I used to get a couple hosts bounced a week… They’d try to brute-force username/password combos over ssh and DenyHosts would ban their IP after 5 failed logins.
For a couple days last week, I probably had about 50 in a 24-hour period, and then they went away as quickly as they started.
Today… Well, today is insane. As this site confirms, GMail limits a “conversation” to 61 conversations. So as this screenshot shows…
This falls into the category of things very few people would notice, but….
Microsoft provides time.windows.com, a public NTP server, operating in stratum 2.
I just came across NTPmonitor, a novel Windows app to monitor a handful of NTP servers. (Sadly, it doesn’t offer the option to sync to any of them, probably because most peoples’ computers let them configure it… Mine syncs to a domain controller which seems to want to give me the time, but not with too much accuracy.)
As with most full-featured NTP clients, it shows you what the remote timeserver reports as its reference clock. I’ve got my server in there, ttwagner.com, showing that it’s currently synced to clock.xmission.com. The “pool” server is pool.ntp.org; whichever of the many machines I connected to is synced to rubidium.broad.mit.edu. On the right we have time.nist.gov, synced to “ACTS,” a NIST protocol.
On the left is time.windows.com, the Microsoft NTP server. Its upstream timeserver?
clock3.redhat.com.
Screenshot attached, since I wouldn’t believe it without one.
I keep coming across things like this eBay listing. Sun Enterprise 4500, 12 SPARC processors (400 MHz, 4MB cache) and 12 GB of RAM. This one looks to have a couple Gigabit fiber NICs, too. (Although it’s fiber, so you’d need a pricier switch to use it on a “normal” copper home LAN.)
Even if you foolishly assume that a 400 MHz SPARC is no better than a 400 MHz Celeron, with 12 processors, this is still a net of 4.8 GHz. With a dozen processors, this is clearly best for something that’s very multi-threaded.
Of course, there’s one problem: these machines use SCSI disks. SCSI’s great and all, but it’s expensive, and you can be sure that, if this machine even comes with hard drives (none are listed?), they’re 9GB. So pick up one of these. What’s that you say? Oh, it’s ATA and won’t work with SCSI? No problem!
Nowhere that I see does Sun mention whether Solaris 10 / OpenSolaris will run on older hardware, but I assume it will. Some Linux distros also excel at running on platforms like SPARC.
Now the real question: how much electricity does this thing use?
It’s no secret that gzip is handy on UNIX systems for compressing files. But what I hadn’t really considered before is that you don’t have to create a huge file and then gzip it. You can simply pipe output through it and have it compressed on the fly.
For example:
[root@oxygen]# mysqldump --all-databases -p | gzip > 2008May10-alldbs.sql.gz
That backed up all the databases on this machine and compressed them. (It’s a 31MB file, but that’s nothing when you realize that one of my databases is about 90MB in size, and I have plenty others at 10-20MB each.)
I stopped at McDonald’s on my way home today, since I was starving and otherwise would have gotten on 128 at around 5:30 on a Friday, which is just asking for a headache. So I took a leisurely dinner. I’m fairly certain that, as long as I was there, not a single normal thing happened. I’m copying-and-pasting an e-mail I sent to Rusty while I was there, hence a little shorthand/terseness:
Lady sitting across from me, after dialing cell phone: “Hello, this is (name). You’ve called this number twice. Who is this?”
“Oh, I didn’t recognize your voice.”
“Okay.”Her little kid: “Who was that?”
“That was Daddy. He had someone on the other line.”*phone rings*
“Yeah, well, I didn’t recognize the number or your voice.”
I’m inferring that they’re divorced/separated, but I’d like to think that if I fathered a child with someone, she might at least recognize my voice when I called.
Some guy on crutches came in and I overheard him ask her to tell the manager that the handicapped door button doesn’t work. She yelled for
the manager, who came over and said, “Ya, the manager is working on it.”“She’s working on it, huh?”
“Yes.”
So then the guy at the French fry station went over and started pounding on the button?
And this surly lady sprawled out in one of the booths, with no food, yells to him, “Doesn’t work!”
I went back up to order dessert, and customers are just standing around by the register. So I asked the guy in front of me if he was waiting to order. He said yes, but made a, “No, I’m all set” motion, leaving me totally unsure?
