burn's blurb |
May 29, 2005
Lot's of new things happening lately, well not really. I'm sitting here on my laptop because my workstation is at imbezol's place. I had planned on going to Sylvan Lake today and finishing the car up, and driving it home! So much for that, greyhound didn't get the parts to sylvan until today around 4pm, so it was too late to even bother going all the way there. Almost done, woohoo! It's damn near summer and I need to drive. I get all antsy when i'm stuck at home and walking just isn't the same.
I've been on a validation binge. Getting all my pages validated by the w3c, rewriting a lot of them, using tidy html to clean up and convert a lot of my pages from HTML 4.01 to XHTML 1.0. Great fun, especially when you realize that a lot of the TAGS i've been using are from html, xhtml and xml... and then you have someone like the w3c say.. "ACK! wtf is this!?" hehe. good fun. It's pretty sweet of the W3C to offer a validation service for free. It also makes you realize that just because your webpage may look fine in your browser, it may look like absolute crap on someone elses.
Hmm, I've upgraded my primary server, echo, a lot since my last post. I also got around to moving both echo and pulse to md raid 1 (linux software raid). Yes, hardware raid is better and faster, and blah blah, but I simply can't afford either a 3ware controller for pulse or a SCSI raid controller for echo. Not gonna happen. Here's the updated sysinfo for echo and the never before posted sysinfo for pulse. I usually don't bother with pulse, as it's a pretty pathetic little machine. =)
I can't think of anything else to write, so that's it for now I suppose. For all you Canadians with a hankering for a fast, local mirror for all your linux & BSD needs, there's a new mirror out there, that you more than likely have never heard of. It's called Arctic Network Mirrors and quite frankly, it kicks major ass. Check it out, and be proud to say "I'm a CANUCK!" =P
April 21, 2005
Well, it's been awhile, time to update the shiz. It was my birthday on the 13th, went out, played pool with some friends. Generally had a good time. I learned how to play poker a few days later. I lost $30, but it was fun, and I drank too much Corona near the end. Hmmm, Corona. Can't wait to play again. I think we were playing Texas Hold em. I've got the logisticis of the game down, just need to learn the terminology and some other little things.
I bought myself a subwoofer for the home stereo setup. Goddamn, what a difference it made. Here's a picture of the new setup. I need some more space. Our place is too small. Oh well, sounds great now. We received our first sound complaint since we moved in about 8 months ago from a woman on the 18th floor. I live on the 20th floor.... Muahaha.
I got permission to use a server at work for "testing". It was going to be our new platform for one of our services, but it just isn't up to snuff. So, I'm using it for the Tera-Byte Mirror server instead. Sure is nice to finally have a local mirror for all the staff and our customers. It's averaging about 800MB out per day to our customers now, mostly Gentoo. There's some stats for that server here. The usual cacti setup for it.
Bought myself a new cell phone. It's a Samsung SGH-E316. I've been pretty impressed with it. My first clamshell phone, here's a picture. I gave my old SonyEricsson cell phone to my sister. She loves it, her very first cell phone. Heh. It's pretty small, so hopefully she doesn't lose it. =) I also got myself a new computer a little while ago, sold the old one to a friend in Manitoba. Worked out well. I also got me a few more hard drives for reverb and fired up the raid action. uNF. New specs on all 3 of my boxes:
Hmm, I wrote a quick script that you can dump in a cron and it will basically sync up your gentoo box, run an emerge command of your choice (-pu world, -pu system, whatever) and email you the output from it. check_updates.sh. I also picked up a handy script from gentoo-mirrors mailing list that creates a pid for a running process so you don't have say, a cron job that runs every 4 hours, the first one takes more than 4 hours to complete, and now you have 2 of the same jobs running. 4 hours later, you now have 3, all doing the same thing. This would be bad in the case of syncing our gentoo mirrors. It's here if your interested, pretty basic. pidlock.sh. That's it for today.
