Testing, testing

Over the course of this week I've been testing a new rev of firmware for our SMC 8013 gateways. These are the combination cable modem/router units that we use for our commercial customers. The updated firmware is supposed to fix some bugs found in earlier versions.

When we first testied on Tuesday and found that the DMZ feature was broken. There were a couple of other minor issues. So, back to SMC it went.

We got another rev yesterday afternoon and began testing once more. Things seemed to be going well. The problems we identified earlier this week were fixed. However, I discovered that the right kind of misconfiguration of the VPN termination feature can crash the box, with the only way to recover it is to use the factory reset button located on the back of the unit. Doing so returns the box to the default configuration. At this time we aren't enabling the VPN feature for most of our customers, although there are a few who are using it. So, we need to get it fixed before rolling it out.

On second thought, I won't upgrade the laptop

I posted the other day about possibly upgrading my Compaq Presario 710US. Upon further reflection, I decide it made more sense to replace Gondor, the trusty P3/733 that I built in 2000, and which remains my desktop PC at home.

Gondor will wind up replacing Rivendell, an ancient P2/300, as Judith's PC. I bought Rivendell from ASL way back in May of 1998. It came as a dual boot system with Red Hat 5.1 and Windows NT4 Workstation. The only major changes I've made to it in that time are doubling the RAM to 256 MB, adding an SMC wireless NIC, and redoing it as a Win98SE box for Judith (she wanted to run something or other than wouldn't work on NT4 or W2K). Hardware-wise, it's been solid as a rock, but it's really long in the tooth. I can redo Gondor with XP and it'll be fine for Judith's use -- web, email, light word processing. She ought to be able to get at least two more years from it.

Replacing Gondor as my main box will be a resurrected Bagend. It was originally built in 1999 as a P3/450. After I decided to host mail for building-tux.com onsite, it became my mail and fileserver running e-Smith. Then, about two years ago, it got zapped in a power surge which blew the motherboard and who knows what else. I was able to shift the hard disk into a scavenged Compaq Deskpro, do a little reconfiguration, and get mail.building-tux.com back up and running, and that's how it's been ever since. In the meantime, the rest of Bagend has been stuffed in my crawlspace.

I intend to pull Bagend out and strip out the motherboard and power supply. The floppy and CD-ROM drive may still be good, along with a case fan. Once it's gutted, the following components which I ordered tonight from Newegg are going in:

• Asus A7N8X-X Socket-A motherboard.
• AMD AthlonXP 2600+ "Barton" core CPU.
• Antec SL400 power supply.
• Asus Radeon 9200SE 128 MB video card.
• NEC 8x Dual-Layer DVD+/-RW drive.
• Maxtor 80 GB ATA-133 hard disk.
• 512 MB of Crucial PC3200 DDR RAM (one stick).

The OS will be SUSE Linux Professional, 9.1 for now, to be upgraded to 9.2 when it comes out in November.

If for some reason Bagend's case is not usable, I'll gut Rivendell instead and use it.

This is far from a high end system but it'll be a huge improvement over what I've got now, and should last me several years. I mainly use my desktop for web, email, remote system administration, and light use of OpenOffice.org. I should be able to run DOOM3 on it, though. :-)

While I was ordering the computer parts, I tacked on a Netgear FS108 8-port 10/100 switch to upgrade the core of my LAN. The LANMaster T12 10 meg hub I have is solid, but slow.

Now I know who to vote for. :-)

Democrats are tolerant (?)

I work at a Bush campaign office in SE PA and the stealing and destruction of signs here is so rampant that at least 6 out of 10 people that walk in our office are there to complain about and replace stolen signs. One family member of a staffer that is in a local union reported that at their last meeting they were each given Kerry signs and required to bring back and equal number of Bush signs.

From a thread on AR15.com.

It sure would explain why I see relatively few signs in Montgomery Country, which is very Republican.

Sounds like the "climate of fear" that Instapundit has mentioned several times recently.

And people think W is stupid?

More words of wisdom from President Numbnuts:

MATTHEWS: Let me ask you the question about—this is going to cause some trouble with people—but as an historian now and studying the Revolutionary War as it was fought out in the South in those last years of the War, insurgency against a powerful British force, do you see any parallels between the fighting that we did on our side and the fighting that is going on in Iraq today?

