Category: General

SoCal People!

Posted on by DizkoDan

If you can see this message, you are one of the few speshul people 😉 In case you didn’t know, & I will be in SoCal for a week next month. We will be arriving on 5/14, and leaving on 5/21. So far the plan looks like we will drive straight down to San Diego and stay there until Sunday evening, then head back to LA. We will stay in LA for a few days, then head up to Santa Maria for a couple. However, we want to see you all! So we are giving you the chance to help us set our itinerary between Sunday night (5/16) & Thursday Night (5/20). When would people like to meet up, and where? While in LA, We’ll be staying in Burbank, and I’ll have a car for the entire week, so getting around shouldn’t be an issue.

So speak up peepz! We are not picky about what we do, just want to hang out with friends we don’t see enough, and get some good relaxation in. Steph has never ben to LA either, so she’d probably be into doing some touristy stuff if anyone is interested in that. Post your thoughts here, I’m pretty sure the few of you in this group are all still hangin out together on a fairly regular basis anyway, so it would be awesome if we could all get together!

-Dan

All telcos are ass fuckz!

Posted on by DizkoDan

So last night was brutal. Sales got a bug up their asses cuz it was end of the month and they hadn’t sold shit all month, so they made up for it in 12 hours. I had 30 servers waiting for me when I got to work last night. By the time I left at almost 10 this morning, there were only 4 left. My team kickz ass!

So I came home, ate a bagel, and started working on some shit before I go to bed, and all of the sudden the interweb went *p00f*! I knew immediately that the cock bitez at BTN shut off my T1 early! Fuckerz! I was not fully prepared to switch over to the new network yet, so I had to make some quick changes to the new firewall, and got the important machines back online. I still have a shitload of rulez to add to the firewall, but I’m too fuckin tired, and there is really nothing important here anymore except my monitoring machine, a name server (which I now have a secondary offsite), and the mail server.

So now I’m gonna crash.

Unplugged

Posted on by DizkoDan

Well the inevitable happened. We lost power at around 11:00pm EST. My UPS’ at home lasted about 45 minutes, then went down with all the servers. The majority of VA is without power right now, and it’s not expected to be back anytime soon. We’ve been running on generators here since about 11:00pm. My datacenter engineer says that under our current load, we should be able to go at least a week without refueling our generators. That’s pretty fuckin impressive if you ask me. Now if I could figure out a way to run a long ass extension cord the couple of miles to my house 😉 Wanna see just how bad it is? Check out these links.

http://www.dom.com/news/outage_map.jsp
http://www.dom.com/news/outage_sos.jsp

Posted on by DizkoDan

It’s been a good weekend. Friday night before I went to work, I decided to get a new server for stvlive & the rest of our personal sites. I had been in contact with someone who wanted to get rid of his server he was leasing at a company called cyberwurx. They have an excellent reputation, and the price he got on the server was fantastic. So I accepted the offer at about 7:30pm. He wrote me back, and told me he passed my info on to cyberwurx to get the ball rolling.

I expected not to hear from them until Monday. I got an email from them about 10 minutes later telling me that they would go ahead and rekick the server for me right away, and gave me the info I needed to register with them. So I sign up, get all my login info for their support stuff, and go shower. When I came back down, there was an email saying my server was online, and giving me my IP’s and passwords. So I got started configuring stuff Friday night at work.

Saturday afternoon we woke up, and went out to dinner with Kevin & his wife. It’s always nice to go out with friends. We don’t get to enough After dinner we came back, and I got back to work on the new server. By about 3:00am I had everything up and running on the server, and decided to do a final rsync of the data, and switch the DNS over. Everything works great, except a couple of minor things I need to work out.

Sunday afternoon we woke up, and drove to Columbia to have dinner with Steph’s family. It’s been a few months since we all went out, so it was really nice to see them. Food was good too! Been working on some fine tuning of things since we got back (minus a dunkin donuts run at about 3:00am). Now I’m doin some updates on my desktop, and goin to bed.

