February 23, 2008 : This marks the last entry to be recorded here. Today I migrated the webhosting from the server that has served me for the better part of the last 7 years, to a new Fedora Core 8 instance on VMWare, with new features. One of the features I setup was blogging, so now WordPress serves as my blog engine for all future entries here. From here on out, the pluzzi.com blog will host the updates. I have copied all historical entries in for searchability - but they all show with today's date ... thats kind of annoying.

February 4, 2008 : By using the procedure at the bottom of this page, I was able to get Turtle Radio working on my atron again. Kinda happy about that because playing Internet radio through my home stereo system was a major perk over the iPod family of products.

January 27, 2008 : After a morning UPS loss, which took down my NAS and a few access points - I ended up getting dragged into repair work on VubuntuS, which is my PDC that has lost some quality of service over the last few days. The reboot of AthlonXP in order to reclaim the NAS share, and subsequent failure to login, is what prompted all this. So what I ended up doing was rebuilding the IBM PC365, getting the old NTSERVER back online .... again ... just for a bit, bringing down the new vmWin2k3 proxy server's second interface (that used to be on NTServer), brought down the Proxy+ software, and then removing all accounts from VubuntuS (/etc/passwd, /etc/shadow, /etc/group, and "pdbedit -x" for all but bb account). I had to change uid/gid numbers for bb and nagios so that they were under 500, and changed original "pluzzi" account to "xpluzzi". Then when I vampired them from ntserver to vubuntus, it seems to have helped since there were no conflicts, and the uid's all worked out as they should be. Seems to be some issue in vampiring them, such that the accouts MUST be specific numbers ... I guess. Anyway, thats how we are now - vmWin2k3 back to normal, NTSERVER down and off, and Vubuntus as PDC .... see if it lasts this time.

January 16, 2008 : Just wanted to share this one ... a new style of Trojan that gets around virus/malware scanners : http://www.crn.com/article/printableArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=Y552U4ANNIFJOQSNDLPCKHSCJUNN2JVN?articleId=205604707 . Now thats kinda scary.

January 15, 2008 : Fixed my RoundCube virtual machine from EnSpeed today. Found out how to get into a shell on the VM, and then it was all me. When the machine is first booting, in grub stage, hit the "a" key to append to the boot string. Add a "-s" to go single user. Then when it comes up, run this "mv /etc/sysconfig/iptables /etc/sysconfig/iptables.save" and then "exit". That gets it up and running and allows login as root user with "enspeed" as the password. Of course I changed that immediately, now that its exposed. Next installed big brother client (stole from vmQmail since its also centOS), and ran that. So far so good. Lastly, went to /var/www/html/mail/config and edited main.inc.php file. Changed the sent_box folder to "INBOX.Sent_Items", changed drafts folder to "INBOX.Drafts", changed trash folder to "INBOX.Deleted" and all was good again. Now I can use squirrelmail, uebimaiu, or roundcube - and there is no issue with folders anymore. Also did set my user preferences in roundcube to do html editing, and have a signature, and all is working. Only thing left is address book configuration.

January 9, 2008 : Finally got vmware dev box back up. Turns out that I still dont know what the hell was wrong with that primary drive, but in the end, I just ended up adding an 18Gb IBM SCSI drive from stock, reloading the O/S, and setting it all up again. So I took out the 50Gb SCSI that had been my vmware repository - was recently converted to the 120Gb IDE drive, and took out the seagate 17Gb IDE drive too. So now its down to 2 drives, and works good. It properly imported all my VM's with no issue, so after about 6 hours of diagnostics, rebuild, configuration, and installation - its all good again.

January 8, 2008 : Spam is getting out of control since about Christmas eve. Im getting 80-100 spam emails per day. I get home to 100-120 emails, about 20-30 are real. Thats just rediculous. So I took some of the info from http://www.bluehostforum.com/archive/index.php/t-3749.html and the sa_rules_update.sh script from http://www.howtoforge.com/fedora_virtual_postfix_mysql_quota_courier_p4 and setup some additional filters. Hopefully that will help somewhat.

January 6, 2008 : Cleared up space issue on turbo tonite. Copying Dee's pictures over, filled the /export/apps share. Gotta add a 6Gb disk to fix permanently. For now, I just moved the filling directory over to /usr which had about 1.1Gb free for now, and linked it back.

January 5, 2008 : Finally finished this mess up today. The samba PDC worked - set that up on VubuntuS and seems to be doing ok. There were a few accounts that didnt migrate over properly since they were already in the /etc/passwd file there (like pluzzi for example) - but otherwise seems ok. One issue I am having though, cant seem to get the windows SRVTOOLS.exe utilities to work properly - they keep giving me permission errors, so Im stuck with 'pdbedit' commands on VubuntuS.

So one other issue I had with loss of "ntserver" is the mapped ports that I use - they allow me to use the same links/ports internally as I do externally. One example is for request tracker, from outside its http://www.pluzzi.com:8082/rt but internally, it wouldnt work and I had to go to http://VubuntuS/rt. Thats annoying for me to have to remember 2 different url's for all my custom stuff. So I ended up setting up a Win2k3 instance on vm380num1, adding ForTech Proxy+ software, and mapping all my old ports from WinProxy over to Proxy+(free version 3.00 - build #232 - with max 2 concurrent users, 3 mailboxes, 1MB cache). Now its working for all ... except one oddity. Since I moved over the old 'ntserver' ip addres to the new win2k3 instance (so everything would still appear where its expected), and I have a DNS resolver turned on for proxy+, the DNS should just "work" right ? Well, dns forwarding (as built in the proxy+ tool, with its caching and all) makes my newer linux instances choke. They see the request going to the internal ip for proxy+ which is good, but the response comes from the external address, and they dont like it. So I may undo the dns forwarder, and just map port 53 - we'll see. .... Update on that - just putting both interfaces to secure interfaces seems to have helped.

Lastly, with the implementation of the new vmWin2k3 host to run the port maps, and the installation of BigBrother on that host, I have disabled monitoring for Ntserver for good. Its now set as a dialup host - so I can keep the history around. Oh yeah, and updated all smb.conf files on linux/unix hosts, to change password server from "ntserver" to "vubuntus" now that I setup the new w2k3 box and used the ntserver ip on it. The other great thing is that after all these minor updates, the SRVTOOLS stuff now works. Thats awesome !

January 3, 2008 : Spent the better part of the last 10 hours trying to salvage the data from NTServer. No matter what I did, couldnt get it running again. So Im moving the SCSI card, and dual drives over to a canibalized and modified IBM PC365 - since its also Pentium Pro. Good news is that it boots, but bad news is that it wont recognize the same 3c905 card, nor the cdrom drive. Getting devices configured in NT4.0 is such a pain in the ass too - no usb, no help, no device manager, no plug and play ... man I dont miss those days at all. The plan will be to get the data from this box's shares, and move them to my NAS. Also using the samba from my VubuntuS host and making that PDC - copy all accounts over, and then promote to PDC. We'll see how that goes ....

January 2, 2008 : What a friggen night last night. The last of my standalone hosts (hosts not hosted on VMWare) other than my firewall, crapped out. Its a Win NT4, PDC, License server, home dir server, smtp server, and app server - and was a DNS forwarder as well. So when it quit, all those functions died with it. I had to visit the /etc/resolv.conf on all my unix/linux hosts and change the address from the DNS proxy to my real DNS server. Thats fine, but it was a useful trick while I was working with different DNS server configs - I could just change it in one place, and all the clients worked without issue - but now thats gone. Then I had to visit the mail server, and modify the forwarder section in /etc/named.conf and /etc/squirrelmail/config_local.php (as well as /var/qmail/control/smtproutes) - and change the smtp host from my "ntserver.pluzzi.com" and/or "mailhost" to "smtp.comcast.net". Truly - I should have done that 13 months ago when I rolled out the qmail toaster project. So now, I still have to fix my missing PDC issue so that clients can authenticate, and so that all my samba configurations on all my unix/linux hosts which point to "ntserver" will work again. So Im finally getting mail again, but far from over. Still dont know whats wrong with the actual Micron host - but its been running for 11 years now - who can really complain right ?

December 21, 2007 : VMWare dev box "vmware", which is a white-box home built pc, is having issues now. It never ends. Its been running for 3 years, but started acting up recently - still trying to isolate the cause.

December 18, 2007 : Working on an effort to try and impove the look and feel of my own hosted email - basically looking for a richer front end. Currently I use Squirrelmail, and while its never given me any real trouble, its just rather plain looking. So I downloaded the VM Appliance for EnSpeed's version of RoundCube's email client, all hosted on a CentOS 4.4 release. Its a great VM - it doesnt contain SMTP or IMAP server, which is great because I didnt want to replace mine - this is purely a front end, and is super easy to configure. Its got drag and drop interface which is amazing considering its a web based application. Its very attractive looking and is quite responsive. Only issue is that for me, I dont use "Inbox.INBOX_Trash" for my deleted folder, I use "Inbox.Deleted" instead. Squirrelmail allows this, but RoundCube doesnt (at least not easily in the VM appliance). So since I had issue with Deleted, Sent, and Drafts folders - I ended up having to do away with it.

