Jan 2008: So much for 1-year of uptime

After being up for 336 days, Usul took a dive. A SCSI error forced a poweroff, \ which forced all sorts of cleanup. A personal best for uptime here at phfactor.\ net, stemming from decent hardware and a small UPS. Ahh, well.

Aug 28 2007 Apache2 bloodbath

See this page and this page for more details, but basically I had to upgrade to Ap\ ache v2.0 from 1.3, and it broke pretty much everything. Still cleaning up the \ mess. Sorry.

New router 5/27/07 19:15

Hopefully invisible to y'all, but there will be dropouts as I (re)configure firewall rules, port forwarding and such...

BA 5/25/07

Buenos Aires wedding pictures from May 2007... Diego and Natalia's wedding.

Usul is reborn 1/2/07

Now in a lovely Antec Sonata II case, somewhat quieter. More downtime possible as I rearrange hard drive layout.

Usul is rebuilt 11/11/06

Yesterday and today, I moved the server from its previous incarnation to the current one. Used to be a Dell, P4 3GHz, 2GB, 300+200 SATA.

Now, it's an Athlon 64 3200+, 1GB, 300+200+...drum roll... 500GB of hardware RAID5 storage. (3x 250GB SATA on an LSI Logic 150-4 'megaraid' card. 64MB ECC SDRAM, write-back, XOR engine, GUI BIOS, Linux support)

Still figuring out the drives and storage layout, so intermittent downtime this weekend while I get that sorted. I'll have to post the whole story to the weblog, but suffice it to say that the Linux software RAID5 was not cutting the ice. With any luck, this'll be fast and reliable; it looks good so far.

The new server is nice in that it's a nice machine, has lots of ports on the motherboard (Firewire, gigabit AND fast, sound, etc, etc. Gigabyte K8NS Ultra.) and is housed in a cool black Antec case. Now I can return the loaner Dell!

Wedding pictures posted July 3 2006

Enjoy!

Simulated blast test 4/11/06

Pretty darn cool, a visit to the UCSD outdoor shake table for a simulated blast test. Video to follow!

Chris starts posting 4/10/06

Chris has setup some pages, with killer CSS and formatting. Check it out...

New CA and certificates

Finally got tired of Mail kvetching and re-did the CA and IMAPS/ASMTP/exim4 certs. New CA certificate can be downloaded here for importing. On a mac, the command is 
 sudo certtool i cacrt.txt v k=/System/Library/Keychains/X509Anchors

News now on the wordpress

As of Nov 05, I'm gonna just post news wordpress site. Please subscribe there for updates; I'm soon to add auto-emailed updates.

Borrego pictures

Day hiking at Anza-Borrego state park. Nikon 5700, lots of pictures, enjoy!

News and email 12/2005

on wordpress, but am reluctant to post picture announcements there. Not sure the no-search in robots.txt will be honored.

Anyway, flight pictures over Chicago posted 11/26/05. Enjoy!

Watch essay on WordPress 10/19/05

I'm still deciding on the whole blog thing, but for testing I posted a new essay there, on mechanical watches and retrocomputing. Read and enjoy!

Now Coming to you live from California... 10/9/05

Server re-located, DNS updated, we are back on the air.

More pics posted Aug 2005

Japan and Salt Lake City, on the pictures page.

Crash, restore, aftermath - Aug 2005

3-month-old maxtor 120 SATA up and died, some data lost. Damn. Backups in place but a bit dated. And the mega-lame Maxtor site requires that you:
  1. Download their utility to diagnose the drive. It's an exe that creates a boot floppy.
  2. Reboot another pc, with the floppy and the dead drive attached, and run said util
  3. Paste diagnostic code into maxtor website. Only then will they give you an RMA.

Words cannot describe how much I think this sucks. Needless to say, the replacement drive is not a Maxtor, and I will not buy another. Consider yourself warned.

Oh, by the way - their utility refuses to see the drive, so I can't even RMA it. Hangs the PC, which is a fairly new Athlon64. Maxtor sucks.