CARTER: Well, one parallel is that the Revolutionary War, more than any other war up until recently, has been the most bloody war we‘ve fought. I think another parallel is that in some ways the Revolutionary War could have been avoided. It was an unnecessary war.

Had the British Parliament been a little more sensitive to the colonial‘s really legitimate complaints and requests the war could have been avoided completely, and of course now we would have been a free country now as is Canada and India and Australia, having gotten our independence in a nonviolent way.

Holy shit. WTF??? This is one of the most retarded things I've ever read. OF COURSE The Revolution would not have been necessary if Parliament and King George III had been more "sensitive" to the colonists' grievances. And if I was Catholic I could theoretically be the Pope.

Earth to Jimmy ... PARLIAMENT AND GEORGE III WEREN'T INTERESTED IN THE RIGHTS OF THE COLONISTS. As events really occurred (as opposed to Carter's fantasy), The Revolution was needed in order to protect the colonists' rights as Englishmen. The end result was that to protect those rights, it became...

necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the Powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them....

(Go read the whole Declaration of Independence here.)

As for "as free as Canada and India and Australia[?]" With all due respect to the residents of these countries, they all have far more socialist goverments than the US. By its very nature socialism is inimical to liberty. Socialist wealth redistribution schemes always require that the government take liberties from their subjects in order to accomplish their goals. Government power is the flip side of individual liberty. Nor do any of these countries have a Bill of Rights comparable with that of the US, which recognizes preexisting human rights not subject to the whims of society.

Finally, he's no historian if he thinks that The Revolution was our bloodiest conflict. It wasn't even close. Total number of American combat casualties in The Revolution was a bit less than 11,000. In the Civil War/War of Northern Aggression, Union combat casualties stood at about 635,000, plus about 335,000 for the CSA. In World War I we suffered around 320K casualties, with over one million in WW2. (Stats here.)

Mr. Carter, please go back to your peanut farm and STFU.

John Stewart on "Crossfire"

I'm not a John Stewart or "The Daily Show" fan, but Mr. Stewart's appearance on "Crossfire" was something else. There's a transcript here. He really ripped into "Crossfire" in particular, and the major media in general, about the disservice they do to America with the way they cover politics.

Busy, busy, busy

Pardon the lack of posting around here since Friday. I've been busy.

On Saturday my partner and I wrapped up the big network cabling job that I previously mentioned. It's a total of 17 LAN drops, 17 4-line telephone drops, 4 single phone line drops, and one run of some coax for CATV. One multiline phone and one Ethernet drop need to be terminated, but we need to wait until a large piece of equipment is delivered. My client will be moving into the new office on October 30th, and we may need to wait until then to complete those two lines.

Yesterday I stayed home and watched Amanda and Alexandra, while Judith went out to take a break. G-d bless her, I don't know how she does it every day after school with both little ones. I couldn't. By dinner time last night I was fried.

Speaking of last night, I watched part one of Farscape: The Peacekeeper Wars on SciFi. Part two is on tonight. Farscape was definitely one of the best science fiction shows ever to appear on TV and it's a shame it got cancelled. It's cool that they went ahead and made a little mini-series. I'd like to see the show revived.

This morning I had a meeting to go over a couple of DNS-related things over in Moorestown. It was the first time I'd been in Moorestown since I transferred to my new job three months ago, and it was nice to see some of my former coworkers. While over there I also did some research in response to a request from my boss's boss, with respect to definitions and expected ratification dates for various 802.11 wireless networking standards. I bailed out of there at about 1445 to make sure I'd beat rush hour traffic on the PA Turnpike.

Maybe it's time to upgrade my laptop

I did a little looking around online and I think I can upgrade my Compaq Presario 710US, getting a noticeable performance boost without spending too much money. The box has a 1 GHz AMD Duron CPU, which is fast enough for my needs.

The first thing it needs is more RAM. It should cost me about $80 to get a 256 MB SODIMM from Kingston to bring the total system RAM up to 512 MB, which is the most the laptop will take. For about the same amount of money, I can get a new, larger 5400 RPM hard drive from NewEgg. The current drive is 20GB, which if I setup a dual boot system (XP and Linux), realistically means I have to split it into two 10 GB partitions. That's too small. If get even just a 40 GB 5400 RPM drive, not only will disk I/O dramatically improve, I can devote 20 GB to each OS. This in turn would allow me to rely on the box as my primary PC and redo Gondor for Judith. (Gondor has a 15 GB drive and I'm only using a bit more than half.)