December 16, 2007 : Handed off the T40 today to replace the Vaio. Signal strength is good in its location - but lets let the user report in if the "upgrade" was a success or now. At 1.5Ghz, lighter weight, more memory, and internal wireless - this should be a clear winner.

December 15, 2007 : Worked my way down from 3 Wiki engines to just 2 now. Decided that even though the only one with working email was WikiBox? - thats the one that offered the least. I liked its tables better than TwikiVM? - but all in all TwikiVM? offers more - better buttons, wysiwyg editing, and other features had it scoring higher for me than WikiBox?. But the main reason I shut it down was to make "room" for the new Zenoss VM appliance I wanted to test out. I have version 2.1.1 of Zenoss running now - and am testing if I can make this usable for me or not. Its mostly SNMP driven, which is kind of a deterrent for me since I usually disable that - but we'll see. I like the Google maps mashups, and some other features, but just dont know if this is a pipe dream, or if it can eventually match what Big Brother has done for me for more than 10 years now - without fail, with no upgrades needed. Time will tell ...

December 13, 2007 : The good news continues - I was able to get my T23 with the Linksys WPC55ag card working much more reliably now. Somehow (could be since I have three of these cards, all purchased at different times) I ended up in the T23 with a version 1.0 card, but version 1.1 drivers. The way they do roaming and signal checking is WAY different. With the version 1.1 drivers, after about 20 mins, my refreshing web pages would all time out, my ssh/putty screens would die, etc. Now after removing the drivers altogether, and using the version 1.0 drivers - things are humming along now 3 days - no timeouts. That has never happened, so Im quite pleased with that too.

December 12, 2007 : Officially determined that the Vaio is dead. But the good news is that I got the T40 working again. After changing the LCD Inverter, I was able to get the screen functioning such that now I can move its position without it blanking out. But the part thats really whacky is that recently - it stopped working altogher whenever I moved it. I ended up tracing it down to the touchpad having issues. With it disconnected - its been running for days now - no issue. Of course in the process of working out its issues - I ended up switching from the Intel 2915 internal tri-band wireless card, back to the original IBM 11a/b/g card - as I thought that may have been it. It wasnt, but the cool part is that now my wireless light on the case works properly - so thats cool.

December 7, 2007 : Recently added 3 new wiki sites to pluzzi.com. Not yet sure which I want to use, I started with :

December 6, 2007 : Powered off sparc8. Needed to turn off some devices in the room to make room available for the vm380num1, which I want to fire back up again, and get a wiki going. I plan to use the VM Ware Appliances, that have proven so successful for me (vmQmail, Vubuntus, ISPConfig, etc)

December 2, 2007 : Lost the Sony Vaio laptop today and the T40 as well. The T40 has some sort of motherboard/video problem, and the Vaio is no longer able to charge - even with a new charger. Something on that one with the port that the adapter plugs into , on the motherboard. My "dead" pile of laptops is growing a little faster than I'd like.

November 17, 2007 : Tired of all these annoying brute force login attempts against my servers, so today I did something about it. I originally planned to use fail2ban, and still might, but in the article I just read in Linux Pro Magazine, I picked up a tip about DenyHosts also - which is much simpler to configure/use. So I added the DenyHosts package to my host which keeps getting attacked. It was a little challenging since I didnt have some of the pre-requisite dependent packages, and a different version of python, but I was able to make it work on my SuSE 10.2 without too much pain. Ran the following :

• Download DenyHosts-2.6-python2.4.noarch.rpm
• rpm -Uhv --nodeps DenyHosts-2.6-python2.4.noarch.rpm
• cd /usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages
• find . -print | cpio -pdvm /usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/
• cp usr/share/denyhosts/denyohsts.cfg.dist to /usr/share/denyhosts/denyohsts.cfg and edit variables and options
• cp usr/share/denyhosts/daemon-control-dist to /usr/share/denyhosts/daemon-control and edit variables and options
• cd /etc/init.d ; ln -s /usr/share/denyhosts/daemon-control denyhosts
• /etc/init.d/denyhosts start

November 11, 2007 : Decided to take a subnet of my network, and branch it off, on its own, like all the other clients that I support. This is something I have been wanting to do for a while, but also recently so that I could test out Smoothwall Express 3.0 - its a linux based firewall. I had read about it in this months Linux Pro Magazine. I basically split off a portion of my lan, and kept all addresses as they are. I am using DSL as the external interface on Smoothwall, and the internal side of smoothwall will be the same address as my current firewall. By keeping the internal side of the smoothwall firewall the same as my old firewall address, I wouldnt have to readdress any of the client devices. They work great in initial testing, and I will cut the rest over this week. My only gap to be resolved is that big brother can no longer see these as native devices on my lan. That means they are not pingable, and that will require a workaround.

October 4, 2007 : Finally something good to report. I just purchased the Tivo HD from eCost. It was $269, with a $200 rebate - and since Im already a user, its only costing me $6.95 per month. So 70 bucks out of pocket, and 7 bucks a month is a pretty good deal for a dual tuner, HD Tivo. This thing is so amazing, I almost cant take my eyes off it. In the past, I had to watch the Comcast input direct to my TV without the Tivo, when I wanted to watch HiDef programs. They are spectacular, but you could never pause them. And you couldnt record anything in HD - like Alias - that was the one that used to piss me off. Now, its a cablecard required, dual tuning, HD pausable picture, ALL THE TIME. Even the non HD channels come thru in 480i at minimum - so every channel has stunning quality. Its truly unbelievable. HIGHLY recommended to anyone that has an HD set, is already a Tivo subscriber, and is has a service provider that has cable cards. Comcast even gives them for free - so I get all my pay channels, on both tuners (cable cards), for zero additional bucks per month. If I wanted another of their HD set-top boxes, I'd have had to pay. For onces, its too good to be true.

September 29, 2007 : ... Lost another one today - this time, its the original VMWare server. It was still running a copy of GSX Server v3.2, but that was before. Now it appears to not even power on. Its a whitebox, Athlon 1800+ with a Gig of RAM and about 100Gb of disk. So now I gotta swap the power supply, get it running again, grab a backup of all important info - and see if its salvagable. This is the one that had my "lab" type vmware images - all the desktop o/s's, my tivo converter, and was where I tested any upgrades (AVG, ZoneAlarm, service packs, etc) - so that I wouldnt hose any real boxes. More to follow.

September 18, 2007 : I lost two laptops this week. First my T21, which was my RedHat 8.0 system, that hosted "fwbuilder" for building my firewall policies. Power failures caused the disk to lose the partition that hosted my boot partition. So I rebuilt this one as a Xandros4 host and spent a good deal of time getting tools like xterm, nslookup, dig, etc - all installed. Its good now though - and in fact Im writing this from that host. Second one lost was my T23 - which was a Windows XP host, that somehow picked up a virus. That was simply reloaded as WinXP-SP2. Its working now - and while I saved all my install info, and software- I missed saving my FireFox bookmarks, and that sux ! But its up and online at this time.

August 18, 2007 : In an attempt to resolve some recent wireless issues, I have decommissioned the WAP51ab, upgraded firmware from version 1.08 to 2.07 on the WET54g, and upgraded firmware from version 1.20 to 1.79 on the WRT55ag. Lets hope it helps.

August 13, 2007 : After having enough issues with long range wireless, I finally broke down and purchased the Linksys Wireless-N products. So I am now putting them to the test. I purchased the WRT300N after much deliberation between that one , the one with 2 antennae's only, and the other more compact module. The clincher was that I was able to buy that one, plus the WPC300N card, altogher with tax and shipping, for under 200 bucks (from newegg.com). So thats what Im using now for when we're poolside. It took a while to test all combinations on the router to get best signal, but Im getting 30% signal or better now and 270Mb/sec without fail. So I'd say so far, so good. (One of the best things is how my average ping time dropped from hundreds of ms to under 20ms)

August 12, 2007 : Seems that DVD Profiler is now charging for all the stuff that made it one of the best-ever in the free program world. Now they want 30 bucks to store more than 50 titles, to post online, and to get cover images. I had been using 2.4 all along and absolutely loved it - recommended it to everyone. And their online collection that you could publish was perhaps the best feature. But now its all pay-for so thats out. The best alternative I can find is DVD-Attache (http://www.mpegx.com/view.php?detail=2441) ... Im on version 3.9.0 build 1 at this time. Its a pain in the ass to convert all 300 titles from DVD Profiler into DVD-Attache, but when its done, it can post a collection to html pages, so that beat all the other free ones I could find. The only difference is that DVD Profiler used www.dvdprofiler.com to host your collection, while DVD-Attache requires you to already have a site that you can publish to. For me, thats no big deal, but for some that could be an issue.

