645 days

Well, it was a sad moment, but it had to happen. While I was in Des Moines for that meeting, I walked over to our office there and (with permission) shutdown Parallel to bring it home.

Picking up the server was a surreal experience. First of all, it was an all-indoor five-block walk from the conference center to our Des Moines offices. You can do that in some places in Chicago for a block or two, but I think Des Moines has a lot more passageways and hamster tubes than Chicago. I and four coworkers walked into the reception area in an office where nobody knew me by sight. Someone from that office had called ahead to let them know I was coming, but all they had was my name.

The receptionist he talked to was on break, but her substitute called her and confirmed it was OK. A third person walked me back to the server room and let me in, where I walked right up to a server, logged in, shut it down, unplugged it, and walked out the front door carrying it. If I had done all that without someone calling ahead, it really would have been a scary thing.

The final uptime was 645 days and about 9 hours running continuously without a reboot. The server is now resting comfortably at my house. I only need a few small tidbits off it before it can be repurposed or retired.

In some ways, it's sad to see old hardware that has been working well come to the end of its cycle. In this case, Parallel served two full cycles - once as someone's desktop computer, once as a webserver. Fear not, because Parallel may yet ride again! Since it's been so dependable so far, I may give it a third life as a firewall/router/web filter for Jen & Eric.

601 days

That’s how long one of my servers “Parallel” has been running without a reboot, as of 8:41 a.m. today (CST).

It’s been running continuously at the Des Moines office since Thursday, April 7, 2005, when the data center had to unplug it to move it across the room. Before that it ran continuously for about six months when they received the shipment from me and powered it on. Before this assignment, Parallel was a dedicated ssh-tunnel proxy in the Chicago office for about a year. Before that, it was used for many years by one of the accounting types at work.

Parallel is running “headless”, with no monitor or keyboard. The machine is an active Bugzilla webserver, and so is NAT’ed on ssh and http ports, and firewalled on the rest. The machine receives nearly 400 failed login attempts per day.

Current specs:

• Hardware
  • Compaq Deskpro DPEP6266/MMX
  • Pentium II MMX, 266MHz
  • 64MB RAM
  • 9GB hard drive (73% free)
• Software
  • FreeBSD 4.9-STABLE
  • Apache httpd 2.0
  • MySQL 4.0
  • Postgresql 8.0 (inactive)
  • Bugzilla 2.20
    • 56 users
    • 774 bugs
    • 7247 bug changes
    • 4946 comments
    • 292 attachments (50MB)
  • qmail
• Network Usage
  • 57,879,421 incoming packets (343 with errors)
  • 21,973,131 outgoing packets
  • 12,034 packet collisions

Alas, Parallel will be retiring before long. A new server, Sphere, will be taking over responsibilities for Bugzilla in the near future. Sphere has been running for a measly 353 days so far, but is a much newer server, resides in a dedicated hosting center, and should last for 3-4 more years.

Related post: Firefox 2.0

Spam update

Looks like that forum invasion may have caused my spam count to skyrocket. Either that, or a recent bugzilla release.

I was offline for the weekend. To get an accurate count, I started by going into my Junk folder and marked everything “read”, and deleted any junk with a future date. Thunderbird automatically purged off junk mail older than a week. This left 481 items in my junk folder, about 96 per day, given that I hadn’t checked mail since Friday. Until recently, I was down to about 70 per day.

Between Friday evening about 7 pm and Monday at 10:15, I received 356 new pieces of email through toomuchblue. Of these, 188 (52%) were automatically recognized as junk, and I manually flagged another 84 (24%) as junk. At least three out of every four pieces of mail I receive is spam.

Out of these, at least 7 were future-dated. I can’t say exactly, because I don’t know when these emails were sent, nor from what timezone. (I could probably find out by reading the headers, but this is a curiosity, not a compulsion). My hunch is that about 50 of these were future dated. It’s possible some of the 356 emails were junk mail past-dated more than a week in the past. If so, Thunderbird purged them before I could count them.

I also received quite a bit of legitimate mail:

• 52 email notifications from various FreeBSD servers.
• Five from email lists
• Four from webservers of my clients
• Three marketing pieces from companies I’ve used in the past. (These are annoying, but not spam since I do business with them.)
• Two legitimate bill notices from companies I use.
• One baby picture from friends

That leaves 17 unaccounted for. I imagine these are probably more spam.

So in summary:

• I get a lot of mail.
• I’m up to about 108 pieces of spam a day.
• If you sent me an email and I haven’t answered yet, it’s just possible it got lost in the noise.
• Time to blackhole a few more addresses.

Things I've been meaning to do

Now presenting a random list of things which have been cluttering up my mental "todo" list.

