Comment Spam

I am getting annoyed by comment spam.



It had been a problem, then everything was working well again, now it
appears that the spambots are able to recognize our challenge and do
simple math.



I also know that the spam is not personal...but really. Spamming a post
about my wife's brother being shot by a sniper in Iraq, so not cool.

More things not to do...(or fun with at)

Adding another item of things not to do.

at now+30m
at> shutdown -g300 -i6 -y
at> CTRL-D

So I was testing some behavior to see if trying to allocate more swap than the available space would generate the message I was expecting (It does).

My next step was to use mkfile to eat up all but the smallest amount of space in /tmp that I could. Before doing that I set up the at job to try and recover if I ended up in a situation where all of my connections hung.

The result of the whole situation...

I was able to use almost all of my swap, the system was unresponsive for a minute or so while I was filling up /tmp.

While I continued to mess around seeing if normal tool use would also generate the message (It doesn't) I forgot to remove the at job.

So after making a note of my results and writing a message to that effect I remembered that I had an at job... unfortunately about 30 seconds too late to kill the running shutdown.

So much for my uptime.

Unfortunate Power Outage

Had a power outage at home this weekend. I wasn't there so I don't know
how long it was.

I do however know that it was long enough to run down my APC 2200.

The problem here is that the old flaky hardware that I have been using
for my main server appears to have lost it's powersupply.

sigh

topic:{technorati}[lame]

Putback Failures

Everytime I post with BlogEd I get a java class exception because of an
error making a cast. I didn't used to get that error.

I would post a screenshot but I closed it, I believe that BlogEd will
facilitate adding an image after the fact.

Vonage call lentgh limit?

So it was confirmed...sort of

Jun 01, 2005 01:11 PM 04:00:00

Jun 01, 2005 09:07 AM 04:00:00

May 30, 2005 01:09 PM 04:00:00

May 30, 2005 09:08 AM 04:00:00

My calls drop at 4 hours, still no idea where the limitation is and no real testing. If I can plan for another long call I will try moving the VOIP gateway outside the firewall but I can't currently think of a limit that would be imposed by the firewall that I wouldn't hit with other long running connections like music streaming. Maybe I need to try and start a Skype call and let it run for 4 hours and see if it drops.

DNS Woes

So the new site go live... Current DNS lookups depending on who you ask
return: www is a CNAME to CDN www is an A record to old site foo is a
CNAME to www foo is a CNAME to CDN Which in addition to the above can
return: foo is a CNAME for www is a CNAME to CDN is an A record for a CDN
server foo is a CNAME for www is an A record to the old site This shows
that the lookup for foo sometimes goes to a DNS server that has the old
info for foo. Foo previously being a CNAME for www results in a lookup for
www. The lookup for www sometimes goes to a server that has the new info
and sometimes the old. The real confusion being the belief that if the
final answer is the CDN there should be no intermediate CNAME. We just had
a spirited conversation that resulted in browsers being restarted, which
cleared up a number of interesting behavior patterns. Now to try and find
some lunch since I didn't get a good breakfast and it is almost 3pm
localtime.