August 4, 2007 : Due to a power failure early this morning (1:30am) from the storm, it expedited a few more decommissions on my part. I retired "NTWS" which was my primary driver workstation from the late 90's through about 2002. It then became a USB print server - and running NT Workstation, that was a bit of effort. So it survived well past what it should have been, because I always thought I'd need to copy that config for another location - but that never happened. When I retired the HP2550L in favor of the HP2600NL printer, the NTWS was no longer really needed. So after it powered down this morning, it stayed down. Also, "satellite" (aka the old "insert") has also now been shutoff. It was a Toshiba laptop, and survived the power failure, but the USB drives connected to it didnt. Rather than power them back on, this laptop was also shutdown. It had been the DamnSmallLinux box I used for my storage server, but now that I have the Lacie 1Tb, its easier to work from that.

Also later this evening, power went out again, this time for 2+ hours. So my battery backups wouldnt hold past about 30 minutes. So what happened was one of my networks on vm580num1 didnt come up. The way the vmware network bridging worked, it was set to grab any interface, but the one it chose is the one that wasnt working. So I setup bridging finally - I had wanted to for a while, but now I was forced to - after doing so, everything is fine. It was clear that it was the bridge because all of the 7 Vm's could ping each other, and the host could ping outside itself, but the host couldnt ping the vm's.

July 31, 2007 : Well, the sharity worked out to by sh__ity instead. It cant seem to keep up with the i/o rate needed. In essence, I needed it for my Audiotron table-of-contents creator script. But that walks the NAS share (7000+ songs) and it worked great when it was NFS shared from a DSL box, mounted on a solaris10 host via NFS. But now, mounting direct from the NAS using sharity - it just kept erroring out. Add to that the issues with the umount - and I said screw it. Now I just use "mount -t cifs" from my suse10.2 host instead. It even runs better from there anyway.

July 28, 2007 : Over the course of the last three days (of course its always three days ....), I have been converting my satellite host (Damn Small Linux on a Toshiba Satellite, AMD 366Mhz) storage over to a Lacie 1Tb Ethernet Big Disk NAS box. First went all the music, then the movies, then the Tivo archives, and finally the CD/DVD images and iso's. Its a great little device, but oddly (I thought) doesnt support NFS. So the main webserver that you are reading this page from, had to change from nfs mount of the nas share to an smbmount. Since this webserver is a linux box that was fine. But the music share is mainly used by my Audiotron. To generate the Audiotron table of contents, I had to run that from my solaris 10 host. But solaris10 can no longer nfs mount the share either, and it didnt come with smbmount. So I switched over to the "sharity" software which is able to mount the share. However, unmounting it is causing my entire mount-table to go haywire. After trying an umount, the commands mount, df, and du - all produce no output anymore. So I have to just agree never to unmount it - until a proper fix is made. But for now, this seems to be working good, and has decent performance.

July 18, 2007 : Decided to pull the trigger on the BigBrother conversion today - and migrated away from my 7 year trusty AIX 43P big brother server ... now it runs Suse10.2 on a Compaq DL380 (G1) with dual 733Mhz processors and a gig of ram , which much more storage space, and RAID configs. So I was able to enable LARRD as well, which is cool. I copied the old address of aix to the new suse10 host as a virtual address - so no client changes were needed.

July 17, 2007 : Completed 90% of the datacenter consolidation tonite. At this point, there have been about a dozen machines that have been consolidated or retired. 3 are still yet to be physically removed, but tonite I moved the openSUSE10.2 host that replaced Castor, into the datacenter. I removed 5 old disk arrays that were consuming alot of space and power, and I re-routed many of the UPS's so that I have full power backup now. Only the monitors are not backed up now.

In the process, "firewall" died on me and wouldnt come back up for a while. Its a good old PackardBell 486 - dx2/66 with 96Mb ram. It was purchased in 1993 - so who can really complain - 15 years of services is *WAY* more than anyone can ask for these days. Regardless, its a RedHat 7.2 kernel 2.4.10-7 box that needs a "newer" cousin to stand in should it fail again. I will add that to my todo list. All this work should go along way toward keeping the servers running on the 90+ degree days when I lose power in the house for 5 minutes or so due to street power problems.

At this point I am down to my DL580 Vmware host with about 7 instances on it, my suse10 host which is my oracle server now, my toshiba pII laptop which is my music/video server, my aix host which is my bb host (soon to be cutover to suse10), and my spar8 host which used to be my music/video box but doesnt do much anymore. There is a DL380 that needs to be fired up, but that will wait until the Sparc8 box and the aix box are retired.

July 04, 2007 : Got fed up with an older iPod mini (4Gb) that wouldnt last more that 15 minutes on battery anymore. There are links to buy battery replacement kits, and I will try that if this doesnt last - but this repair process seemed good enough to share. I executed it and just played my ipod for about 2.5 hours before the music stopped - and only because it was the end of my library - there is still 3/4 of the battery life left !

June 06, 2007 : Finally completed a three week project (lots and lots of interruptions) to cutover from SCO UnixWare 7 that was running since about 1999 or so, on a whitebox Pentium II-350. This host had gotten so flaky, I had to do nightly reboots just to keep it running. It had the IBM 18Gb SCSI disks that just dont want to stay running - and run hot as hell. This was my main Oracle server (version 8.0.4), and also did my Samba/NFS server duties, serving out my windows install share, my public share, and my old SCO OpenServer share, and other archived/saved info. It was moved off to a multi CPU Compaq DL380 with all kinds of redundancy and service-ability. Its now runnin OpenSuse 10.2, Oracle 9.2.0.4, and Samba/NFS serving now from a host-swapping RAID-5 built in array with more space than the original.

May 22, 2007 : Had some issues today trying to add an external dvd drive for my DL380-G1. I inserted an Adaptec 2940 card, no internals connected - plugged the external scsi dvd in, and it was recognized. Sounds good so far, but the issue was when I put in a bootable media - then it would hang after it cleared the adaptec discovery process. I tried all kinds of different settings - but it took an updated flashing of the adaptec bios to 2.52.2 to get it working properly. After that, all good. Now I can continue with my Suse 10.2 build.

May 01, 2007 : Its been quiet here lately - doing much more work for others than self. Anyway - recently got an IBM R40 laptop, had internal wireless 802.11b. I wanted faster, and found a $24 brand new, eBay special for an Intel Pro 2915-A/B/G card. Bought it, went to install - and found its not supported because IBM only allows approved vendors to make mini-PCI cards for their laptops. However, found a great page to fix this too. See these two ... 1 and 2. That "no-1802" iso image is a beauty - worked like a charm. Now Im cruisin at 54Mb !

February 01, 2007 : In a sad day (for me), I powered off solaris8. That had been my dns and email server. But since email was moved to vmQmail some time back, and DNS to vmISP recently - solaris8 had no use anymore. It had been up for many many years for me, and its sad to see it go. But its better for the power situation to have it finally out of the picture. So one week from now, it will be physically removed as well.

January 31, 2007 : Took delivery today of 2 Linksys wet54gs5's that I won on eBay. These are no longer available in the primary market and kick myself for not getting them when I had my chance. So I got 2 used ones and set them up. So one is in my other server room now bridging the 2 rooms together, and the other is down in my living room connecting the audiotron and tivo to the network. In the proces, Im also consolidating down to 4 access points, and instead of using MAC filtering now, Im using different SSID's to keep the devices pointing at the right access points. So far so good - just one change left to make now. Coolest part now is that with the wet54gs5 on the living room tivo, and the wet54g on the keg-room tivo - I can now transfer tivo recordings to my pc at much faster rates !

January 28, 2007 : In a continued effort go get my former Insert host back, I setup an old AMD K6 366Mhz Toshiba Satellite laptop with DSL (Damn Small Linux) on it - with the Compaq USB2.0 card (CPQUSBCB) to attach my 200Gb and 350Gb drives. Now my music, movies, and tivo/mpgs are served from that host. Oddly, with the additional 3Com 3c575 card in for networking (laptop is old enough not to have built in networking) - while playing music from audiotron and another source - cpu runs at only 2 percent. So thats pretty cool.

January 25, 2007 : Fixed a slight cable problem. I had previously had a Linksys BEFW11S4 serving strictly as a 4 port switch to enable all the lan connects on my vm580num1 vmware server. However, this has been dropping connection lately and I think thats behind the latency on the site. So I ran 3 full home runs back to the Cisco 2924 tonite to see if that helps.

January 22, 2007 : Setup new wet54g tonite for the keg-room tivo. It replaces a wet11. No need for setup disk - just point browser to 192.168.1.226 for default addres, and configure from there. Used the default Linksys username/password to get in, but changed right away of course. That was the easiest one to setup that I have been through yet - and such GREAT signal strenght. Reaches 45-50 feet with no problem ... the wet11 wouldnt do that.

January 21, 2007 : Migrated new vmISP (ISPConfig) instance from dev (vm380num1) to non-dev (vm580num1) now that I find I like the DNS management. This instance is much more geared toward running a full ISP with all kinds of web, ftp, mail, and invoicing - but I just wanted the DNS part.

