Computing

2003-01-04 17:05:00
Wow. My phone lines died. No dialtone since this afternoon. Good thing DSL is still up. |:-)

2002-12-07 18:10:00
Today I took my server down to swap out a video card. This always kills my uptime. Hmm…I’ve always wondered how my server compares to others on uptime. Want to know? Well check out this Netcraft survey on the LinkLINE netblock… best uptime.

2002-11-23 09:34:00
Cool.
I compiled Sendmail with Milter to work with AMaViS which interfaces Sendmail with Network Associates Virus Scan. The result is all incoming and outgoing emails, attachments (including zip files) are scanned vor viruses before being relayed. This will certainly save me a lot of time with all the people complaining about viruses. The only problem is there is a slight delay when sending email because after transmission sendmail has to scan it before relaying. This will be fixed in the future by setting up two sendmail servers. One to accept mail and one to relay (which will scan for viruses). …now, school.

2002-11-09 11:10:00
Dual Processors Melting
Meredith and I got together to do some work on the Plumbing company’s network, but they didn’t have the software ready.

So Meredith what do you want to do tonight? Hey! Lets see if we can make dual processors work. We hijacked a couple old Pentium 160MHz CPUs from MK’s junk box and dropped them in the SMP board. Ouch!! those things get hot!. After a quick run to CompUSA Meredith spliced our brand new cooling devices into the power supply and placed one on each CPU. Red Hat Linux can do it…come on…come on… IT WORKS!!!

Ok, so the kernel panic’s occaisonally and its not exactly a supercomputer but it gives decent computing power but i still have the CPU’s underclocked @ 133MHz. Thanks for your help Meredith.

2002-11-04 21:40:00
today on the root account at work i recieved over 17,400 emails. It took 15 minutes holding down “D” to delete them all.

2002-10-25 20:05:00
“If all the Chinese simultaneously jumped into the Pacific off a 10 foot platform erected 10 feet off their coast, it would cause a tidal wave that would destroy everything in this country west of Nebraska.” –Fortune

2002-10-23 23:29:00
In the Computer Science department many students go over their quota on the lab computers and ignore warnings. Ken (my boss) deletes their files at random which results in the following situation…

Angry Student: “Why you delete my files?”

Ken: “I don’t like you.”

2002-10-13 22:50:00
Apparantly if you put special math characters on your website AOL will block.

2002-09-28 13:03:00
Scenario for Company: employees don’t regularly backup files. some files need to be shared across network. some employees have laptops. os varies from win98 to winxp. company needs to connect ~10 computers to the internet with 3 IP addresses. …budget for project: low. 

Solution: requires 1 server with FreeBSD, IPFW (firewall), ISC-DHCP, NAT (gateway) and Samba (to emulate Windows file sharing). 2x15GB HD. 256MB Ram, Dual Ethernet ports. Total cost of hardware: < $300. Total cost of software: $0.00 

Implementation Part 1: rebuild kernel with firewall and divert. configure nat to translate packets from lan to internet. install dhcp for automatic client configuration. block all ports except SSH from external network. configure Samba. 

Implementation Part 2: ..backups Map “My Documents” folder on all computers to users’ /home folders on samba server. this means everyones’ “My Documents” will actually be stored on the server. nobody will know the difference (unless the server goes down). create “pub” folder for file sharing. write backup scripts to make incremental backups of everyones’ “My Documents” folders. 

Total labor: 2×10 Hours. Thanks for helping me Meredith! I couldn’t have done it in one night without you.

2002-09-21 17:54:00
Educational Software Made by Newbie Programmers?