I need to think on this.

Automating IE, Part 2

One of the other guys in my department, who was working on the problem mentioned in my last post, came up with what should be a better solution. He uses a Mac, and wrote a shell script which employs curl to make the updates via the router's HTTP interface. The size fo the script is less than 1K.

We may need to use a Mac rather than a PC to run the script, but we can scrounge one up.

Automating Internet Explorer

Yesterday afternoon I was asked to come up with a way to automatically reconfigure an option in the SMC cable modem/router boxes we adopted last year for our commercial customers. While there is a minimal command line interface, the option that we need to set is only available through the HTTP interface.

Did I mention that we're now up to about 40,000 customers?

I tried using Keytext but couldn't get it to do what I needed. I then tried Clickymouse and so far, I am able to get it to reconfigure a router pretty quickly. Once I have the router's login page loaded, the macro logs in, goes through and sets the needed option, then applies it and logs out.

However, when I try to automate pasting a router's IP address into Internet Explorer, the macro blows up. (I'm using IE because I know that the SMC was developed with it in mind. It probably works OK with Mozilla but I don't want to add something else to possibly troubleshoot at this time.)

So at this point I have a way to speed up the reconfiguration of a boatload of deployed routers, but it's still going to require babysitting to feed in the boxes' IPs and deal with any errors.

A coworker suggested using a Perl script to parse the HTTP outputs and input the required config changes, and I suppose it's possible. For example, there are Perl scripts that will allow one to use Yahoo! Mails's HTTP interface via a POP3 client. The only problem is that I don't know Perl.

The really annoying things about this all-of-a-sudden high priority project are that the config change that we're making is something that's been known about for a few years, and the next version of the firmware that will be loaded onto the boxes will allow for this config change to be made easily via SNMP.

How fast does God drive?

216Km/hour (~134 MPH), apparently.

French cops busted Eric Clapton at that speed in his porsche 911 Turbo.

Slowhand .... lead foot.








("God" in the title of this post is a reference to graffiti which appeared in London subways in the 60s -- "Clapton is God.")

More Gmail invites

I have 5 Gmail invites available on a first-come first-serve basis.

If you want one, send an email to davemarkowitz at gmail.com.

New member of The Shooters' Bar from RI

David D'Augstino of Rhode Island is now listed in my list of pro-RKBA attorneys, The Shooters' Bar(SM).

A reader needs some Windows networking help

The following came in yesterday from Joe in NJ:

Dear Dave,

I am a fan of your blog and your site for going on 3 years (when I discovered DayNotes).

I'm an IT manager in a school district. I normally can work out my own problems, but the following has me confused...I am looking for the simplest way of doing the following

I want to allow specific user accounts access to specific machines. We are taking about 4 user accounts and 100 machines that I want them to access. Conversely I want my other 1200 user accounts to be able to login into any machine. However I want to be sure that the 4 user accounts are only able to login to those specific 100 machines. Currently everyone can login everywhere. What is the most simple way of doing this? Windows 2000 domain controller, the 100 machines in question are Win 98 and 2000. The rest of the machines are Win 2000.

If you have any thoughts on this I would appreciate it. All the advice I got so far involves complex script writing.

Thanks,
Joe

Joe, thanks for your kind feedback.

I am hopeful that one of my readers has an answer for Joe. I've not done Windows system administration on that scale, so I really don't know. If you're reading this and wouldn't mind sharing some Windows networking savvy, how about submitting a reply comment to this post?

My favorite inexpensive handgun

Every so often I'm asked to recommend an inexpensive handgun. I invariably suggest the Makarov, or Pistol M, as it's designated in Russia. It's a simple, reliable, and surprisingly accurate design, and was the standard sidearm of the USSR from around 1950 until the Soviet Union's collapse. The Russians are now replacing the Mak with a newer design, chambered for 9x19, which is more powerful. However, the 9x18 Makarov is still a decent round for self defense, being a bit more powerful than .380 ACP.