January 18, 2007 : Prepping for Daytona, and what I'll be taking with ... I removed the wrt54gc from use. It had simply been doing 4 port switching for me and nothing more - so I replaced it with a bulkier befw11s4 that I had in stock. Now I can take the portable model with me. I also reused the Toshiba Satellite laptop that I had (366 Mhz AMDK6, 152 Mb RAM) and am using Damn Small Linux cd bootable to become my new storage server, replacing the Sony Vaio (1 Ghz, 512 Mb RAM, beautiful screen .. wasted). So Im going to unplug my 2 usb2 drives from the vaio (aka "insert" since its also a linux-cd-bootable box up for 280 days) and plug them into the Satellite. Then the Vaio is free for use in Daytona with my EVDO card. Im just waiting on the Compaq USB2 PCMCIA card to arrive now before pulling the trigger on that cutover.

January 15, 2007 : Migrated new VubuntuS instance from dev (vm380num1) to non-dev (vm580num1) now that I find I like the Request Tracker, SSL-VPN and gui desktop enough to keep this one around for good.

January 14, 2007 : Using another precompiled virtual machine appliance, Im now trying to get an easy to use DNS server - easy for admin, usage and reporting. So Im trying the ISPConfig package instead. Its Debian Sarge based, and is ok, but nothing stellar so far. Two very import things to get this one working in a usable fashion - without these steps you need to use shift-7 for the "/", period for the "-", and shift-pipe for the "*", not to mention z for the "y" and y for the "z" (steps below fix it for current session and reboots) :

• loadkeys us-latin1
• cp /usr/share/keymaps/i386/qwerty/us-latin1 /etc/console/boottime.kmap.gz

January 9, 2007 : Converted pluzzi.com's big brother instance to a new frames based design. When the quantity of hosts to manage becomes large - its unruly and this approach makes it a bit more manageable while still only have the one bb server. Unfortunately due to hackers and abusers, the site must remain private so nobody gets to see it thats not internal.

January 4, 2007 : Using another precompiled virtual machine appliance, Im now able to use Nagios, Request Tracker helpdesk tickets, and other features using the VubuntuS instance. Its called VubuntuS and there are some very interesting installed applications in this instance. This one is based on Ubuntu 5.10 "Breezy" and worked pretty much right out of the box. Issues with changing domain name, and IP address though - required lots of find commands and vi edits. Currently this is on my dev vm server (vm380num1).

January 3, 2007 : Migrated new vmQmail instance from dev (vm380num1) to non-dev (vm580num1) now that all accounts are cutover, spam protection is working, virus updates are happening, and squirrelmail is properly configured.

January 1, 2007 : Found that my new test virtual machine Qmail Toaster instance is losing 20 seconds every minute. Time sync is all [censored] up !! To fix this, I found that installing the vmware tools was required, and that I had to change a setting in the vmx startup file for the virtual machine. All this is documented on Vmware's site on page 14 near the top.

December 30, 2006 : Using a precompiled email virtual machine instance, Im now testing qmail toaster instead of my solaris8 sendmail combination. The new qmail toaster has qmail, spamassasin, clamav, and squirrelmail - among other things. Its based on CentOS version 4.4 (which is a RedHat Enterprise Linux v4 clone), and after 2 days of effort, I finally have it working. Of course you have to change passwords in all sub tools (squirrelmail, qmail, root, clam, mysql, etc) - but if it stops the incredible amount of spam I have been getting lately, its gonna be WELL worth it. They have other great vm's there too - like solaris 10 with zones preconfigured, OpenXchange, and many many others.

December 27, 2006 : Found a great repository of pre-compiled Virtual Machines on VMWare's site.

December 6, 2006 : One of my ups's took a crapper today, brining the DNS server down with it, from 10am to 5pm. Oh well, time to replace them I guess.

November 29, 2006 : Updated turbo's /etc/httpd/conf/srm.conf file to include "IndexOptions NameWidth=*" so that my directory listings have proper name column sizing now - normally the column width is so small you cant read the full file names. That flag fixes it. Then just restart httpd.

November 25, 2006 : Comcast commercial service just sucks. The service is absolutely terrible. They have missed three appointments on me now, and I just dont know what to do with them anymore. Love the static IP, but I would not recommend this service to my worst enemy. Just wait for FIOS no matter how long it takes.

November 08, 2006 : Comcast commercial service installed today. Now I get five static IP addresses, can run my own services without concern, can get real service calls, have 4 hour response time on issues, and have guaranteed bandwidth.

October 29, 2006 : Installed phpsysinfo on vm380num2, vm580num1, gsx-sol10, gsx-ubuntu504. Of course now that I run vmware server 1.0.1 - all the "gsx" names are incorrect and should really be "vm" instead.

October 23, 2006 : Migrated gsx-ubuntu504 from the Athlon 2.2Ghz vmware GSX 3.0 server over to the vm580num1 server which has much more fault tolerance built in. My Athlon-vmware server was all single point of failure. This host vm instance was never really an always on instance - believe it or not, I prefer other instance of linux to Ubuntu, so I never stuck with this one. I actually liked Xandros better. This is now an always on, auto-start instance and is my new jabber 1.4 server. This is now instance number 4 to auto-start and always be running.

October 17, 2006 : Comcast upgraded me to the new 6Mb/768k circuit speed today - lets see if reliability improves at all.

October 10, 2006 : Migrated gsx-sol10 from the Athlon 2.2Ghz vmware GSX 3.0 server over to the vm580num1 server which has much more fault tolerance built in. My Athlon-vmware server was all single point of failure. This is now instance number 3 to auto-start and always be running. After migrating it over, I successfully installed and configured apache 2.0.59 with SSL on the solaris 10 host in vmware - its now a full LAMP server. Now that will run all of my different domain's secure site traffic. Two pages that were very useful : setting up SSL and Certs in Apache and Solaris 10 Intel Downloads. They were both key in getting this working.

October 06, 2006 : Rebuilt vm380num1 - from a 1x9Gb, 1x36Gb configuration with no redunancy, into a configuration with 4x18Gb RAID-5 configuration. It runs vmware server 1.0.1 now instead of GSX 3.2. This vmware server is more like my development environment.

October 03, 2006 : Migrated gsx-turbo from the Athlon 2.2Ghz vmware GSX 3.0 server over to the vm580num1 server which has much more fault tolerance built in. My Athlon-vmware server was all single point of failure. It was designed to confirm the usefulness/success of vmware, and it worked so well, that "temporary" became "production" (if you can call what I do production). It is just as snappy and responsive on the 4x700Mhz XEON as it was on the 2.2Ghz AthlonXP chip. This is now instance number 2 to auto-start and always be running.

October 02, 2006 : Successfully converted RedHat 5.2 + Oracle 8.0.5 instance from physical AMD233/128Mb machine to a VMWare instance on vm580num1, as I virtualize all these machines to help with my power problems. Its migrated now onto a 4 way XEON Compaq DL580 server with 2.5 Gb Ram. So thats now instance number 1 thats configured to auto-start and always be running.

October 01, 2006 : Got the Audiotron table of contents perl script working on gsx-sol10. So now I mount that music share there, run the atron-toc script, and after about 9 minutes or so, it builds up a proper Audiotron formatted table of contents for my music collection. Now if I lose power (frequently do), the Audiotron restarts MUCH quicker and doesnt take 20 minutes to catalog all my music. Its a bit klugey for me though - but working. Required downloading MP3-Info perl module first then File-Find-Rule-MP3-Info perl module then MP3-Find then after all done, the TOC Maker script. The three perl modules followed the standard gunzip, untar, perl Makefile.PL, make, make install - routine.

September 29, 2006 : Configured vm580num1 and vm380num1 as VMWare Server 1.0.1 hosts. They had previously been built as VMWare GSX 3.2 hosts but had never seen any activity. That documentation is from the 2005 initial installs, and will need to be updated for the new VMServer1.0.1 build as it differs slightly.

August 30, 2006 : Replaced another failed IBM 18Gb DXHS18Y drive in castor. Just like before, I disconnect all but the failed drive, insert another drive of same capacity, boot knoppix, used "dd" to copy the drive, set the id of the new drive to that of the old drive, reconnect other drives, and fire up. Unfortunately, Im getting pretty quick at this - thats only because I have that many failures. This server has to get converted to a VMWare instance pretty soon.

August 12, 2006 : MAD-Office drive died today - now I know it was a bad drive after all. So it lasted all of what, 2 weeks ? So I finished rebuild of MAD-Athlon2 and reinstalled that one. MAD-Office sits at the lab now.

July 29, 2006 : Now that I know DSL seems to work predicably, I configured the dual-provider script. I use a Linux firewall which allows me much flexibility, so I wrote a script to manage my connections for me. If Comcast is up, its the better routing metric and traffic flows over that link. If Comcast is down, we use the Verizon link instead. So outbound always works for me ... unless both providers are down. The inbound however doesnt work on Verizon DSL.

July 27, 2006 : MAD-Athlon2 died today. Apparent Drive failure and definate power supply failure. Swapped out the 40Gb drive over to the MAD-OFFICE (PIII 667/256) instead. Using the setup utility I was able to just have it find the 40Gb drive and reconfigure it for use in an Intel chip machine. It wouldnt run at all when configured as an AMD chip machine. Replaced bad power supply in MAD-Athlon2 and will rebuild that as an 80Gb drive setup. Swapped out 2x256Mb RAM chips over to 1x512Mb RAM chip in MAD-Athlon2.