Backup restoration

  1. Buenos Aires pics restored from tape. All hail serial media.

New hardware, new OS 4/11/05

I finally confirmed that Linux + AMD + IDE appears to be the problem. I was hoping it'd be ok for a while, but Murphy got me - it died mid-week when I was out of town. Of course.

For now, I have a loaner Dell 280, and a new Debian install. Expect broken-ness, downtime, etc. Such fun I have.

There is definitely lost data - the old hard drive is toast. I have backups, but about 2-3 weeks old. Yeah, I know. Still working on it. Will need to repost Buenos Aires and spring pictures.

More space, less luck 3/11/05

I tried swapping out the system drive. Now have a nice 120G SATA.

Didn't fix the problem.

Usul stumbles 3/10/05

The reinstalled failed to solve the problem. Ahh well, at least I've got a cleaner system now.

Speaking of that, the new CA root certificate is here for those of you using IMAPS. Not that IMAPS is signed with it, but it should be later today.

Usul the Phoenix 3/4/05

After much, much, much grief, I figured out that the hardware is actually stable, and the fault lay someone deep in my N-times-installed Debian.

So you're looking at a fresh install of it. I'm still restoring the various services, so expect more problems while I get it sorted out. So far, I've checked the website, PHP, SMTP and SSH. (New hostkey!) User accounts are likewise intact, as should the MySQL databases.

Major hardware problems 1/2/05

Starting sometime around xmas, we've had major outages due to local hardware problems. Debugging continues, and uptimes will be intermittent until I sort this out. On the good side, we have a new and nicer server, if I can ever get it stable.

More walkabout pics 10/29/04

I finally decoded the resolution change magic on the camera; you have to hold a button on the left side while rotating a dial on the upper right back. Really.

Alas, the light is worse, and so are the compositions, but at least they're full-sized.

  • Second walkabout

    • Blackberry page 10/25/04

    I've posted a first draft of a page about the new Blackberry, a combo review and programs page.

    Fall walkabout pics 10/24/04

    It was too nice to stay instead, so I took a walk up and down the river. The pictures came out well, but my idiot self misread the camera configuration, so they're all low-res. (VGA, 640x480). At least they load super fast.

  • Fall walkabout

    • End of outage!

    8/12/04

    New DSL provider ends a week-plus outage. Also have a small UPS to bridge the short power outages we've seen lately.

    13WCEE pics

    Demo prep for an earthquake conference, see the RSS page for more details and URL.

    RSS feed for site updates

    I am now testing ListGarden for generating an RSS feed of site updates. If you don't have an RSS reader, try the HTML version. Either way, let me know what you think!

    RSS feed URL rss.xml

    RSS as HTML URL rss.html

    UCLA work trip

    A rather cool visit to help out at UCLA for my day job. They have an office building that was damaged in the 94 quake, and have instrumented it to the gills.

    Have a look, it's much cooler than it sounds.

  • UCLA trip

    Sarah's Birthday, June 04

    A lovely visit to Missouri, for Sarah's birthday. Managed to get some really nice sky pictures coming back on routes 39 and 88, courtesy of a large storm cell passing through.

  • Sarah and Missouri

    • Six Flags June 04

    A very good friend came to town, and we went to Six Flags. Much fun was had by all. Love those roller coasters. And the vertical drop ride was awesome.

  • Six Flags pictures

    • Power outages and stuff 5/23/04

    A moment of silence for my Inwin Q500 full tower case. It's lasted me through many, many motherboards and system upgrades (Dual P1, dual p3, athlon, etc) but I've finally retired it for an Antec 1045B2 (tower, 450W, black, more LEDs on the front 'SOHO file server') case.

    Hopefully, the additional power will cure the RAID problems I've been seeing. And heck, it saved me from the front panel LED mod I was planning on inflicting on the Inwin.

    We also had a power outage while I was out of town; looks like I'll need a new HDD in the firewall soon. Sigh.

