Category: Geekdom

Another Great Firewall Candidate

While I’ve always loved and used Smoothwall for years, I’ve been having trouble getting it to recognize a Compaq DL320 that I had sitting here in the office. I intentionally bought the IDE version of the server (which I got on eBay cheap) because I figured it would be more compatible than the SCSI version. I was try to find something that fits nicely in the rack-server setup I’m building. But Smoothwall, no matter what I did, could not recognize the IDE controller. So I decided to give Endian — an IPCop fork which was originally a Smoothwall fork — a try. Endian is basically a version of IPCop with all the cool modifications and add-ons already built in. And lo-and-behold, it just worked — and I didn’t have to monkey with it other than setting up my firewall rules. And I now have a speedy little firewall that takes up far less space than before (1U versus a tower).

I still love Smoothwall’s community as it’s full of tons of useful folks and great modifications, but if I ever need to install a firewall system on Compaq server hardware again, it’ll be on a Endian box.

July 20, 2008

Yet Another Reason To Use OpenDNS — Patch Your DNS Servers Now

There’s a really ugly DNS security issue that’s affected pretty much everybody, you need to make sure you’ve patched everything you can. While nobody really knows what the problem is, considering that the domain name system is the Internet’s backbone and if it gets broken, it’s a bad thing.

Thankfully, OpenDNS isn’t susceptible to the attack, so you can use them safely (and encourage your ISPs to patch their DNS servers, too, or at least forward all DNS requests to somebody like OpenDNS until they can patch their BIND implementation). I’ve used OpenDNS for quite a while and have set it up at the office, and it’s worked great.

July 9, 2008

For All The Geeks Stuck In IT Hell…

…this game’s for you.

July 7, 2008

What A Nightmare

Damn you LayeredTech for forcing me to move servers. While the transferring of data went smoothly, DNS issues kicked my butt. Then, the other thing I was worried about bit me in the butt: The new server is running PHP 5 and MySQL 5 while the old server was running PHP 4 and MySQL 4. While I did an informal audit of the sites I host and the software packages they ran, I couldn’t really test out some of them that had custom code until I put them on a live PHP 5 install, so I just moved them over and gave them a whirl. Unfortunately, my day job site didn’t like PHP 5 in some small but critical areas and required a few minor tweaks to get it working right. They were beyond my expertise so I had to found outside help to get it working, but things are working fine there now. I also had to update the church’s site with a new version of Typo3 to make it all happy.

Then comments on this site broke. MovableType and the Perl implementation CentOS5 don’t seem to play nice. I had similar issues when I setup Jack‘s site that I had with this one. I implemented a fix I found that involves changing bootstrap.pm. Early in the file, you’ll see this:

sub BEGIN {

my ($dir, $orig_dir);

require File::Spec;

if (!($dir = $ENV{MT_HOME})) {

And that needs to be changed to this:

sub BEGIN {

$ENV{'MT_HOME'} = '/home/username/public_html/mt'; #<-- this line should be addedmy ($dir, $orig_dir);require File::Spec;if (!($dir = $ENV{MT_HOME})) {

That gets things all working again (I'm mostly documenting that here if I run into this again, which I'm sure I will after I try to upgrade and forget to change the bootstrap.pm file beforehand). I did submit this to SixApart to see if there's a workaround that won't get bulldozed on upgrades. It's apparently a problem with File::Spec::rel2abs in my Perl install, so I'll have to look into that.

Update: Looked into it. Apparently File::Spec versions are vastly different in CentOS 4 than in CentOS 5. In 4, the version is 0.86 while in CentOS 5, it's 3.25. There are some skips in version numbers because of the author's combining of a couple projects, but considering that Movable Type isn't the only script having an issue, so I don't feel so bad knocking my head against the wall for this.

But things are hopefully all back to normal now. My servers are both much meatier than before, and this one has a full 100mbs connection to the 'net (last server had a 10mbs connection) and both have much more processor power than before (quad and dual core versus single core processors). I still have a couple sites to move, but it's mostly all there. I still have the old servers for a couple more weeks, so if anybody has a huge file(s) they want to share on there temporarily, e-mail me and I'll dump them there until the cancellation date.

If anybody notices any other weirdness, please email utterlyboring [at] gmail [dot] com.

June 18, 2008

Damn You AT&T!

Why can’t you open up a store here and get local numbers in Bend without serious work (like porting a number or something) so that I can get the new iPhone 2.0 that’s coming out? That thing is going to kick ass (official Apple site here).

June 9, 2008

Geekdom Link Dump

For the geeks (like me) out there, enjoy! (And even if you’re not a geek, there is something you’ll enjoy here, I’m sure).

June 4, 2008

Did You Notice Google’s New Favicon?

I noticed it the new Favicon, too, and I agree with pretty much everybody here: I don’t like it. I thought there was something wrong with my browser when the Google icon on those tabs for various searches and services is now a small “g” (versus the capital “G” before). I can barely see the small letter while the capital letter was easy to spot and we all know it was Google’s icon. What moron in their marketing department thought changing their obvious branded “G” to this was a good idea?

Google’s official word is here (which doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, really), but there is a Greasemonkey script to get the old one back.

I just wonder if there are bigger plans in the works — some sort of new interface, perhaps — that they’re trying to start getting the new branding out there. Begin forming your conspiracy theories now…

June 3, 2008

Looking For A New Web Host/Dedicated Server Provider

LayeredTech, a dedicated server hosting company that I’ve used for years and have a couple servers with, has decided to raise their rates. Last year, it was a simple $8/month increase, which I was fine with as they promised remote reboot cards for their server. A year later, I still don’t have a remote reboot card for either of my servers, and they’ve decided to raise my rates $28/month for each server, no matter how many you have (and there are folks with dozens of servers with them). Needless to say, the natives are restless, and I tend to be one of them. They recently bought another Web hosting company and secured $11 million worth of funding, but apparently they don’t seem to find a problem with raising the rates for all their clients, cutting into the meager profits I had on these servers (as they’re mostly for hosting sites like this one along with some small companies around Bend).

Needless to say, I’m shopping around now. If anybody has any recommendations, I’d be glad to hear them (I have some emails into some reputable companies around the country). I’d also consider a partial advertising trade for a link on this site as well. Comment below or email utterlyboring [at] gmail [dot] com. I’d also consider co-location if the deal was right and the network didn’t suck (but I’d prefer just renting the server as that way I can yell at somebody if the hardware goes bad).

May 29, 2008

Photoshop to get GPU and Physics Acceleration

And it’s about time.

So, what can you do with general-purpose GPU (GPGPU) acceleration in Photoshop? We saw the presenter playing with a 2 GB, 442 megapixel image like it was a 5 megapixel image on an 8-core Skulltrail system. Changes made through image zoom and through a new rotate canvas tool were applied almost instantly. Another impressive feature was the import of a 3D model into Photoshop, adding text and paint on a 3D surface and having that surface directly rendered with the 3D models’ reflection map.

May 27, 2008

The Best Reason Yet To Buy An iPhone

Free access to Playboy and Penthouse magazine (as well as a bunch of other less-adult magazines).

You can also get your browser to pretend it’s an iPhone to access the site.

Too bad AT&T doesn’t have local numbers or an office around here (nor do I have the money to blow) as having an iPhone would be pretty sweet (as my Blackberry contract is up for expiration soon).

May 27, 2008