February 07, 2005
I just realized that my last post disappeared after rebuilding echo, I'm so SMRT. Oh well, it was probably me complaining about something anyway. Not much new with me. I bought a new car, had it for 3 days and then smashed it. Go me. Got some more hard drive space for my file server, reverb. A 300GB drive, officially the largest drive I own now, too bad it's a Maxtor, yech. For some reason phpsysinfo doesn't display SATA drives. (another first for me) It's there, trust me. =p Bought some new fans for the servers the other day, they should be here soon. These fans kick so much ass, i have to share, this is what i ordered:
Christmas was great, got to see the family and stuff, my little cousins both shot up, makes me feel old. hehe, zif. Was nice to see the sunlight again anyhow. People need light, I know this after working 7+ months of straight nights... trust me, go outside! My parents are awesome, they offered to help me pay to fix the car. That's great, but I can't afford that, so I'm fixing it myself, well, as much as I can. I can't straighten frames and i can't paint, that's about it, the rest my dad and I should be able to get done fairly easily.
hmmm, what else. I got married! Here's the lucky lady. Goddamn, okay, that's just wishful thinking, but if it were true, damn, i would be thankful to be alive every day instead of every once in awhile. Something about her face, dunno. She looks innocent and sexy at the same time. Anyway, what the hell do i know.
I upgraded Cacti for AGSN the other day, and it was so damn sexy and easy to use, I decided to say, "The hell with the hours I put into making custom purty graphs and layouts" and I use it on my servers now as well. Check it out.
October 09, 2004
Yay! I got something accomplished at work. It's such a small thing, and yet it took so much time to finally get implemented, it almost wasn't worth it. Oh well, for comparison's sake. Here is a graph representing name servers lookups without using rndc and one after I implemented rndc. No more spikes, no more 1+ hour down time when it reloads. S'all good now!
I got the offical word on the nagios box, it will never run on gentoo, ever. Needless to say, I was none to impressed with this tidbit of information. What can I do? I am not willing to work for a company that is so close minded when it comes to improvement. In this business, I would think you would always want to be providing new and better services, while this place is content to use the same old crud that's running now. Some improvements are coming, eventually, some day. Oh well, I'm just happy I finally got to do something that makes a bit of difference.
Yep, I finally got around to putting my pictures from spain back on the interweb. They've been missing since echo crashed awhile back (hard drive failure + i fucked up). Took about 4 hours to go through them all, delete the junk and gibbled ones, and the ones that should not be public. ;) Looking for another project to work on now. I tried to switch my stream over from shoutcast to the open source equivalent icecast. Doesn't look like that's going to happen. I'm using winamp for the source and would need to use ices2 or something to broadcast to the icecast server. Which I can't do as the source is also a stream (don't ask). Oh well, have a listen, tell me what you think.
October 03, 2004
Well, I'm here again. I've realized that i only write here when i'm either incredibly bored or very pissed off. It's bored tonight. I feel like i'm locked in my apartment and have no where to go. Everything is closed, and everyone is either working or sleeping. Night shifts fucking suck. My bike got stolen and my car is long dead, so i have no wheels either. I took the bus for 2 years and swore i would never again unless i had to, and i don't have to go anywhere. I need to get out of here! I'm sick of the computer, I've seen every movie and tv show that i like to watch twice over. I've gone through my entire mp3 collection and sorted, deleted most of the crap. There was a lot of it. I'm down to 8388 mp3's (not including ogg's) consisting of about 51GB. That's a lot of fricking tunes. Built myself a gigantic playlist of all the good shit from the singles directory. Blasting Saliva - Always right now, makes me want to break something. Headhones are god's gift to people with roommates. Though i don't believe in god, it's still conveys my meaning quite well.
I'm typing away and i still haven't thought of anything to do. Remember the nagios box I built and my employer wanted it moved to freebsd? Well, it was wiped, freebsd was installed, and it sat there doing fuck all for 1 month. So, I'm reinstalling gentoo and setting up nagios, yet again. YAY!
fuck this, i need a smoke, i smoke when i'm bored, so i smoke a lot more lately. which really bites in so many ways. oh well, what can a person do?
September 20, 2004
It's been awhile since I've wrote anything down, I know. Want to know why? Didn't think so, but I'm going to tell you anyway. echo, the server that houses the bulk of everything I put online has been having some hard drive issues lately. The web drive was completely wiped out, bummer. In an attempt to backup the / drive, I somehow managed to rm -rf /bin /chroot and /etc before stopping it when it hit /dev. What can I say, I fucked it up good. Oh well, it was damned good excuse to completely reinstall echo, and I'm glad I did it. The system feels faster in general as I kind of butchered the last install to suit my needs.
