Yay, I have a car again… The inside door panel still needs to be replaced, but that’ll get taken care of sometime next week. Also, the place rotated the tires for me, so I don’t need to have that done for a while.
Oh, and I seem to have resolved the internet problems by switching the APs back to Channel 1 from 11. I had changed them to 11 a week and a half ago or so, and since then the signal had been about 50% everywhere. Back on 1 and it’s nicely full.
So, earlier today I submitted my Lightsticks In The Toilet LJ Post and photo album (photo gallery retired) to the Make Blog. I had also submitted it to Digg sometime last night.
Well, it has been posted on the Make Blog, and the Digg link has really taken off. With a total of 5 fastcgi processes for myself (nuxx.net, et al) the box is sitting at a load of ~5 to ~10, and is handing out loads of data. Feel free to watch the bandwidth consumption here.
This is interesting. I’ve only had to deal with tremendous bandwidth load before (eg: hosting the SG videos, or original seed for Katrina photos), not something that actually loads the box.
I just moved the photos to nine per page (3×3) to cut down on the impact of each page load. We’ll see what happens, I guess…
I’ve got a bunch of hardware here that I just can’t bring myself to throw out. For example, a Digi AccelePort C1 (with a REAL 16C650) which I had previously used with a 3Com ImpactIQ for ISDN network access from 1997 through 2000. There is also the first computer I bought, a Pentium 90 which I’d paid almost $3k for, with 17″ monitor. A real, made in the USA 3Com Sportster 56k x2 modem from the time before the v.34 standard was formalized, which had been subsequently flashed to v.34. Some great-for-wardriving Pentium II 300 laptops, etc.
I’ll be upgrading PHP on rowla.nuxx.net a bit later today, so the hosted website(s) will go down for a while.
While cleaning out the basement (yes, the long-awaited get-rid-of-the-crap-you-don’t-use cleaning) I came across a bunch of old magnetic media which I wanted to render unreadable. I tried a few different methods, and I think that the best is the use of a band saw. As you can see above, DLT cartridges are easily disposed of by removing the spool from the housing and cutting half-way through them with a bandsaw. This turns the whole spool of magnetic ribbon into lengths no longer than ~6 inches. When a bunch of cut tapes are mixed in a box and then tossed like a salad they can be rendered nearly irrecoverable. I don’t think even the big agencies would be too anxious to try and recover data from that.
I also cut into hard drives, from edge of drive to spindle, and in one case cut away one corner of the whole drive. Having to dispose of some ZIP disks and DATs I also sliced into portions of these with the bandsaw before tossing them. ZIP disks would be cut to the hub of the platter, and DATs straight into the side of the tape bearing the full spool until reaching the hub.
I still have to figure out a good way to dispose of lots of both pressed and burned CDs. This too may employ the bandsaw, although a bonfire would work good as well.
Hmm, I received this from what appears to actually be Spark Fun Electronics (sent from one of the servers physically near them), and the site itself is still offline:
Hello,
On February 8th, 2007 it came to our attention that someone or something gained unauthorized access to the Spark Fun Electronics server. It is highly unlikely that this person gained full access to our server data. But because there is no way for us to confirm the depth of the access, we felt it in the best interest to warn our (wonderful, wonderful) customers the server contained sensitive customer information including some credit card data. All numbers have since been removed and we are putting systems in place to better protect sensitive user information in the future.
Please check your credit card statement for any unauthorized activity. We will do everything in our power to work with you and your credit card company to investigate any discrepancies.
We truly appreciate your business and are very sorry to cause a scare. Please contact us (you can reply to this message) if you have any questions or concerns and we will address them as quickly as possible.
Best regards,
Spark Fun Electronics—
This message has been scanned for viruses and
dangerous content by MailScanner, and is
believed to be clean.
UPDATE: Here’s some more info about the message… it appears to be legit:
c0nsumer@rowla:/var/log> grep "server89" maillog
Feb 12 13:36:26 rowla postfix/smtpd[50546]: connect from server89.sparkfun.com[65.58.240.213]
Feb 12 13:36:26 rowla postfix/smtpd[50546]: setting up TLS connection from server89.sparkfun.com[65.58.240.213]
Feb 12 13:36:26 rowla postfix/smtpd[50546]: TLS connection established from server89.sparkfun.com[65.58.240.213]: TLSv1 with cipher DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA (256/256 bits)
Feb 12 13:36:27 rowla postfix/smtpd[50546]: 180394AC23: client=server89.sparkfun.com[65.58.240.213]
Feb 12 13:36:27 rowla postfix/smtpd[50546]: disconnect from server89.sparkfun.com[65.58.240.213]
c0nsumer@rowla:/var/log>
server89.sparkfun.com is now down, and Spark Fun doesn’t publish SPF records. However, sparkfun.com is 65.58.240.188, so with a whole /25 (or less, maybe a standard /24?) they could be in the same subnet. It all appears to be in a block of colocated stuffs owned by dnssys.com who doesn’t have much of a site. Still, the email message appears to be legit…
At least there are no strange charges on the card I used there. Yet. :(
I’m not sure why I find this so strange, but a 1280×1024 LCD seems really odd to me. It just seems really, really, really square. Then again, I guess 5:4 is… Maybe I’m just more familiar with 4:3, 16:9, and 16:10 displays.
Well, backups are working. Every night my PowerMac G5 backs its important stuff up to external disks, and then a few hours later rowla.nuxx.net shoves its important bits down to one of the disks. It’d be better if it was all sent offsite, but I do only have a certain amount of space available remotely.
At the end of last week I ordered two 320GB hard disks and a Macally PHR-100AF FireWire 400 (1394a) disk enclosure so that I could handle all of my backups straight through my PowerMac G5. Well, today I received the parts and while the outer box had the right labeling on it, the inside was the PHR-100ACB, a combination USB 2.0 / FireWire 800 (1394b) enclosure, along with all appropriate cables. Seems like there was a mix-up somewhere. Whoops!
I don’t mind, I just hope that this doesn’t mean that there is a mixed up package elsewhere and someone else will inadvertently receive an enclosure which is a bit less than they had hoped for.
To everyone who uses rowla.nuxx.net to some degree: This machine is going to be moved at some point within the next few weeks, hopefully within the next few days. The colocation provider I use is getting their new building / data center going, and I’m going to move in there sooner than later. Because of this I will have to switch to a new IP address and have the server down for a few hours while it is driven to the new building, but after that things should be fine. It should just come back up once turned on.
Email deliveries attempted while the server is off should be queued by the last-hop mail server and delivered after things come back online.
I’ll post more info (and more specific dates / times as I have them) here, but for now just know that it’ll be happening.