    Garden pictures 5/15/04

    Bulbs, tulips and other red-hot stuff. Enjoy.

    Wedding pictures 2/29/04

    Finally got done with selection and a bit of cropping. Enjoy!

    Basking in Reflected Glory 8/22/03

    My sister Susan has been elected to the Whitman College Athletic Hall of Fame. How cool is that?

    Two links - the Hall of Fame inductees for this year, and the page of her achievements.

    I feel much cooler just for being related.

    Hardware and AC problems 2/21/04

    Power outage killed the second hard drive on the primary firewall. Quite the mess ensued.

    Then, of course, the gadget I bought to connect the Sun to the KVM failed to work at all. More hijinks ensued, but we're back at last.

    Kernel Goodness 2/14

    Kernel 2.6.2, finally. I have high hopes for the new nForce ethernet driver; I strongly suspect the old version was causing many of the problems we've had.

    More Bling Bling 2/2/04

    Thanks to a friends' upgrade, the server is now sporting 768MB of memory.

    Thanks to Linus, Ingo and many others, it's also now got 2.4.24.

    Up and Down 1/15-1/16

    Large downloads appear to hang my DSL modem. I may be able to fix this with traffic shaping on the firewall, don't know yet.

    Update: Looks like it may be caused by a bad power filter dropping the DSL connection. Fingers crossed and hardware swapped...

    Brazil!

    I finally got our Brazil pictures online with bins, have a look. Makes a nice backdrop to counteract the Midwest winter.

    More pictures posted 12/6/03

    Stephan's 40th birthday
    and
    Thanksgiving 2003

    Enjoy!

    Firewall replaced 11/22

    Swapped in a new firewall based on an Ultrasparc 1, should be a transparent change.

    More Server Updates that Fix Something 10/30/

    Thankyouthankyou John, my old friend. The more-air-miles-than-Bush Promise 100 card is now working. No IDE errors. No spurious interrupts. Much better.

    About 16MB/sec on big writes, 50MB/sec on large reads. Pretty good for 3 semi-matched disks. More than good enough for 100Mbit networking.

    Still no IDE booting, meaning that I now suspect the motherboard.

    More Server Updates 10/11 - 10/12

    The new PCI IDE card works. Sort of. Mostly. If you don't mind booting manually via a Grub floppy. A friend is sending me a different vendors' card to see if it'll solve the problem.

    With this SIIG card (CMD649 chipset), if the card is in the machine, it won't boot. The SIIG seems to claim BIOS drive 0 (80h) but won't boot from it, regardless of settings. Took me a while to figure this out, which is my excuse for the intermittent downtimes.

    RAID performance seems better, though.

    Server hardware updated 10/4/03

    Added a generic UDMA/100 dual-channel controller; this enables RAID5 with one driver per channel. Hopefully this will get performance up to reasonable - with 4 drives on the 2 motherboard channels, I was getting .5MB/sec with 100% CPU usage. It's got to improve now.

    Due to this, I switched ethernet boards, from an add-in Tulip (still the best by a long shot) to the onboard nForce, using the driver from NVidia. Fingers crossed!

    Still unable to run newer kernels, immediate panic on boot, amd76pm, doesn't seem to matter if APM or ACPI, disabled or enabled, ideas welcome...

    B17 pics 7/21/03

    Four 1200hp radial engines, bristling with guns, it's a B17 at the Aurora airfield. Supercool.

    Power outage 7/15/03

    A spectacular thunderstorm knocked out power locally; offline from about 4AM CDT to 9AM.

    More Pictures 7/14/03

    Pictures from Sarah and Jack's wedding are now posted for your perusal and amusement. For a few extra bucks I'll email you The Picture Deb Does Not Want the World to Ever See.

    Linux 2.4.21

    ...seems to have a vastly improved QLogic fibre channel driver. My aggregate read performance is now easily 80MB/sec, peaking to 85. Kudos to the kernel gurus, 'cause this is a wonderful boost in speed for QLogic users.