I've been learning html a bit more, and perl a bit more. So I wrote a quick Mail FAQ for the few people that currently use this server for email. I don't like coding stuff, I am more of a get shit working, leave the tweaking for someone else kind of guy I guess. Once you've got something working, there's no fun in tweaking it, you feel like you finished the project already. Well, I do anyway.
Broken links? I know from good ol webalizer that there are lot of people trying to get to things here that no longer exist. Sorry, but not even I can remember all the crud that was here. The page that suffered the most I think is /funny as that is something I had no backups of whatsoever.
My good buddy o-min designed a new logo for AGSN. In my opinion, it kicks ass. People with artistic talent, well they suck, I can say that because i'm not one of them. =) Tera-Byte.com has a new webpage up. I think it's much better than the old one. Gives the customers a little more control or at least the feeling of it. Unfortunately for me, the changes they make are not done in real time, and must still be entered into the database manually by some poor NOC tech, like me. Automation is key to keeping the redundant work load off of NOC and keep them helping customers. Redundancy makes me a weee bit loopy. >:]
I finally incorporated rndc (name server control utility) into tera-byte.com's name servers. 2 out of the 7 total name servers are using it so far. Apparently it needs to be tested and junk before it's used everywhere. Funny part is, rndc has been part of BIND for a long time. We even used to use NDC, but as most people know, NDC was a giant security hole waiting to be exploited. rndc on the other hand, would stop our name servers from taking so bloody long to reload. Reading a 35k line long named.conf and reading in the associated zones... takes a long damn time! Almost 49 minutes to be exact. During the day, bind receives a sighup every 20 minutes, to reload any new zones, but it takes 5 minutes to start responding again. So bind is effectively not responding for 1/4 of every hour. This image shows when BIND is answering queries on one of our name servers, this server is not using rndc. Anyway, over time, I should be able to fix this now. Go me, I have finally got a miniscule amount of trust to make some changes.
August 23, 2004
Back from spain, watching a lot of stargate. Spain was awesome, I took a wack of pictures, over 1000. My camera is uber, I quite like it. Note to self, bring more sdram cards on my next vacation. Brought 2 256MB's and 1 64MB, filled em all. Luckily enough, I stopped at my dad's friends place twice while i was there. Lucky for me, he had a computer and a cd-writer so I could burn them off. Dialup though, oh well. ;) Here are all the spain pictures I put up on my server. Not sure what to say about it, their architecture was amazing, the women were beautiful, the cars pretty sweet. We did a lot, went from Barcelona, to Terragona, well, we went to a lot of cities anyway. Cadiz was beautiful, had a lot of fun, got really smashed with my sister. It was fun! That's about it, back at work, which is good. I think I'm a lot more relaxed now, doing things about the stuff I can, ignoring or putting the things I can't change to the back of my mind. I feel much better. :)
July 19, 2004
Hello again, first off, a minor correction. FreeBSD is not archaic, just the servers here at work are. Don't get me wrong, they're fairly well patched up, but some should be outright rebuilt.
Missed most of fragapalooza this weekend because I had to work. Which i was pretty pissed off about. Pissed off enough to quit, then I had a chat with my boss, and he kind of made me realize that quitting for a LAN party is pretty dumb. I knew this, but I had spent all day convincing myself otherwise and had succeeded. Oh well, so I missed sitting in a sauna with a bunch of geeks sweating out every drop of fluid I had in me. Instead I went to work and did the same thing all by myself. Whomever has decided that buildings don't need AC on the weekends should hung up by their big toes. I mean, why the fuck would you turn off the AC at all, so you can crank it on monday to compensate...HELLO!?
I'm going to Spain at the end of the month, hurray. I should be looking forward to it, I mean, free plane ticket courtesy of air miles, free accomodations courtesy of local hostels. I dunno. I guess I would be more excited if I were going somewhere I knew something about. I plan on having as much fun as possible, if only I were getting paid a bit more, I might have some moolah to spend while I'm there. Oh well, guess that's what credit cards are for.