My Bulgarian-made Mak is utterly reliable. I've put about 450 - 500 rounds through it. The only malfunction was a single failure of the slide to lock back on an empty magazine. It is the single most reliable semiautomatic pistol I've ever owned, and that includes two Browning High Powers, a CZ-85, a Springfield M1911-A1, and a Browning Buck Mark. Curiously enough, the Mak was also the least expensive. My dad has had similar experiences. I paid $130 for it several years ago, new in the box.

My testing of the Makarov pales in comparison to that described in this thread on Glock Talk. All I can say is, "Wow!"

Think your job sucks?

Then check out BBC-4's "The Worst Jobs in History."

Bulk email polcies

One of the things we've been trying to nail down with our outsourced email provider is their policy WRT to bulk email. This afternoon, one of our marketing managers working the issue asked me if during the course of my research, I came across such policies.

Most providers' email policies bar sending out unsolicited email, although other than that they don't go into a ton of detail. Verio actually has a pretty good, detailed policy. In my reply, I mentioned Verio and added the following as key points:

(a) That there must be a pre-existing commercial relationship between sender and recipient.

(b) Lists with over 50 recipients should be handled using a mailing list manager like Majordomo or ezmlm. The big problem with using a regular mail client to send bulk emails is that quite often all the recipients get listed in the "To" field, which facilitates address harvesting by viruses. This is a MAJOR problem.

(c) Message size on bulk emails should be no more than 10 megs each, preferably much less. Sending out big file attachments to multiple recipients is a huge waste of bandwidth. The better course of action would be to send out a link that the recipient can click on to download it if desired. If a customer REALLY needs to send out massive attachments, or to very large distribution lists, he should be running his own SMTP server

Dell laptop power adapter recall expanding

According to this article at CNN.com, Dell is expanding its recall of some laptop power supplies. You can find out if your power supply is affected here.

I just ordered a new PS for my Slacktop.

Windowmaker

If you're running Linux or BSD on a low end machine you may not want to deal with the overhead of a full-blown desktop environment like KDE or GNOME. KDE is even starting to feel sluggish to me on Gondor, my P3/733, after getting used to how responsive my work Dell P4/1.4 Gig laptop running XP is. So, this morning I decided to try out a couple alternative window managers on Gondor.

I've mentioned my use of Fluxbox, which is very lightweight and suited for olde hardware like my P2/366 laptop. I don't have Fluxbox installed on Gondor and didn't feel like downloading it. I do have FVWM2 installed, and briefly gave that a try. It's lightweight but SUSE's default setup is fugly. I'm a bit tired today after being up in the middle of the night with Amanda, so I didn't feel like dinking around trying to make it look decent. Perhaps another time.

Another fairly lightweight (although not nearly as so as Fluxbox) desktop is Windowmaker. I already had it installed and it's one I've used before.

Windowmaker is a descendent of Afterstep, which was intended to be a clone of the NeXT GUI. AAMOF, Afterstep was the first Linux GUI I used, back when I bought Rivendell in May 1998. Both Afterstep and Windowmaker are very easy on the eyes. In the words of its developers:

Window Maker is an X11 window manager originally designed to provide integration support for the GNUstep Desktop Environment. In every way possible, it reproduces the elegant look and feel of the NEXTSTEP[tm] user interface. It is fast, feature rich, easy to configure, and easy to use. It is also free software, with contributions being made by programmers from around the world.

Definitely check it out if you're running Linux or BSD on an older machine.

Running X on MS Windows

I want the ability to run X applications using my XP laptop. To do so, I can either get a commercial X server for Win32, such as Hummingbird Exceed or Winaxe, or go the open source route. I'm going to try the latter. I'm currently installing Cygwin on my company Dell Latitude, taking advantage of the fat pipe I have at work.

Aside from giving me some of Linux's functionality on XP, I'm looking to use the Cygwin X server to connect to Gondor when I'm at home, allowing me to export its display to the laptop so that I can run apps on Gondor but have their display sent to the laptop's screen.

I could use VNC -- which is based on X -- to run apps on Gondor with their displays on the laptop, but I'm hoping that the Cygwin X server will give me better performance.

Another way this would be handy if it works well on the company laptop, is to install Cygwin on my personal Compaq, which I use in my side work. I could use a X server when going to one client's site, who's running a SUSE email server. I currently do all my admin for that box -- whether I'm onsite or at home -- using SSH and occasionally webmin. I do have X on the box though, and for some purposes having X could be handy.