Catching Up

Happiness is relative. Today I don't have a headache; I'm getting over my cold; two of my bosses are out of the office so stress levels are manageable; the new server is finally working... Good enough for me.

Munuvia, and Heather in particular, came under a particularly nasty spam attack today. This one dodges MT Blacklist by generating a new throwaway sub-domain for every spam. And it was persistent. But manually blocking the primary domain stopped it in its tracks. Then I just had to go and delete 400-odd comments. The world blog was saved, thanks once again to Jay Allen and MT Blacklist! Block banned-pics.com now and avoid the rush!

Fedora Core 2 is out - think of it as Red Hat Linux 11. I logged into my home box from work, killed my existing BitTorrent download (Pretty Cure episodes 1-5) and started downloading FC2 instead. It's available as a DVD as well as 4 CDs (8 in all, counting the source CDs as well) but I don't currently have a DVD-ROM drive on my Linux box. I'm not sure quite why I don't, but there it is: A perfect excuse to buy a new 8x DVD burner! (4 CDs, and I bet it still doesn't include Nethack.)

Now I just need to think of an excuse to buy a gigabit switch: I can get a Netgear 5-port switch for $170 now, and my Windows box and my fileserver are already equipped with gigabit cards. Of course, with a mere 2.6GHz Pentium 4, Windows can't really go much above 100mbits anyway, so there's really no point.

On the other hand, it's cheap...

The 1.4 terabytes fileserver at the office has been fixed by the Judicious Application of Money™ - in this case taking the form of a Highpoint RocketRaid 1820 PCI-X 8-port Serial-ATA RAID controller (around A$300). It's a bit fussy, and the drivers don't seem to work with Fedora, but once I'd downgraded to Red Hat 9 everything went smoothly. Nice card, even if it does beep beep beep beep if there's something it doesn't like. Oh, and the ports are numbered 5 - 6 - 7 - 8 - 3 - 4 - 1 - 2, which was a little confusing.

I've been experimenting with rsync for backups - now that we have an extra 1.4 terabytes of space that needs to be filled up - and it works very well. Very well; I'm actually rather impressed. Err... assuming that it's actually working, that is, and it appears to be. It's very quick to backup minor changes to a very large filesystem. Not the best way to back up a live database, but no worse than most of the other ways.

600 gig down, 800 to go. (What do you mean, it's not a contest to see who can fill it up first?!)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 03:01 PM

Comments

1 Isn't there a Ken Thompson (old Unix guy) about disks? "The natural state for disks is full" (or something similar).

Posted by: Ozguru at May 19, 2004 03:56 PM (/acvO)

2 "The steady state of disks is full."

Tho a quick google gives the cite as Thompson, Dennis Ritchie and Kirk McKusick.

'S true, tho.

Posted by: Matt Navarre at May 20, 2004 11:32 AM (f/E40)

3 the b-p jerks hit SR also. Happened to be online when it started, so I went and re-wickered one of the catch-all strings after just picking one and adding only detected 3 of what I could see was a barage.

The re-wicker stopped it, and a rapid purge of over 180 items followed.

I'd like to catch the morons that think this is an effective and useful marketting ploy, or whatever their fucked up line of thinking is, and help stake them out atop a fire ant bed.

Posted by: Wind Rider at June 03, 2004 02:22 AM (8Pv/P)






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