July 14, 2006 : DSL arrived today. Since comcast is so flaky for me, even after replacing the cable modem more than once, I now have DSL backup.

July 03, 2006 : Put to rest (powered off "for good") RHL5.2 which just wont stay running longer than 24 hours anymore. This was my DBI/DBD/Oracle server so its really missed. This impacts the DRPRods.com site and any of my own billing applications that are web based.

June 24, 2006 : Got "insert" storage server (Sony Vaio Laptop with 2 USB drives) to save the critical information on a usb key for restarts .

June 22, 2006 : Powered off 2 MTI arrays that had previously been used by Sparc8 - this went a long way to helping with the power problems in the server room. Unfortunately I have 2 classes of power problems - one which is self caused from running too much stuff on these circuits, and the other is general street power.

June 21, 2006 : Resolved issue with "insert" where it was unable to NFS export to Turbo.

April 20, 2006 : Powered down the Amanda/Arkeia backup server - a Compaq 2500. Its consuming too much power to run it, plus the 3 DLT drives, plust he 2 DDS drives.

April 14, 2006 : Replaced faulty cable modem - hopefully this will help.

January 1, 2006 - September 30, 2006 : Much work done yet to be updated - will backfill at some point. Short story is that :

• LOTS of comcast connectivity problems and significant infrastructure upgrades.
• Replaced Sparc8 fileserver with Veritas and two arrays - with a Sony Vaio running Insert live-on-cd and two usb drives. Sparc8 still around, but doesnt do the big file serving anymore.
• Replaced bad audiotron with Gateway Audiotron product.
• Replaced bad 802.11g WAP54G bridge with 802.11b WAP11 instead - not happy about it, but all I had. The 54g bridge was storming my wireless lan with crap and causing all kinds of issues.
• Retired Turbo from physical to virtual VMWare instance after boot drive died - that job totally sucked as I did lose some data. Thank God for google finding my site, and caching data - thats how I recovered a good portion of it actually.
• Powered off Compaq backup server for power reasons.
• Replaced two bad drives in Castor that died out - both IBM 18Gb drives - they suck.
• Built up three different garage laptops for Verona garage and still no luck getting one to do what I want.
• Replaced KimXPpro with Kim-evo ... which is a Compaq EVO workstation - very happy with that one.
• Installed new Tivo DVD-R/W and three new wireless accesspoints.
• Configired CRC-tivo similarly in Verona.
• many other updates - which will be detailed out later.

December 29, 2005 : Upgraded the firmware on the WRE54G and reconfigured it. Since this one was only repeating a WRT11 signal (B, not G), the WRE was giving a red light all the time and was never quite right. After the upgrade, its fine now. Still VERY tricky to get setup for my non default SSID, and WEP encryption though - those things are made to do defaults all the way. The document I wrote a while back on setting it up is still the only way I can do it.

December 09, 2005 : While trying to update iTunes to version 6 today, I ran into problems where the installer kept crashing with code 1628. Clearing my temp directory resolved that. Good document here about issues with MS INstaller and temp directory issues.

November 24, 2005 : Finally figured out how to get the Free ZoneAlarm product to stop asking for reboots after a botched upgrade. Answer to the issue was at this site. Basically, I had to uninstall, boot into safe mode, rename a bunch of files (vsconfig.xml, vsdata.dll, vsdata95.vxd, vsdatant.sys, vsmon.*, vsmonapi.dll, vsnetutils.dll, vspubapi.dll, zaplus.*, zapro.*, zllictbl.dat, zlparser.dll, zonealarm.exe, zoneband.dll) and reboot cleanly before attempting a reinstall. I also cleared my registry of any "zonealarm" objects too. That did the trick though.

November 22, 2005 : Had an application of Knoppix that kept giving me errors on the ethernet. It was on a Tohshiba Satellite laptop, model 2065SCDS. Everytime I tried to bring up the interface (PCMCIA) it would tell me the device was busy (actual error : "SIOCSIFFLAGS: Device or resource busy"). I tried a 3C575 3com card, and two Xircom cards - all the same. Good info found here. After checking "dmesg | more" I found that the card manager (cardmgr) wouldnt properly allocate the IRQ for the cards. There was a broken escape key on this laptop, so it was tough to get into the bios - but thats what I had to do. So after getting into the bios and finding that the PC card was on "Auto-Selected", I set it to "CardBus/16-bit" for the PCMCIA slot type, all was good. Other commands I used to help locate the error were "cardctl ident", "cardctl config" and "pump -k". For what its worth, I also used the following boot string to boot knoppix : "knoppix screen=800x600 fb800x600 nodhcp acpi=off". That got me the normal gui instead of the cheesy 640x480.

November 21, 2005 : While (finally) researching some spyware issues for a friend, I came across an excellent site for listing what processes are and what they are related to - with respect to Windows. Its called ProcessLibrary and its quite informative.

November 17, 2005 : Installed new wireless device to replace my dead WAP54A device. Now I have a WRT55AG that I got from www.hpshopping.com because they had 30-50 dollars cheapear than anywhere else. Im not using the router/firewall functions, so its really just an access point for me.

November 12, 2005 : Installed additional fan in tape array to help keep it from overheating and brought it back online. Also installed RedHat Linux tools for Compaq servers from HP site. After extracting the zip file, just run the install.sh script to launch a nice gui installer. Then run "cpuacqxe --enable-remote" to configure web access. Then I can just point my browser at my internal address for that server via https on port 2381 and Im good to go (after changing the password of course).

November 9, 2005 : Had to clean out BB histlogs directory which can grow to be enourmous if unchecked. In this installation of BB I dont do much with archive or availability reporting, so it was ok to remove the logs older than say 2 years. So a new cron job was setup for the first of the year each year to prune anything older than 2 years. I can store up to three, so that should give enough headroom.

November 7, 2005 : Built the new (virgin, never used) DL580 Quad PIII Xeon 700Mhz server as a new VMWare GSX 3.2 Server. Its running Windows 2003 Volume Server Edition, and VMWare GSX 3.2 release. Server has 2Gb RAM and 2 9.1 GB disks in the array. Right now its just an OS and VM Server, but the additional 5 disk array's will be added shortly. Also built a DL380 dual PIII 1Ghz with 1Gb RAM and 2 9.1 GB Disks - that is also a VMWare GSX 3.2 server with Windows 2003 Volume Server Edition. Both have disk arrays connected for storage.

November 5, 2005 : Finally got the webcam and started setting it up on what was going to be the media pc. Now its just sitting in the basement with this new webcam on it, watching the interior french drain and sump pump. The idea is that an alert will trip when the pump is on for more than 20 minutes, and alert me. Then I can connect in and see the status of where the water level is at, so I can guage if I have to get home right away or not. The view is in the private area of this site, so only privelaged members can see it, but if you have that access, there is a link at the bottom of that page.

November 3, 2005 : For the castor 18Gb problem - the drive was totally dead - recognized at startup, but bad blocks prevented reads. So the drive was removed. It contained my group share, my software depot, and some archives - they are all gone now. New disk, and will need to recover whatever I can from backup now. Also found my ntp servers this this host was using are gone - so time was way off - that was also fixed.

October 30, 2005 : My castor host is giving me tons of grief with the disks lately. Its got a 4Gb main drive, a 9Gb extra drive, and an 18Gb drive as well. Much of the info is on the 18, but thats the one that no longer cooperates. Make that the 5th failed disk in two months for me now - Im starting to get annoyed with these things ...

October 24, 2005 : In a sad twist of events, my Linksys Wireless Access point for my 802.11a network, took the big dirt-nap. It no longer powers on. I had it apart, and even though its an extremely simple design, I was unable to resurect it. Until I figure out what Im doing with my wireless (pre-N, another A, more G, etc), this condition will persist.

October 22, 2005 : Finally got fed up with FTP on the TurboLinux replacement server, and switched from wu-ftpd (my normal favorite) and went with ProFTPd to get the thing working. The rebuild of the TurboLinux server as a virtual machine, from a backup tape in December 2004, of a server that ran a non-standard chip (Cyrix 166) has been anything but simple and straightforward, but if you are viewing this, at least I can say it partially worked.

September 22, 2005 : Many updates missing from January 1, 2005 through today. The main webserver died catastrophically for pluzzi.com and its affiliates, and the only functioning restore tape was from December 27th of 2004. So all content is much older than it should be. Its been a tough few weeks. In the last three weeks, I have lost my cable modem 5 times, my server room monitor fatally, my webserver fatally (this is from a VM now), my Cisco 2924XL switch fatally, my parents PC fatally, my sisters pc (recoverable), and one storage array containing all my Tivo recordings. Needless to say, Im getting fed up with technology ....

July 18, 2005 : I have lost my records of the drbd install, but was able to pull them off the Google site since they were all cached already - one good reason to be indexed by Google. Here they are.

April 21, 2005 : While this is truly out of scope for this site, anyone looking for status on dad (a.k.a. Rich) can find it here.