• Install Bacula on Progeny, configure it to backup Tricia's machine and the other servers on schedule.
• Find a quiet time for reading the Bible and praying.
• Pull all my O'Reilly books together on one shelf, take a picture, bragblog about it.
• Get the Saturn into the dealership and have them reset my radio. (Locked out after a jump start.)
• Buy the bike Ethan "gave" me on my birthday in 2003 (2002?), go riding with the kids.
• Call T-Mobile and see what deals they can offer me to switch.
• Call Verizon Wireless and see what deals they can offer me to stay.
• Move the script backing up my Bugzilla site from Athos back to Progeny.
• Get some lumber and start putting walls in my basement.
• Rearrange my office so the servers are outside the curtain to cut down noise on phone calls.
• For that matter, just cleaning up my office would be really nice.
• Redesign my website, using Drupal to manage content and setting myself free from FrontPage.
• Buy a new battery for the digital camera so Trish can use it to take more pictures.
• Get a newish computer to run Unix and X-windows the way they were meant to be run.
• Release a new version of Customer Service Alerts on my own time, since I can't seem to find time at work to get it done.
• Get over to Victory Christian Academy and see if some of the less pleasant popups can be blocked.
• Figure out why my "sitemonitor" script notifies me about a particular site every night, even though I had programmed it to ignore that change.
• Exchange the fullscreen Indiana Jones DVD set I received for Christmas for the widescreen edition (thanks, Mom).
• Migrate my Bugzilla install to the new server purchased two months ago for that purpose.
• Inventory the various unused computers in my basement and get rid of the ones I have no use for. (I mean really, how many 200Mhz PC's can one person use?) I guess I could work up a simple install image and set up my whole family up with FreeBSD firewalls. Gotta be low-maintenance, though, otherwise I'll never see my family again.
• Get to the doctor and see about this finger that's been giving me trouble.
• Configure Tricia's old computer as a games (ahem, "educational software") computer for the kids; find a good home for it where they can play supervised. Hmm, maybe the landing?
• Get to a different doctor and get screened for adult ADD (which, if it comes back positive, could explain much of this list).
• Write the Great American Application, make millions, retire early.
• Get back with the Lindens to update the TongShan site I helped them set up. (Guess I won't be done with FrontPage very soon.)

Don't hold back, tell me what you really think.

Waiting for some FreeBSD ISO's to download, I followed some links to find The Bleat, a rather irreverent blog with some good things to say. In today's post, he goes off on a rather well written rant about many of Kerry's claims from the debate. He's not afraid to use an expletive here and there for emphasis. By the end, you can just imagine him being red-faced and out of breath, but I have to say he has stated quite well many of my frustrations with Kerry. Some choice excerpts:

I can’t take any more talk about bringing allies to the table. Which ones? Brazil? Mynmar? Microfrickin’nesia? Are there some incredibly important and powerful nations out there whose existence has hitherto escaped me? Fermany? Gerance? The Galactic Order of the Belgian Dominion? Did we piss off the Vulcans? Who? If we mean “France and Germany,” then please explain to me why the reluctant participation of these two countries somehow bestows the magic kiss of legitimacy. They want in? Fine. They don’t? Fine. At this point mooning over France is like being that sophomore loser dorm pal who spent his dateless weekends telling his loser roommate about a high school sweetheart who stood him up for the prom. Give it up. Move on.

...

And I’m not exactly thrilled with the idea of a big summit of non-allied allies after the election, either. Summits are convened not to solve a problem but solve the perception that there is a problem. Imagine if the government had been different in 2002 - we’d have had a summit with France and Germany. End result: the sanctions would be dropped by now, and Saddam would still be in power.

...

Here’s the thing. I’d really like to live in John Kerry’s world. It seems like such a rational, sensible place, where handshakes and signatures have the power to change the face of the planet. If only the terrorists lived there as well. Who does Zarkowi fear the most - France, summiteers, or Marines? If the rightness of a cause is measured by the number of one’s allies, would Britain have been right if the US had stayed neutral in World War Two?

I'm not exactly sure what word he's looking for, starting with S and ending five letters later in T. SOVIET and SADDAT both fit, but not the context. Anybody got a guess? Side note: the advertising on his site happened to rotate through this gem. The perfect gift for your favorite Youth Pastor or college student.

Microsoft prepares security assault on Linux

I'm more comfortable with FreeBSD than Linux, but I can still see the humor in this article. I'm intrigued to see what Microsoft has to say on the subject. In practice, FreeBSD has a centralized management, where Linux tends to be more distributed. In my opinion (and many others) this leads to more stable, predictable releases. Linux may be grabbing all the press, and finding its way inside corporate firewalls, but FreeBSD is used more often by ISPs and major sites who are serious about staying up.