So I finally approached the register, and the cashier was just *glaring* at Surly Lady? But kind of in jest, maybe? And after like 30 seconds of me awkwardly standing there and being ignored, she took my order. I got my ice cream and went to where the straws are, where I expected the spoons to be. But there were no utensils.
So I went back up to the counter, and asked. The cashier—who spoke perfect English—handed me a fork and knife.
And as I write this, Surly Lady is staring at me?
And then a cop with his lights on pulled into the parking lot, came in, used the restroom, and left with the blue lights still on?
I sent that, expecting an end to insanity. No such luck:
So I’m sitting here looking out the window, and some guy at the stop sign to leave the parking lot opens his door and… I think he threw up?
Surly Lady’s twin sister (!) just walked in and talked to Surly Lady. She’s talking VERY loudly about how she just spent $200 at the supermarket, and she pulled out a receipt as long as she is tall to prove her point?
The Web Developer toolbar, which is (1) the #1 hit on Google for “Web Developer,” and (2) now compatible with Firefox 3 beta, is totally awesome. You may recall that, in the past, if you had text after a bulleted list or similar on this page, the text would suddenly be mashed together. I never took the time to fully look into it, but it always irked me.
A quick “Outline… Outline Block Level Elements” drew colored boxes around each element of the page, which was exceptionally helpful. This shows the problem: posts start off inside a <p> tag, and adding a list or similar closes the <p> tag. This would have been an easy catch, except that the list looked fine. Upon a closer review, it’s because the lists specified the same line-spacing, thus looking right. While I most likely could have solved this by staring at the code for a long time, Web Developer made it much easier to spot: the first text is inside one box, followed by the list, but the other text is floating outside, leading to a quick, “Oh, I should look at how the <div> is set up” thought, which ended up being exactly the problem. (There’s a bit of excessive space now, but that’s caused by me using PHP to inject linebreaks.)
Web Developer also includes a lot of other useful tools, including the ability to edit the HTML of the page you’re viewing, view server headers, resize non-resizeable elements frames, show page comments, change GETs to POSTs and vice-versa, and much more. Whether you do design full-time, or if you just occasionally fix things, it’s worth having. And you can’t beat the fact that it’s free.
I’ve alluded before to using gzip compression on webserver. HTML is very compressible, so servers moving tremendous amounts of text/HTML would see a major reduction in bandwidth. (Images and such would not see much of a benefit, as they’re already compressed.)
As an example, I downloaded the main page of Wikipedia, retrieving only the HTML and none of the supporting elements (graphics, stylesheets, external JavaScript). It’s 53,190 bytes. (This, frankly, isn’t a lot.) After running it through “gzip -9” (strongest compression), it’s 13,512 bytes, just shy of a 75% reduction in size.
There are a few problems with gzip, though:
But I’ve come across something interesting… A Hardware gzip Compression Card, apparently capable of handling 3 Gbits/second. I can’t find it for sale anywhere, nor a price mentioned, but I think it would be interesting to set up a sort of squid proxy that would sit between clients and the back-end servers, seamlessly compressing outgoing content to save bandwidth.
One company’s job listing advertises the type of benefits its employees get… You know, health insurance, dental insurance, accidental death insurance…
Wait, what?
I suppose it’s actually a good thing, but I’m kind of left wondering what my odds of dying on the job there are?
A job posting just listed something like, “Experience using TCP/IP” as a requirement.
I’ve been using it since the fifth grade or so, when we networked two PCs together. I now use it on a daily basis. I’ve used it very extensively, including billions of ACKs, millions of SYNs and FINs, and even some RSTs and PSHs.
But I’m not just being a goofball. The job doesn’t seem to entail any low-level knowledge of TCP/IP. I think they’re just looking for someone who knows what it is. (I also have extensive experience using ICs, device drivers, and OS kernels.)
I don’t really want to work at this place.
Is it just me, or has the “news” ceased to be…. new? I don’t really watch news on TV much, simply because I can justify sitting in front of the computer as being semi-productive, but if I sit down in front of the TV, I’m guaranteed to be 0% productive. Plus, I prefer the news online where I can get it from multiple sources, sometimes even primary sources.
But here’s the news I’m seeing:
Did nothing happen in the past few days?