December 27, 2004 : Finally also completed the addition of some new storage for my Sun/Veritas storage server project. Since I picked up Tivo, I find myself recording tons of stuff and needing a place to put it all, before burning it off to DVD. I had an Ultra 1 that I had been using for some dvd recordings, and all of my music, but I have over 60Gb worth of Tivo stuff on there already and have at least another 15 hours of Tivo recordings to get off the Tivo box. So I hooked up the other MTI array today. It was a bit of a struggle taking it from its old location, moving it, getting new power sources, firing it up, cabling it up, configuring the new luns, and everything else, but its finally done. The original music array was configured as a pure striped RAID-0 luns since I can reproduce it all. However, this set of luns were configured as RAID-5 for some level of redunancy. Good thing too - after the first use of the array, drive *0,3* turned out to be a problem. The 60Gb lun was rebuilt in approximately one hour.

December 26, 2004 : Finally completed the *Tape Drive Tower* project. After searching ebay and picking up a SCSI-II Plextor (8) CD tower some months back, and ripping out all the CD drives, I finally inserted all my tape drives into a tower format. I had previously had two DLT drives (one DLT3 and one DLT4 drive) in their own enclosures, which are pretty large I might add. I also had two DDS-3 drives (one Sony and one Archive/Python/HP) in a Sun Duo-pack enclosure. When I then got ahold of another DLT drive (a DLT15/30 model made by DEC - now Quantum), it was the final straw that broke the *stack-em-up* tape drive mountain. At this point I realized that one more power source and power cord, one more stack on the tape drive chain, one more external scsi cable, and one more headache would not do. So I took the CD library I had purchased for this reason some time ago and finally did the deed of creating the *tape drive tower*. Im not sure its a *supported* format, but it worked out quite good actually - now there are three DLT's and one DDS3 drive connected, and I can backup the enterprise on this little tower. Its much cleaner and stands the same height as the Compaq 2500 server it is connected to - so it looks much better too.

November 22, 2004 : Converted my VMWare box from IDE to SCSI for all virtual machine drives. This was a physical (not logical) change. The Seagate IDE drives were giving me issues for some reason, so they were removed. I added an Adaptec 2940U2W that I had in stock, plus three 9gb drive's. Two of those drives were spanned together using Win2k3's spanned drive option when formatting (as dynamic disks), since Win2k3 is the host operating system for this configuration. All the virtual machine folders and files were copied from the existing IDE drives to the new spanned drive, and upon completion the drive letters were reassigned to make everything line back up as it was before. ... one drawback I found out almost immediately, is that Knoppix and Kanotix (bootable Linux) didnt recognized the spanned volume - it would have been better for me to do one-volume-to-one-drive ... oh well, too late. The third drive was added as a standalone-basic drive instead.

Also while working on other stuff today, I decided to copy a DVD I had, and while doing so realized that I didnt have a color copier for the cover art on the DVD case. I stumbled across a good site where you can pick up cd and dvd covers at no cost. Image quality isnt perfect, but its pretty good. They are just jpg files, so you download and print - simple as that !

November 17, 2004 : Attempted configuration of the new Linksys WRE54g wireless range extender, but BOY did I run into issues with their setup utility. Its all documented if interested though.

June 1, 2004 : Configured new win2k3 host to run the VMWare GSX server. On it I installed Lindows 4.5 and SunJDS 1.0. I also did install Windows98 as well, so that I could test differing variants. I have enable sound configuration in all of the three partition (guest os's), but didnt document any of this stuff yet.

May 30, 2004 : The DRBD testing is completed. Using the newly build suse1 and suse2 hosts, I was able to build a replication device. It required configuring /etc/drbd.conf file and not much else. Further documention will eventually appear, but for now its just good to know this stuff works (here is a rough draft). All of what I needed, ok most, was built into the suse 9.0 distribution.

May 24, 2004 : Finally got good working SUSE 9.0 hosts running. Theree is a "suse1" and a "suse2" host. These will primarly be used to test the DRBD facility which is the basic equivalent (logically) as EMC's SRDF. More to follow. The first host is another Cyrix 166+ that was purchased for parts for "turbo". The second host is a P-Pro 200 Mhz that was forced to be a full SCSI server because I didnt have a working IDE cdrom.

March 9, 2004 : Ok, so the fan/cpu saga continues. I had to replace the fan on the old RedHat 5.2 oracle server yesterday. Seems that the heat spell over the weekend caught me off guard, and my server room got a bit "toasty". All seems back to normal now, and the drprods site is operational again.

March 6, 2004 : I have been having problems with my web servers - again. They were down from 7am to 11pm today/night. Turns out that this time, my "trusty" Cyrix 166 chip finally bought it. Apparently the torturous spells of late January took their toll, and with the recent spell of warm weather (and no A/C on), the server room got kind of hot. I have to assume that was all it took. When I brought the box down to take a look at it - the recently installed cpu fan had siezed, and the cpu was not working at all. When the problems in January occured, I became concerned enough to look around for spare cpu's and found some on ebay - thank God because I needed it this time. My 1995 manufactured Cyrix P166+ chip was put to rest today - and replaced with another just like it (albeit lower voltage version).

February 20, 2004 : I converted my IBM T21 laptop from a RedHat 8.0 (psyche) system to a SunJDS system. Now my primary daily driver workstation is a Sun Java Desktop host. It has been positive so far.

January 28, 2004 : I have been having problems with my web servers for the last week or so, and finally removed them from service for repair. Turns out my good old trusty Cyrix 166 chip still worked, but the cpu fan that came with the original chip .... way back in 1997 .... finally took a dirt nap. I replaced it, brought it back online, and all is well. I will have to monitor it closely for the next few days or so before putting back into production.

January 4, 2004 : .... I dont want to turn this into an 80's rockin music post list since I am supposed to be an IT guy, but .... I FINALLY found out who rocks the tunes I have been hearing on hardrockin80's that I didnt recognize. Mostly that station spins true 80's tunes, but what also makes that a great station is that occasionally, they will give bands "airplay" that may not have been previously heard before, and I think that is what I found with WARMACHINE. If you havent heard them before, and are also a hard rockin 80's fan, you gotta check them out - you wont be disappointed, I PROMISE ! If you like Iron Maiden, Dream Theatre, Fates Warning, Warrior Soul, Spread Eagle and the like, youre gonna love this one.

December 24, 2003 : While working (sadly) remotely for my day job, on Xmas eve, at my 2nd remote location, I finally reconfigured the 802.11b wireless to allow it to be the same configuration and WEP keys as my own 802.11b, and now I no longer need to change all the settings on my laptop each time. Now I can just turn on the laptop at that location, and have direct access to the Internet and local resources with no additional changes needed at the laptop - works great.

December 15, 2003 : OK, two things to report today. First, I finished the update of D.R.P. Rods with the new picture format - it looks and feels better now (at least in my opinion). Second, I just found out that the 525.com is back online again. This is good news because thats really a good source for new music of the nu-metal type. Between it and the 80's link below, I never use public FM radio anymore - ripped mp3s and Internet radio have changed it all for me.

I "ripped" the copy of Head Office from VCR as shown in yesterday's entry. I burned it to my dvd r/w and played it on my IBM T21 laptop, on my Sony DVD player, and on my linux laptop - all successfully. As a first burn, I have much to still discover, but it was pretty damn cool, I must say.

December 14, 2003 : While on multiple calls for work for my day job from 6am to 11:30pm ... continous ... I upgraded ImageMagick on my Turbo Linux box which runs the webserver for all my sites. Its cool because now I can just plop my digital camera pictures into directories, and run jigl to get these really nice looking photo album pages - very professional looking stuff. I will have to go retrofit all my D.R.P. Rods stuff now because it looks so good.

Also recently purchased one of the ADS Instant DVD 2.0 devices and created my first DVD of a movie that only comes on VHS - a pretty good feeling. Very easy setup - just usb to the PC, and RCA cables to the VCR. The rest is done with software, and in just 15 minutes of deciding what software to use and how, I was "ripping" the VHS copy to disk, and burning off to dvd with my own menu. I chose "Head Office" for my first rip.

December 5, 2003 : I figured I'd give a plug to the Hard Rockin' 80's Internet Radio station I have become such a fan of. I was a 525.com fan until they went classic rock on me. The Hard Rockin 80's is the best of 80's hair band heavy metal for all those other fans .... both of you. Oh yeah, and the got some pretty rockin Xmas music too.

November 6, 2003 : After suffering enough with the combination of Granite Canyon's Public DNS server's infrastructural issues, I cut my domain over to register.com for the pluzzi.com domain. All of my other domains are at register.com, but since pluzzi.com has existed for so long, I initially set it up thru the Network Solutions registrar. Unfortunately, NSI doesnt offer free DNS for the domain, so I had to find an alternate solution. It proved too difficult to bring it in house due to ISP issues, so I had to find a public server to provide this service. Then register.com came along and as part of the domain registration, they provide DNS for the address .... for free. It really made no sense to keep my pluzzi.com away from there, so I finally transferred it to register.com. Now my DNS never fails, and I get ALL of my email for a change. I cant even begin to explain how annoying it was for people to tell me that email to my address was rejected due to unknown domain name reasons ....

