August 2009 Archives

One of my biggest pet peeves other than anonymous cowards is the know-it-all asshat. The other night I was trying to find out why some mail from me was being rejected and was picking over the various RBL check sites when I ran across a weird check for my IP. This check led me a post concerning one of the websites I host. Jonnyx has organized the space and science tracks for Dragon*Con for a long while and does so partly through madscientist.org.uk which is part of my web hosting stuff. All that aside this dumbshit decided he knows how the internet works and how I have my stuff setup and decided to play internet detective badmouthing my abilities to manage a server. Well a quick note to Jonnyx and I feel somewhat vindicated as his response to these clowns was quite sharp. Now to remedy this situation in the future I added a little code to my wilpig.com site tonight so it will be really evident should someone try to hit it by IP again. http://173.14.96.225/

Now to explain my setup. My reverse lookup for 173.14.96.225 is set to wilpig.org because at the time I didn't own wilpig.com AND the main reason is to make the email work as my primary mail server calls itself "WILPIG.ORG". Most mail servers properly setup now reject mail from any source that doesn't have a proper reverse lookup. Now then... if you hit the web server by IP you get wilpig.com not wilpig.org because I would like to make a little money from hosting and page design. So there you have it. My stuff isn't thrown together it is actually pretty well thought out. Previously I had it set to default to http://blueboy.wilpig.org but that really has no meaning to anyone but me.

This is pure win.

The button on one of my work shirts was falling off and my designated sewer is up in Chicago so I tried this on my own. Worked out okay even though I managed to break a needle.

How to sew a button

As I said the other day the physical build is complete and I started on getting the rest of the work for my new server done. I have installed three virtual machines on it now a linux(hosting), a windows(wilpig) and my netware(wilpig_srv) test server. The windows machine went okay and I think I have sound working on it now, the linux is there but I can't get the vmware tools to compile and then the netware has given me some trouble. I can't seem to keep tomcat from crashing. Most likely when I did the migration I just copied in a bad file or missed a file some place but I can't tell what it is. I will get back to it later cause tomcat is really unnecessary at this point. I work tonight at midnight again so I plan to do my work stuff then sit down and start the battery of tests it will take to get my linux box migrated over. I can't remember all the perl modules that have to be compiled but I know there are several.

In other news I met a nice girl and hope to see more of her. Also I went ahead and got a litter-robot for eve and ziggy and have had relative success with it thus far. Ziggy seems to have no trouble with it at all but eve has not been the most accommodating. She will use the box to pee but will not poo in there.... Yesterday I showed her the mess she made then put it in the box and showed it to her again and she looked interested at that point. Haven't had to clean up a mess today, yet. That should do for now.

So after much gnashing of teeth, yelling and everything else involved with this project the physical build is complete and as you can see there is a PCI card in there now.... There was no way around it ASUS has a failure somewhere and I am not gonna keep replacing the board to get the network card to run at proper speeds.

http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?showtopic=103581
http://vip.asus.com/forum/view.aspx?SLanguage=en-us&id=20090508002440534&board_id=1&model=M4N78%20Pro&page=1&count=22

The above two links describe the problem I was / am still having so if you know the answer please contact me! From what I have read and seen the only answer is to replace the board.

Final parts list:
3x Seagate SV35.5 Series ST31000525SV 1TB (Raid 5 Virtual Machine Storage)
2x Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 200GB (Raid 1 OS)
HP dvd840i DVD Writer
ASUS M4N78 PRO aka the bane of my existence
3Com PCI 3c905C (if you don't know what this is... you have no business looking up parts)
AMD Athlonx2 7750 Black
4x OCZ OCZ2P8004GK 8GB total RAM
Enermax EES620AWT 620W
Logisys CS888UVBL BLUE

Okay and for the geeky details portion.
OS: Ubuntu 9.10 + Vmware Server 2.0.1
Software raid all around the primary OS is Raid1 between the two 200GB drives. The VMWare images are stored on the TB drives in a RAID5 setup with ext4 and lvm. It's purdy. I tried every flavor of *nix before I had to settle for Ubuntu as well. The original idea was RHEL because of its long life cycle and I would get updates free through work. Unfortunately RHEL, Fedora, SUSE all had problems seeing the drive controller correctly. For what it is worth I had trouble even getting this board to run windows correctly. Last to any of you Ubuntu people out there when someone is installing and selects a partition on a disk to be bootable it isn't necessarily always going to be HD0!!!! FIX YOUR INSTALLER! That little burp had me for a while and it took much hair loss to get it correct. I ended up having to disconnect all the sata devices with the exception of the DVD drive to get it to load the bootloader onto what I wanted because for whatever reason it decided that sata came before pata and kept loading the bootloader onto my raid5 set.... hate you guys, really.