One more little heads up. This server is no longer on 100mbit to the intarweb. I was doing 27mbit out for a solid 6 hours and I got my ass unplugged. Now I'm on 10mbit FD, cuz "that's all anyone needs". Pffft, hmmkay, welcome to the 21st century, 10mbit is not enough! Not for me anyway >=]
May 28, 2004
Well, I setup a server a few months at work that monitors all of our other servers. It works great, better than expectected actually. Which is awesome, except now I've been told that the OS I used is not acceptable because no one else knows anything about it.... ARGH! What a bunch of fucking bullshit. I used gentoo, it is so similiar to our other servers it's just stupid, but it can't be used. Like I know how to use FreeBSD, well guess what, I don't! I also have no intention of learning how, it's archaic and I don't like it, plain and simple. That's fine, this company can stay in the dark ages for all I care. NONE of our other servers have the reliability this little gentoo box has had. example:
Hostname: nagios - OS: Linux 2.6.1-gentoo/i686 - CPU: Pentium III (Coppermine) (701.784 MHz) - Processes: 44 - Uptime: 137d 20h 49m - Load Average: 0.12 - Memory Usage: 130.28MB/504.42MB (25.83%) - Disk Usage: 1.79GB/18.24GB (9.82%)
Makes me so fucking mad, but what can I do? rotate on my thumb. That's fine, someone else can take all the work I put into nagios and dump it on fbsd server. I'm sure as hell not doing it.
May 18, 2004
Why the fuck do I write here? Oh I know, because I'm bored out of my tree. Well, I got fired last week for not showing up and not giving my boss a clue as to why. Why did I do this, good fucking question, wish I had a good answer, but I don't. I know I'm sick of the BS that goes on there, but shit like that happens at pretty much every job, you just have to work around it kind of thing. It was a pretty sweet job when I think about it, free coke, free bandwidth, people were generally competant and nice. Blah blah blah. Oh well, I have a chance to go back to that job, I just have to get some things done first. Thing is, I'm not really sure I want to go back, my boss has done a lot for me a I appreciate all of it, but I just need to do more than I would be doing there. I'm bored damnit!
I can bitch about my job like everyone else all day, or I can just do something about it. Listening to Portishead
- Biscuit right now. Good shit. At least with 2 weeks off I've had the time to get some things done. I've redone my
eggdrop sysinfo script. It now works properly with *BSD and doesn't put a
huge space in when using a P IV processor like before. Colour support added too! Though I think imbezol did most of
the work there, can't say for sure.
I've been interested in a girl for a long time, nothing serious, she's cute, but I've decided to back off forever. I
know it would never work, and I'm sick and tired of a lot of BS from her, if she reads this and hates me, so be it.
I'm sick of being people's doormat, fuck em. That, and I would risk losing a friend over her, which is just not worth
it. Then again, that friend never talks to me anymore, so... Actually, over the past few months, I've been talking to
old friends less and less and meeting new people. Which is great and all, but I miss them in some ways. I think I am
going to move, I don't know where yet, but after I get back from spain and save some bling, I'm gone and hope to not
come back. That would mean buying a car, which I need money to do, and a job to pay for that loan, so wtf do I do?
Sit here and take it up the ass like everyone else. ARGH!
Lying. It can be a persons best friend for years, until I realized (and i've known this for a long time) that I am
not a good liar. Most people aren't. It takes a certain personality to be truly good at lying, and you probably don't
want to know that kind of person, ever. I've decided not to lie, ever again. All it has ever done is get me in
trouble. Hopefully when I move I can start over and gain the trust of some new friends. I think I am going to write
here more often, even if no one reads it, it makes me feel a bit better to put thoughts onto "paper" so to
speak.
Honesty, kind of goes hand in hand with lying. I've hurt a lot of people by being dishonest. My parents more than
anything, and I'm sorry for that. They stuck by me no matter what I said. I'm almost positive they know when I was
being dishonest and when I wasn't, but they helped through it no matter what, and I love them for that.
These are pretty huge changes for one to make in his life, but I'm going to work hard on making them happen. Sad part
is, it takes some conscious effort to stick to these, hopefully after time, it will come easier. Hope, heh, that has
come too.
