I’ve got about…30 minutes to blow before my first class. Gave myself a little bit too much time to make up this test.. I have found this nice little niche in the back of the building underneath the stairwell though. I’ve got my coffee, internet and if I look around the frosted glass a good view of the lake =P

I could be working on my piece for my writing class but…I’ve already finished it and like it pretty well, besides, the final isn’t due until next week. Today is just a status conference.

So what do you do when you’re online and just wasting time? I’ve semi been doing some geekstuff (the changelog for FreeBSD 7) Still looking up some more abandoned facilities (and pictures of missile silos for sale!) and reading the economist online.

hmm..Currently listening to this drunk girl upstairs calling multiple people and apologizing for her crazy drunken behavior at a bachelorette party?

More to come, but for now I’m going to try to grab another cup of coffee before class starts

If you’re into Urban Exploration I’ve been checking out a couple of good sites

Fallout-UE -This site probably has some of the most artistic photos I’ve seen yet. The Metro hospital and The Pines Hotel pictures are both work checking out. ( I really would have liked to have gone into the E before they gutted those two side buildings…or taken pictures back in `02 when the other side was demolished to make the gazebo.

Infiltration - An ezine filled with new reported locations, ethics of exploring and other resources for the interested to stay involved

Opacity - more locations

I was looking for known sites in Western KY and I did find something kinda cool. Two abandoned airports nearby that seem worth checking out. Who wants to come with?

Also, looking through some of these pictures has piqued my interest in digital photography. I’ve been doing some research on decent “starter” cameras…and I’m kind of looking forward to looking like an idiot and taking 50 million pictures of the exact same thing until I get the sense of what looks good =P

Geek Stuff.

I realized the other night I’d let my servers get a little dated…with the production release of FreeBSD 7.0 out I figured there was bound to be some security fixes which meant it’d be a good time to catch up. Before long, I realized it was nearing 8am and my first class (and that essay absolutely destroyed me, the rest of the test wasn’t bad though)

Getting done early, I decided to get on a computer and see how everything was going. Trying to SSH got me a timeout. Okay, maybe just sshd needs to be restarted locally.. Hm, can’t go to my web site? Try logging into my backup box.. uh-oh. Either there’s an outage in my area (unlikely) or something with portupgrade broke my router! ;)

As soon as I got home I saw my modem ready light was flashing…Turns out it was an outage and happened RIGHT in the middle of a php upgrade. make install clean ftw…

I’ve determined that hosting a web server (amongst other things) on a P2 300 isn’t the best idea. As long as the system is left alone everything runs smoothly…but, any compiling and everything about dies.

I have a PIII 900MHz w/ 512MB I’m thinking about switching everything over too. Plus, my current server hasn’t been fully wiped clean since FreeBSD 4.10-RELEASE.

Which brings me to my next point, I was trying to think of something to do with this web site besides turn it into a personal blog so I’ll be adding a couple of techie sections to the list. I know every time I have to do a clean setup there is ALWAYS something I wind up forgetting or something doesn’t work right which sends me to Google. So, expect a few multi-topic tutorials in the upcoming week(s) I don’t know how in-depth I’m going to go yet but I have a couple of ideas

1.) Basic FreeBSD installation, typical system hardening and maybe automated maintenance

2.) BIND and Zone files… They both drove me insane so I’ll give a little backgroudn

3.) Apache, MySQL, PHP and including the best configure line to prevent constant recompiling

EDIT: Waiting for the release of FreeBSD 7.0 later this month

I was having a conversation with an old friend of mine this morning and he brought up the topic of NIC Teamming or
Link aggregation. I don’t know how the copyrights work on being able to upload pictures from Wikipedia so I’ll link to the site.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_aggregation

At first, I just assumed it was done for redundancy, if one NIC failed the other would be able to take over the load. What I didn’t think of is that it can also do load sharing. Hm, assuming you only use one switch it still gives you a single point of failure for the device but, if you seperate it through VLANS and then setup separate routes for the different subnets it would be another way to prevent a network outage.

What I’m wondering is would it be possible to NIC team with dual switches? Unless you had a full power outage wouldn’t that provide the best redundancy? In addition, if you had multiple trunks on a mission critical server it would provide the most efficient load balance as well. From what I’ve read I’ve never seen a dual switch setup implimented but I fail to see why it wouldn’t be possible.

This will be costly but, in a corporate environment, when compared to revenue lost as a result of downtime it has the potential to pay for itself right then.

EDIT: http://www.intel.com/support/network/sb/cs-009747.htm - Is a great read to show the different type of teaming modes available. 802.3ad dynamic mode is the only mode that provides both fault tolerance and load balancing

After messing with it for wayy too long last night/this morning/this afternoon. I’ve got a limited form of Nagios setup. I’ve got it reading local services and is able to check publicly available remote services (ping etc) I have some serious problems with the documentation. It’s not very clear the location for various configuration directives. On top of which it doesn’t give a full list of commands and command directives.. Not too mention problems constructing a template.

Even better…one of the plugins that was supposed to run remotely on one of my FreeBSD boxes says “To run FOO without inetd consult the local SECURITY doc” … Sure fine. Except for there’s not a SECURITY doc inside the tarball.. blah

it works which is an accomplishment but doesn’t work exactly to my specs so it’s frustrating.

blah @ natd.conf

So, I managed to get my box setup but realized I had some daemons / services running that well, I really didnt’ want to have on my router so I decided to setup another box. Managed to get it up running and updated but for some reason my forwarding rules aren’t working

They’re working fine for my Windows box but not the other FreeBSD box.. I’ve compared the rules and they’re in the exact same syntax.. the only thing I can think of is that since I’m having to manually set a static ip there’s some information missing from my FreeBSD interface that’s not going through the network properly

ifconfig_rl0=”inet 192.168.2.60 netmask 255.255.255.0″
defaultrouter=”192.168.2.40″

Every manual i’ve read just says to put ^^ two lines in my /etc/rc.conf file and it’ll work.. but it’s not. Even though it’s working internally.. which, under the ruleset shouldn’t even work… which means it might be going to the wrong interface.. no, because there’s only one interface in that effing box. and it’s the same as grrrr.

i’m going to figure this thing out.

Met up with my friend Stephen in Greenville the other day…he wanted to stop at Uncle Lees and get himself a new toy and then we were going to the Muhlenberg South/North Classic. I was surprised that about four guys that I knew from Murray showed up. Listened to some bands and wound up going to Huddle House to catch up and BS.. It was pretty fun

and now I’m playing with my FreeBSD box.. It’s been a while since I’ve done any maintenance on it so I at least better make sure it didn’t get hacked (so far so good)

I bought a pretty sweet book from BAM the other day.. The Company.. 1950s-80s CIA stuff.. I think I’m actually going to go read some more of it.