October 5, 2003 : Updated the visio diagram of the setup of pluzzi.com to now reflect the backup server and other changes including firewall changes.

August 11, 2003 : Went live today with a new firewall. What a pain in the ass getting it all ready and together, but I trust it will be much better than the old WinProxy server. Actually how could I complain - for my local network, I used WinProxy and ForTech Proxy+ for almost 7 years - since 1996 - without issue. Getting that many years out of the same hardware (Micron Vetix) and software is really better than can be expected. In addition, with this change, I am now able to see the real addresses of those hitting my webservers and what they ar esearching for. As a result, I now have proper statistics.

December 18, 2002 : Finally setup webmail today. Using SquirrelMail 1.2.0 to frontend the IMAP server running on my Solaris 8 for Intel server. The IMAP is also a new addition. It comes on the companion cd and was a snap to setup. I cant say enough good things about this configuration - its truly a great new combination. Complete details now available.

October 6, 2002 : Mail server problems today. There was a Brazilian DSL client (200.161.189.79) that was able to sneak past my relay rules for about 10 hours. So I shutdown all mail services (which would cause ANY incoming email to bounce ..... that sucked), and had to reconfigure the relay rules. Now its all working again, but I am still getting hit with a few thousand incoming spam attempts per hour. They all get rejected with the "relay denied" message, but it makes syslog grow kind of quickly. So that has to be rolled over twice daily now, instead of once a week. And all I wanted to do this morning was to watch the ESPN pregame show ..... better luck next week.

September 8, 2002 : Its been a while since I posted any updates here, but that is because I have been busy. I have been working with a few new devices lately. I purchase the 802.11b product from LinkSys about a year and a half ago (wap11/wac11) and have been very happy. But once I started to develop my own video-on-demand system, I wanted to use some wireless to get it down to my tv, and the 802.11b just couldnt cut it. So I got the 802.11a stuff now as well. I picked up the Linksys wpc54 and the base station for the new 5 Ghz products. They work fantastic. I am now able to play a move that was copied from a dvd that was copied to my storage array hanging of my sparc1. Then since the array has a samba share on it, my laptop can see and play it using its dvd player. I just convert that signal to tvout and play it on my big screen now. I built an html form to wrap around all my movie titles (actually a cgi script that just does an ls and parses the data), and now you can imagiine how many movies I have on demand at my fingertips all the time now. But this was also not enough for me. Since the dvd-on-demand was such a hit, I wanted the same for my cd-audio collection of 300+ cd's. So I bought the new Linksys wireless ethernet bridge (wet11) and an AudioTron from Turtle Beach. I configured these two devices to also see a new share coming off of my sparc1 for music now. This is one of the cooles things I have ever used. I feel like my own dj, because I just pick the songs I want, any song/any artist, and they play all day. I can even shuffle them. If I dont have the cd's ripped to mp3's yet, I can also get them from Napster/Kazaa/Morpheus, or any other similar idea. This is good stuff.

April 17, 2002 : In a recent Network World "Short Take", I saw that Microsoft has finally release some Baseline Security Analyzer Tools. I have yet to try them however, but its definately a positive sign.

March 30, 2002 : Updated my other "hobby" site for any interested parties - its www.drprods.com .

March 25, 2002 : Things have been pretty busy lately. I got ahold of a storage array that my company was throwing out, and I put it to good use. I found a Sun Ultra 1 on Ebay for about 30 bucks, and with some other parts I had laying around like an old Sun UniPack, I was able to build myself about 144Gb of storage available on the network. This got me to thinking that with a dvd ripping program, I can actually build myself a "video on demand" system, so that is the new project. I currently have the whole Kevin Smith collection available (Clerks, Mallrats, Chasing Amy, Dogma, Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, and Clerks Uncensored) available for viewing along with the one other classic, My Cousin Vinny. There are new images of my current layout, which grew to the point that it has now required breaking into two rooms. First is the full "server farm" view of the main systems I use, and the new office which is where I now work from. In the server view, you can look all the way to the right to see the Ultra1 with the MTI array, and in the office shot, you can even see the new SunRay1 which is a device I am beginning to REALLY like alot. The office is connected via one of those new 3Com NJ100 network jacks, and although its expensive, I like it quite a bit - nice and neat and tidy. The SunRay1 has great graphics for the price, and fantastic ability to do X stuff - it does however, require a SPARC server to serve it all these goodies, hence my "new" Ultra 1. In this office shot you can also see the fridge which is fully stocked with Corona and other tasty beverages which all good offices should have. Last but not least is the "recycled" cd tower which used to house all my audio cd's before I got the new motorized Brookstone model which I like so much more.

February 14, 2002 : Posted some information I found regarding TurboLinux Cluster Server 4.0 booting problems (with respect to NIS). I understand this problem applies to desktop, server and any other non cluster products as well, and if I read the stories right, its also for current 6.0 and later versions. The information was a lifesaver for me, so I share it for all.

February 10, 2002 : Just recovered from one hell-uv-a nameserver problem. I was unaware that my email was bouncing all over the place and that most of my mail was not being delivered properly. Two people had told me that they didnt recieve mail that I KNOW I had sent them, and when I added that with the fact that I didnt recieve mail that people told me that they had sent, I knew something was up. I had 75 queued messages on my server which usually has none queued. So now its fixed, and all should be working well again. Time will tell ......

February 09, 2002 : Microsoft has released a patch for some problems in the IE 5.5 and IE 6.0 browsers. The patches are available at TechNet and should be applied immediately. The information about another vulnerability fixed in these patches is also available at Network Magazine near the bottom of this page. In the same Feb 2002 issue of the magazine, on page 36, they also cover a problem where WinXP can give a BSOD witha top code of "STOP 0x000000ED UNMOUNTABLE _BOOT_VOLUME" if a standard IDE 40 wire 40 pin cable is used instead of a modern 80 wire 40 pin cable for UDMA controller drive/combinations. It also claims that the BUIOS must be set to force faster UDMA modes to make this work. Last but not least is a section that covers a DELL upgrade to XP problem where the error "A problem is preventing Windows from accurately checking the license for this computer. Error code: 0x80070002" may occur. The fix is covered at Microsoft'sknowlege base site. As a result, the security section of pluzzi.com was updated for these new issues.

February 05, 2002 : Updated most of the BigBrother extension scripts once again. See the table on the page for the latest versions and release dates. However, the big news there is the new extension script to allow HP-UX clients to properly use the disk space column - no more hassles with the two line output. And someday soon I will document how to run the bb clients in a DMZ thru encrypted ssh tunnels to get them to report to internal bb collectors.

January 21, 2002 : After getting sick and tired of the current crop of commercial virus programs currently available, I embarked on a search to find a good virus program which was free. I just cant see spending for a subscription service to McAfee or Norton. What I did find is a product that seems good so far. I have installed this so far on two Windows XP (a no-name and a Dell 4300s) along with my own NT4.0 workstation (sp5). The product I found is called AVG and is available on the Grisoft company website. So along with this antivirus program, the free version of the Zone Alarm personal firewall, and the VNC server for Windows, I am able to remotely monitor, teach, explain, control, and administer these new family workstations. This is considerably better than having to drive over to each house to explain what to do on some error message screens. The ZoneAlarm firewall is set up so that only I can remotely access these two workstations and nobody else, and to be honest it works pretty damn good. I am quite pleased so far.

January 20, 2002 : I recently began to setup two new Windows XP computers, and recalled of the "Universal Plug and Play" feature that causes Windows XP to be a target of malicious DOS attacks. To correct this situation, Steve Gibson has posted a great new tool (or should I say another great new tool since he does so many), that fixes this problem. Simply run this very small (22k) executable, and choose to disable the service altogether.

January 15, 2002 : Updated the visio diagram of the setup of pluzzi.com to now reflect the new mail and dns servers. In other and different news, I also wanted to post two new sites that came my way today. I have used similar sites, but these are recommended by more than one trustable source. They are windows network performance sites. First is DSL Reports and the other is the Speed Guide.

January 12, 2002 : Finally brought my mail services onto a dedicated Internet mail server which hosts my domain. Now I dont have to worry about who is in or not in business anymore. My mail now all goes to the pluzzi.com domain. The updates are available at the bottom of the the Solaris 8 server install page.

December 27, 2001 : Well, its been a long night while I updated my former @home IP address to be on the new comcast.net subnet. Since I had to change to a DHCP address, it meant that I could no longer use my proxy server as a dhcp server also. That meant moving the dhcp services from that server to another. With all the reservations I have in use on the dhcp configuration, this was looking like a daunting task .... that is until I found the answers already in a Microsoft KB article. All is now well again - I just need to update my DNS records for my new IP address so that everyone can find me again.

December 27, 2001 : In the December issue of Network Magazine, there was a pretty good article in the best practices area, of how to help prevent malicious code from executing on Windows machines. This has also been added to the security section under "locking down nt".

December 20, 2001 : I just found an interesting site which offers some utilities for different O/S's. I came across it while looking for a way to filter out some messages in NT4.0's event logs. Have a look. I also upgraded all my NT Big Brother clients from the 1.04b/e to the newest 1.08b in order to filter out the performance counter problems in the event logs. Works nicely now and parallels the Unix look and feel.