This is going to be a long post, I can't seem to stop typing, oh well. criticaldamage, the members of this former
Quake3/Rocket Arena 3 clan have been my friends for a long time. I left our channel on EFNet the other day and didn't
miss it much, pulled all my bots, delinked them from the master bot. Thought I would rid myself of this place
forever. That didn't last long. Within 48 hours, I was back in the channel sans bots. Oh well, life goes on, it's a
good place to vent. =) I think I will leave eventually, no new people ever come in because we have our little group
and no one ventures out of it for the most part.
SPAM! I fucking hate it, along with most things related to e-mail. Whatever, it's better than the phone. :) I'm
running my own mail server now, and I'm seriously thinking of installing spamassassin on it, as well as clamav.
Though I don't get much for virii, I host some other domains for friends, and would also like to lighten the load on
them. Right now my mail server uses qmail, mysql, vpopmail, courier, and IMP for webmail. imp is pretty cool, i quite
like it over squirrelmail. imp relies on the horde project, which is pretty huge, but it works once you know how to
set it up. I'm also using qmailadmin to manage all the domains that I host. It integrates qmail and vpopmail very
nicely into a web interface that a person can manage. Opensource is the shit. :)
April 29, 2004
Well, I've been told I should make a page that I actually update on a regular basis and yap about shit no one cares about. Why? Beats me, but it's my day off and I don't feel like doing much of anything else, so here goes.
First off, my name's Rob, I'm huge, don't fuck with me. just kidding. A couple things about me, well, I can't type worth a shit, but I'll try to put some effort into doing so here. When people watch me type, they say my brain goes faster than my fingers, so I often skip words entirely. I do this when I talk as well, yay. :) I have a horrible memory, I can remember stuff I did when I was 2 years old, but not what I did yesterday or who you are, don't be offended, nothing personal. :) One thing about this little page is, I will never make any corrections or erase anything I have said. It's not worth my effort, you have a problem, or I have a problem, too bad, it's going to stay.
Ok, back to my junk. First off, how I came by the nick/alias of burn. It all started off when I was 2 or 3 years old, my parents were at a hotel, my mom was paying the bill and my dad had me over his shoulder, I pulled the fire alarm and pissed off a lot of firefighters. Oh well, it was only Lloydminster (I was born there by the way). By age 6 I had a thing for fire, I torched a school bathroom, by 8, a field, a dumpster. I got the nick when I was in high school and we used to go camping in the winter, god we were dumb. It's fucking cold in the winter in this place. Anyway, we were all out there freezing our nads off, when my friend at the time decided to pour gas on the fire, straight from my gas gan (which was my parents). Needless to say, the gas can caught on fire, so Ian tossed it into the snow, or tried to, it sat there burning my gas can... Being the smart person that I am, I kicked the gas can into deeper snow, and in the process, kicked gasoline all over the trees, which caught on fire. Oops. Ian then kicked the gas can away from the trees, and straight at my feet. Keep in mind this all happened within about a minute or so. Well, I caught fire, that was fun. I tried to jump over the gas can, didn't make it. I got my pants soaked in gas. You know what, stop, drop, and roll, doesn't work worth a shit when you're covered in gasoline. Luckily, it was winter and my friends starting covering me in snow to put me out. Jay got one hand frost bitten from the snow, and the other a little burnt. I was fine, my legs were baby soft for about 2 months until my leg hair grew back. So, that's where the name stemmed from.
I've been reading a lot about the QRIO robot released by sony, fucking cool stuff. There's some videos of the little guy here: QRIO Also some videos of Honda's ASIMO robot here: ASIMO
I collect a lot of shit, and I mean A LOT. I've got over 800GB's of storage space in my file server at home, and I'm running out. Sick. Here's some pics of Google's old hardware
Thinking about writing your CCNA exam? You and everyone else. Be original ya fucker. Here's some handy literature and tests if you need some help.
Hmm, what else. Oh yeah! I listen to a crapload of music, all kinds of it. Trance, rock, house, blues, some pop,
very little country. I frequently listen to di.fm when I'm at work. Even have a
subscription, awesome tunes. For that last 2 years or so I've been listening to Stephanie Pakrul as she made some better and better music. She even got some studio
time saved up and recorded her first CD in the last little while. Being the geek that she is, she has put it online,
and I'm mirroring it for her. You can find her cd in mp3 or ogg here.