Pork chop sandwiches!

Posted on by DizkoDan

So I’m still at work fighting a stubborn hozed harddrive. I’m hella tired, and a bit delerious. These movies have been floating around for some time, but I just cant stop watching this one. The audio is not really work safe, so make sure you put the headphones on if you that sort of thing gets you in trouble. The video is safe.

When the grass is cut the snakes will show

Posted on by DizkoDan

Note to self.. Mail server is cursed.

Just a few weeks ago, I had to completely rebuild my mail server due to a hozed HD. Things were running smooth, and I had managed to get all kinds of shit working that I had been meaning to for a while. Fast forward to Monday night.

Got to work at about 10:30pm and tried to ssh into my mail server. Immediately it returned a connection terminated. So I had Steph go look at the console, and sure enough, it had a kernel panic. She rebooted it, and it did it again. Rebooted again, seemed to be okay. I start investigating the panics, and come to the conclusion that it’s probably bad RAM or the swap partition iz fux0red. As I’m looking around, I get some dma errors (a sign of a dying HD). So when I got home in the morning, I brought the server down to test the RAM. All tested fine. The HD however, told me to go take a flying fuck!

So I spent several hours attempting to clone the drive, but it was too far gone, and kept crashing on me. Finally at about 5:00pm I gave up and went to sleep. I woke up at about 3:00am and started a clean install. Luckily I was able to mount the old HD, and copy the maildir’s, and important configs, so everything seems to be in order now.

Covad got dispatched out again today. Even after I tried to explain to the dispatcher that my DSL was up, just not at the right speed. So when the d00d showed up this morning, I was like go away, and fix my shit at the DSLAM! With any luck this will be closed out today.

Aside from that, I’m working on a migration process to move serve-you.net to a new datacenter. Meanwhile Steph seems to be dying from ebola or some shit.

I should be asleep

Posted on by DizkoDan

I’m on hour 24 of my day. I had no intentions of staying up this long, but shit keeps coming up.


I woke up yesterday at about 4:00pm, showered and brought my car the the dealer for an oil change & inspection. To my surprise, it failed state inspection, cuz my tires are starting to show thread all around. So I came home, and ordered 4 new ones from tirerack.com, and had them shipped to the dealer. They should be there by tomorrow or Friday, so I’ll drop my car off and have them mount em n shit, then reinspect it.

After that, we went to get a nice meal at pf changs. It always amazes me how cheap that place is. After dinner, I decided that it was time to rebuild my computer. It has been freezing up in X way too frequently, and it has been doing this through several versions of XFree & nvidia drivers, so a clean install had to be done.

I decided that I’m gonna take a journey into the darkside (ie, Debian). As most people who know me are aware, I HATE Debian for several reasons. Mainly the asshole zealots. But the development branches piss me off, amongst other things. But apt is great, and the stability of a Debian machine is hard to beat.

I recently checked out a relatively new Debian based distro called Libranet, and it was quite slick. One of the only distros out there that I could see using daily. So I figured what the hell,… if I don’t like it, I can wipe it and do a clean install of whatever te fuck else I want anyway. Install was smooth, after updataing just about every package on the system, I now have a nice bloody desktop.

While doing this, I had to take Stephs car to get it’s inspection and emissions done. I got there at like 11:30, and the dude was already gone for lunch till 1:00. So I went to BK and got a vegiburger, then picked up a magazine and sat in the car and read for an hour. Finally at 1:45 I was on my way home.

After that I came back here to work on my computer again, and the doorbell rings. To my surprise, it’s Verizon (completely unannounced). The guy sits out back on the phone with Covad for a while and says, our loop is fine, it’s Covad’s problem. I’m like WTF? So I say whatever, and let him go on his way. I came up here, and checked the router. Sure enough it’s trying to link. I powercycle it, and it links up! However, it’s not performing quite as fast as it should be. Since I haven’t heard back from Covad yet, I can only assume that they are looking into it. So with any luck this might actually fucking work!