While digging through old files on our website, I found some old versions of AskRestek.

This page is live on our site right now, probably not linked to from anywhere.

Mike :: Feb.02.2005 :: General :: 3 Comments »

So apparently more of the cool kids are joining up on planet.

I only have one thing to say…

Highly sketchy, publicly accessible server configuration.

Diversity in action.

This is the new location of our servers. As long as they don’t get eaten by the gigantic stack of batteries next to them, we should be pretty stable. It’s a little scary when you reach to the back and realize that 30% of your body is leaning heavily on exposed battery terminals

drool. From top to bottom: Packeteer, Firewall A, Firewall B, and our multi-million dollar router.

Mike :: Jan.21.2005 :: General :: Comments Off

[mike@heimdall]- w
 14:00:16 up 314 days, 23:10,  1 user,  load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
[mike@heimdall]- sudo shutdown -h now
Broadcast message from root (pts/0) (Wed Oct 20 14:02:09 2004):

The system is going down for system halt NOW!
Connection to heimdall.restek.wwu.edu closed by remote host.
Connection to heimdall.restek.wwu.edu closed.

Heimdall has faithfully chugged along for years collecting bandwidth stats. As our most underpowered server, it has recieved the fanciest home in the basement of Bond Hall. Now that the filters can collect all bandwidth stats and run our IDS, we have no use for this lowly pizza box.

Next time I’m down there I’ll take some pictures to post up here.

Mike :: Oct.20.2004 :: General :: Comments Off

I few days ago I was working on the filters from home. I was trying to become another user in order to debug some error emails I was seeing.

sudo su - SOMEUSER

should work great. After typing in my password, I see the following message:

         *** System shutdown message from root ***
 system going down in 60 seconds

I start freaking out, and eventually realize that I should reboot the dang server before it is shutdown. This is one server that I don’t want powered off while locked deep in some telecom room on campus. So it reboots just fine, the CARP failover works great, all is well. I kind of forgot about this mystery until today, when I realized what had happened:

mike# fortune

        *** System shutdown message from root ***
system going down in 60 seconds

IT’S A FREAKING FORTUNE MESSAGE. WORST JOKE EVER. NOT FUNNY AT ALL.

Mike :: Oct.13.2004 :: General :: Comments Off

In the early summer I took the time to redo the graph generation code for our bandwidth graphs. The old setup was some custom C code, linking to the GD library. We are now generating them in PHP using the jpgraph package. The new way is much more flexible, you just pass arrays of data to jpgraph and the rest is magic.

So back in August Nick noticed a bug in the bandwidth graphs when displaying weekly data. I was bored in class today, and scribbled down some notes about what interval to display ticks at. It was a pretty easy fix, once I had all intervals calculated.

New weekly graph

I think I’m doing an excellent job of clogging up the planet with images.

Also, comforting to hear than Nick is scared.

Mike :: Sep.23.2004 :: General :: Comments Off

So it’s probably a bad idea to have the router rate limit our proxy server.

Guess when the limits were removed?

We are now pushing an impressive amount of data through the proxy. Just another remind that we need to push for the rate limit changes. At least once the madness of opening has settled down.

Mike :: Sep.20.2004 :: General :: 2 Comments »