in the majority of places, like my parents home machine and my “router” neon.

I’ve been playing around with lighttpd a fair amount after Andy proded me to a few weeks back, I have to say I’m very impressed with it. I’m not a big fan of FastCGI spawning three copies of PHP without any users, but I suppose it could be worse. I’m tempted to set it up on nebula for ajb007.co.uk and provide a second alias to try it through.

nebula is approaching a point where is despiratly needs a reinstall, however I’m waiting until FreeBSD 6.2 which should hopefully have Xen dom0 support. Then it’s a trip down to telehouse for a quick Xen install, and create a cell which has the current nebula in it, then to create the proper installation from afar. Xen will provide me the ability to reinstall entire cells with very little down time.

xenon has also been having a few issues since it’s MB swap, the Adaptec 2810SA RAID card was being lost contact with during heavy use, disabling SMP seems to have restored the stablitiy, which probably means there’s a race condition somewhere that needs to be found.

I’ve been having issues trying to make neon pass Bonjour traffic between xenon’s vlan and the inner lan vlan. The problem is Bonjours address is in 224.0.0.0/24 which isn’t ment to be routed between subnets… “great”. However I want to use daapd for sharing to iTunes. I’m thinking I’ll need to write a relay program that does simple listening and relaying, and of course IGMP… :/ This is also an issue to stream music to the Airport Express from iTunes, although not an issue using DVD Jon’s streaming program.

Work is good, had a few issues with ResNet over the past few weeks, Cisco’s VMPS protocol is a PIA. We were having an issue where the VMPS server appeared to be loosing data, so after a long rewrite the problem still persisted, the end issue was that the VMPS and *nix kernel was buffering that much for us that the requests became out of date.

It appears that it sends 3-5 requests for the same MAC auth to ensure that one gets through, and thoose request are only valid for 10 seconds, before it does it again with a different ID. Our issue was that this was all to much for the PostgreSQL database to deal with in a timely fashion.

There are three things I can do to VMPSd to solve this, we can check upon reciept of VMPSd packet to see if we already have that ID, upon popping from the queue if the request is over 10 seconds old and upon processing, if it’s just a reconfirmation just bounce back the VLAN provided. This will put off the problem for a while, but there isn’t a huge amount that can be done in the long run, this method is maintainable for 6,000 ResNet users, but I’m not sure how well it will scale campus wide. Saying that, I’m not convinced of the database design the external script is using.

Ahhh well, I shall get on that this week if I have time and make it cleaner again.

Feck all else to talk about really,

D.

Well, it’s been a tiring week and weekend, I’m really starting to feel the need to relax alot more then I do. The holiday from work doesn’t seem to have really helped as much as it should. Maybe I should really try chilling at the weekend and not doing anything.

Anyway, the new RAID array is now in and working. I really have to remember that manufacturer sizes are in billions of bytes, not gigabytes. The RAID array is 1.5Tb in size, with 1.4Tb usable (thanks for that FreeBSD ;)). I copied the old data onto it last night and it’s now at 1.1Tb capacity. Tonights task is to rebuild my PC into a slow POS. :/ Maybe I’ll get away with playing SWAT, I guess I really need a new PC, I did spec one up last weekend, it came to the best part of £800. Sigh.

I’ve ordered a new gigabit switch from Dell (strange I know), it appears to be web managed and supports vlans and port aggregation. I’m thinking it might do the job. My current gigabit switch doesn’t support vlans at all, and goes flunky when you try and use it for that. It was uber cheap from Dell.

If you arn’t already a fan, I’d like to recommend Questionable Content as a great web comic, it’s about the only webcomic I’ve got into, and I’m not sure why. ’tis pretty neat and worth a read. You might need to go back to the beginning though.

Anyway enough of that for now.

D.

Whooo, tomorrow I go to Scan and pick up the bits for my new RAID array, again it’s gonna be RAID 5 and running on an Adaptec card, but it’s all new. I’ve brought a Adaptec 2810SA 8 port SATA I raid controller and five Western Digital 400Gb WD4000YR’s. The drives themselves get excellent reviews and show to be the fastest on the market for that spec, they support TLER and NCQ which should help error recovery and speed (respectivly). I also decided to buy a 5 harddisk caddy system that fits into 3 x 5 1/2 disc bays, and they each have their own LED! mmmmh RAID lights flashing.

So what else is going on, well at work we’ve been routing ResNet, instead of it being a static class B routed together at a Cisco 7401, now we have five routers all over campus using OSPF. Oh that reminds me, TEH VPN!

Andy and I have been realising our dream of a proper VPN between us. By the power of greyskull…. not wait, gif interfaces and OSPF, we have a resilent and fully functioning VPN. Point to point links make life very easy. I’m also in the middle of moving my network to the 10.10.0.0/16 range so that I’m fully VPN compatable, it’ll be nice once it’s done and there will be scope for some funky ACL rules on various vlans, including /30 (point to point) links for server. mmmh nice. I’d quite like to borrow the work N2X’s in order to through put test the FreeBSD router and to see if polling makes any difference at all. I shall have to ask Len about this.

Tonight work are off out for a curry with everyone in networking and network systems, it’s looking a tad thin on the ground, but otherwise it should be a good evening, including the chance to win a Video iPod…. mmmmh sexy.

Apart from picking up my RAID array tomorrow I also plan to pick up a cross training exercise machine to help loose the flab I’ve managed to “obtain” over Christmas. :/ Ah well.

That’ll play for now.

D.

Well it’s a new year, it’s also been nearly three months since I last blogged. I guess I’ve been a lazy naughty boy, although the real reason is that I just haven’t had time or felt the need to, not that I feel the need to now, well not on an emotional level. To quote Andy, I’ve been a “non blogging tart”, an accurate description to be sure.

It’s the new year and as such time to make resolutions that the chance of keeping is slim, there are two this year, one serious and one fun. The serious one is to get fit, I’m about two stone heavier then I should be, so it’s time to eat more sensibly this year, and to buy some hidiously expensive exercise equipment. I’m tempted to get an eliptical cross trainer. After using my mothers step machine last year I was able to reach a decent weight, but I could never easilly loose it off of my chest, with a cross trainer I should be able to.

The non serious resolution is to blog a lot more. Even if no one reads it, I’ve found it nice to have a history that I can go back and read on. To that end (until hiddenblog is sorted) I’ve installed WordPress and removed the old narwar.net. Sara said she liked the old one, which I’ll agree it was nice, but the only used part of it was the blog.

So it’s time to catch up… whats happened in the past three months?

First thing is I’m still living with John and Ali, and really intend to for the next five or six months until Sara is in a position to move in with me over summer, we’ll have a look for a house two months or so beforehand. Work is still good and enjoying it every day, it’s always different.

I haven’t had a huge amount of time for personal projects, I’ve got myself a Soekris 4801 which I intend to make a missionable FreeBSD machine. So far I’ve got FreeBSD down to about 16Mb with plenty of usable utilities on it. I intend for it to do routing and nat when it needs to, as well as other things such as monitoring and logging.

I’m also in the process of setting up a proper routed VPN between several sites, on which I’m trying to run OSPF to distribute the routes automagically, however I’m having issues atm. I have two Quagga servers set up and they are (or were atm) swapping routes correctly. They arn’t however sending or recieving routing information from a Cisco 2620 I have also connected to the VPN. It’s causing some issues.

As for projects I’ve kinda accidentally involved myself with programming (or attemping to) the new version of LuBBs. Looking interesting so far, although it’s only in planning stages.

Ah well that’s about it for now, I’ll try and write more stuff soon!

D.