    Net outage 5/15 to 5/18

    The net was down from 5/15 (Thur 5AM) until 5/18 noon-ish. Started as Earthlink emergency maintenance, progressed through daily calls to tech support, thence to an incorrect 'Bad DSL' report, and was finally resolved by level 2 TS, who had Covad re-provision the line.

    I had no idea Covad was the provider. The things you learn.

    This is pretty unusual - Earthlink has been an excellent net connection, and I'd still recommend them.

    Rantoul and Bins 5/15

    I've found an extremely nice album generator, called Bins and have used it to generate an album of my latest visit to the Octave Chanute Aerospace Museum in Rantoul. Check it out.

    Sugarplum Rocks

    The Sugarplum spam trap works quite well - I caught a spider pretending to be InfoSeek, and it only gave up after close to 5000 page views. Heh. Spam those addresses, idiot boy.

    Another Waste of Time 4/6/03

    Cron-driven, Internet-sourced, auto-filtered, XML format...television listings.

    Yes, I am so lame that I spent almost two hours getting this working. Alas, the program filtering is useless (it filters, but the results don't indicate time or channel!) but it's kinda spiffy.

    Since I'm lazy, it pulls hourly.

    Local television schedule

    Probable Waste of Time 4/6/03

    Although it'll probably make no difference at all, I've installed the Sugarplum spam trap code locally. If you are a robot, ignore my robots.txt, and follow this deceptive link, you enter the spam trap. Of course, we'll have to see if any fall in.

    It's...alive!

    First two nodes of the open Mosix cluster are up! Took a bit, but it looks interesting to play with.

    Coming soon - more Fibre Channel at home updates and rants.

    No NAT Counting For Me

    A recent article on slashdot documented how to count NAT-shielded hosts using the IP header ID. Hah! The firewall, among other things, is OpenBSD based and has always been instructed to 'modulate state' on all outgoing packets. Recommended.

    More Photos You Won't Like a Bit 1/29/03

    These are recent and, er, not recent. More spawn of iPhoto, which is nice and fast for this sort of work. Wish it did drop shadows, though.

    Massive New Pictures Upload 1/7/03

    After prolonged procrastination, I've uploaded three new sets of pictures to the photography section. These are my first try at using iPhoto instead of htmlthumbnail, so they're not quite as pretty. Let me know what you think of the results.

    New SCSI 1/1/03

    Courtesy of HyperMicro, the server now has better SCSI, an LSI Ultra160 card, sym53c8xx. Fast and cheap, which are words not usually paired with SCSI. Also got a dual-channel QLogic 1280 for my desktop - very nice, and Xandros hates it. Even though, once installed, they have support for it. Yar.

    SMTP Encryption 12/28/02

    With some help from a friend, we got TLS (aka SSL, aka encryption) working for inbound email. This also allows use of phfactor as a non-spam-relaying SMTP host from afar. A good page for reading up on this is at AntiOffline that explains how to do it on your system.

    Disaster Recovery 12/12/02

    Lost a hard drive (intermittent errors, the best kind) and probably the motherboard as well in the primary server. Much consternation ensued.

    You're surfing the new machine now, courtesy of credit card + NewEgg. AMD Athlon XP 1700, 512MB, Asus A7N266-VM (nvidia nforce integrated chipset) motherboard, as recommended by the Ars Technica budget box system. Other than an unsupported RealTek 8100 LAN chip, a painless upgrade.

    It would have been up sooner, except I mistook a HVD terminator for LVD and spent some time swapping cables and host adapters. Clever, eh?

    New firewall 12/02/02

    I finally got the OpenBSD firewall up and running. You should not notice any changes whatsoever; it should be invisible in normal usage.

    I'll note that, in the continuing bad karma, it took 8 hard drives before I found one it liked. Not to mention the previous one dying mid-configure. To quote Stephenson, I am channeling the bad shit.

    HP printer hacking, 10/24/02

    New mini-project, HPset. Truly a worthless hack, but its kinda cool. Allows you to reprogram the displays on HP printers over the network.