????, 2001 :For those of us with Windows NT 4.0 installed, Microsoft has finally released a version of patch/hotfix checker. It has always been a daunting nightmare if not impossible for some, (tedious and time consuming for even the best of us), to find out what patches/hotfixes we have, and what we need. Its not quite like HP-UX's patch analysis, or Sun Microsystems patch_check or patchdiag tools, but it will do. It is available at Microsoft's site. However, its still unbelievably manual. Well, to help with all that, Shavlik Technologies has come out with a tool which makes this a bit easier. It takes the results of Microsoft's tool, which is all command line based, and still required, and "html'izes" it. This allows the ability to click right to the patch/hotfix spot on the web and saves the need to launch the browser, go to the hotfix download site, and continually cut and paste the KB number. They have a pay version which has even better reporting, but the free one is well worth the effort of downloading, and should now be part of every NT admin's toolbox.

September 23, 2001 :Highly recommended site for downloading free windows utilities with a mind for security. Prevents you from downloading software which has hooks that send spyware info back to the vendors/creators. A fantastic depot for some very good software.

September 20, 2001 : Equally good is the free Nimda virus scanner, which is free from eEye Digital Security, and can scan 254 IP addresses in one shot. It can tell you if you are vulnerable or infected. It seems to perform an SMB lookup as guest with no password - if this check succeeds, it assumes you to be infected. When I ran Symantec's new free tool to remove the W32.Nimda.A@mm virus, it reported after much checking, that I was not infected, but the eEye tool says that I was, so I dont know who is right. Update : I did find that my "internal only" NT authentication server was still allowing guest access from my last test, so after disabling that guest account again, all hosts using this server for authentication now report as "not tested", which is good.

August 25, 2001 : Implemented my "virtual site" script for forwarding around different virtual sites which I host. However, it all comes into one IP address regardless of which of the 25 sites I host. This creates a tough situation for me, so I modified things with a custom cgi-script. If interested, email me for more information.

August 12, 2001 : As of today, this and all other maintained sites were moved from an NT4.0 server to a Turbo Linux server. I simply got tired of all the hassles with Microsoft and the viruses, bugs, problems, etc. The biggest problem so far with the move has been the change required for the search engine. Its now using HTDig instead of the IIS Index Server. Of course I have not yet dealt with all the virtual sites also involved - thier integration begins tomorrow.

June 03, 2001 : While reading the Gearhead columns in Network World, I came across some very interesting issues related to what our machines do without our knowlege - that is send information to sources regarding where we browse, and what we do with our machines. Well, there is a WIndows application that can both alert you to what is trying to do this on your machine without your knowledge, AND it can undo that for you. First, a list of what software is currently known to do this, and now the application itself - known as Ad Aware. I have at least one firewall up at all times, I consider myself to be safe in what I browse, I carefully open only trusted email attachments, I have virus scanning programs, I have both IE5 and Outlook set to maximum security, I allow only specific applications to be installed, and I still found 17 references to spyware on my local pc - so I highly recommend this to all. Another mentioned application is called Spy Blocker which is supposed to prevent any future apps from being able to spy on you without you knowing, but I have yet to try this one - I want to let Ad Aware sit for a few days, and thru a few reboots before I ad another application. (I have been having trouble with the domain for spyblocker lately, so its never really been tested properly.....)

February 25, 2001 : Installed updated g++/c++ compiler and libraries on my Turbo box so that I could get many of the newer tools like netcat, nmapfe, cheops, etc installed. Notes at the bottom of the turbo install notes - this didnt work at all on the Redhat box - gcc was simply too old, and missing libraries.

February 20, 2001 : Finally decided to do something about the BellAtlantic/Verizon voice mail indicator on my phone line as it relates to my dial out needs. I am only able to dial in to my job via modem since they dont yet support Internet VPN. But everytime I have a message on my voice mail, I had to delete it in order to dial out, otherwise I got a message indicating no dial tone. To get around it, in the windows control panel, then modems, add a custom "extra" setting to the dialup codes of "ats6=5" which tells the modem to check for a dialtone for up to 5 full seconds before aborting.

February 15, 2001 :Installed sysstat 3.3.5 from http://perso.wanadoo.fr/sebastien.godard/ on my RedHat 5.2 box. I had to use the source rpm because the binaries are always looking for libraries I dont have on this older release.

December 23, 2000 : Had to perform a full shutdown of all systems to re-integrate two bad UPS's back into the mix. Now I feel a bit safer, but what a pain ....

November 20, 2000 : Just came across some nice information on how to configure some of the tcp/ip parameters in Solaris (can be found on the networking section). Its mostly a full performance type article for Solaris, as it covers some of the kernel parameters as well. While on the networking topic, I also ran across a review in SCO World on Storm Firewall for Linux that claims this is the best firewall solution under $1000.00, and its only $99.95 ... unfortunately the article is not available on the web.

November 19, 2000 : Included some new information on how to serial cable/connect a console for Sun SPARC servers. This can be found on the Hardware section under the new cabling header, or in the bottom of the Solaris install pages. Other new solaris info on the Solaris Extra page.

November 19, 2000 : Decided to begin plotting and testing my own network. Found a great tool that I am sure almost everyone knows about by now, but I just learned of it. It is called Cheops and it is fantastic at scanning for devices on the network, and identifying the target O/S types.

November 18, 2000 : Included many pieces I have been lacking on this site for a while, regarding Solaris, and the ability to set/change Solaris network interface parameters while the system is up. I always had to keep referring to my email for this and finally decided to put it on the web.

November 14, 2000 : Just realized that with the removal of my Solaris 2.6 machine, I lost my printer gateway from a Unix standpoint. This involved setting up a new printer under Solaris 8 using Samba, to print thru my Ntserver which acts as my new print server. Details to follow.

November 07, 2000 : Updated MANY of the BigBrother extension scripts once again.

October 20, 2000 : Updated MANY of the BigBrother extension scripts.

October 11, 2000 : For TurboLinux, I was getting many errors/collisions on my Vortex driven 3c905b card, and for the first time, saw no help on deja.com. After much research, I found the site that I needed - http://www.scyld.com/diag/index.html which explained everything I needed. I picked up the vortex-diag.c, the mii-diag.c and the libmii.c modules, and compiled. Then I was able to force my 3c905b into 100Mbit-FullDuplex mode to match my switch. I havent seen a collision since.

October 06, 2000 : Network has grown so large, I had to split my backups into two "segments". Also finally installed Seagate/Veritas backup exec agents for aix and turboLinux.

September 28, 2000 : Installed TurboLinux Cluster version 4.0. Documentation now available.

September 23, 2000 : Installed StarOffice 5.2 on my Solaris 8. Read all about it. It is MUCH better than 5.1 was/is. Its truly a no-contest choice.

September 23, 2000 : Had to patch the Solaris 8 with new cluster patch and maintenance update 1. This box was crashing so frequently, it made windows looks stable !

September 01, 2000 : Installed a 4.3 Gig and an 18.2 Gig Ultra 2 SCSI drives into "castor" as it will now serve as my storage server for the network. I was outgrowing directory's and filesystems all over, and this makes the most sense. It will use samba and nfs to share the new filesystems with all other machines on the network. It was a logical choice since it comes with Veritas Volume Manager, and I am intimately familiar with it, so it also keeps me from getting rusty now.

August 26, 2000 : Installed Solaris 8 finally as well, and will be taking the Solaris 2.6 offline, in order to bring TurboLinux in house finally. ALso made many changes to the switch where I lock down the interface settings. rather than leave them all to the N-Way auto configuration. This was causing many performance related problems.

July 22, 2000 : Finally got AIX installed even though it is only version 4.1.4/5, it beats none, and sure beats having a RISC machine laying around doing nothing at all..... So I installed BigBrother version 1.4h2 on it, as it can handle the load much better than the old machine I had doing it along with Oracle, and is a much more stable O/S than was originally on - SCO OpenServer 5.0.4.

May 20, 2000 : I have recently located my "data center" from Verona to West Caldwell in New Jersey. Based on my ISP rules/regulations/processes, this required an IP address change. Lucky for me, I reference almost everything by FQDN now, and not IP, so updating the DNS records was pretty much all it took. There are some scripts that needed to be updated, but a little find/exec/sed took care of all that. Pictures coming soon .....

Let me apologize for the interruption of service that occured when my cable modem went down for about 2 weeks between end of January and beginning of February. Things are back up, and once again, looking good. However, I seem to have been having problems with my root and /usr/local filesystems on my BigBrother server. I have just perfomed a full fsck on these filesystems, and hope that my problems of crashing on the comet server are a thing of the past. Stay tuned .....

Please note that this site just went through, or I should say, as of October 5, 1999, IS going through a rewrite. So there are some links that show a "coming soon" type of image. These pages/links will be either converted from the older site format to the newer, or they will be sourced up and displayed new to the site, in the very near future, so stay tuned.

I have finally added a search form for all those who requested it (thanks for the input).

New and Intersting Information: