I've been dealing with a lot of Cisco routers lately. We've put in several 2811's and a 2851 recently, and I've had to reconfigure some older 1700 series routers. I'm not cisco certified or anything, but I'm fairly comfortable with IOS just because I've been thrown in to make changes on routers so many times. I've heard rumors about web interfaces or gui tools for configuring IOS, but I've never seen them. The CLI is pretty easy to use once you get acquainted with it, and I like it pretty well. I've used way too many GUI's that just got in the way and made things difficult, or outright removed functionality.

The bad thing about Cisco is of course the cost. For the price of the 2851 and WIC cards for 6 T1's you could buy a small car, new. Alas we've tried to look into other vendors, like Juniper, but can't seem to get anyone to return our calls. Oh well; we'll stay with Cisco for now.

Posted by ra in computerish at 19:14 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

IP aliases are incredibly useful for testing and troubleshooting (and virtual hosting too). The other day I needed to add some IP aliases on a FreeBSD machine. I administer FreeBSD servers at work but I am much more familiar with Linux, so I had to look up the syntax.

I found out how to add an alias:
ifconfig rl0 alias 10.0.0.5 netmask 255.255.255.0
...and remove an alias:
ifconfig rl0 -alias 10.0.0.5

This contrasts with the Linux ifconfig syntax for dealing with aliases:
ifconfig eth0:0 10.0.0.5 netmask 255.255.255.0
ifconfig eth0:0 down

Or what I'm usually using-- iproute2 on Linux: (I have really come to love iproute2)
ip addr eth0 add 10.0.0.5/24
ip addr eth0 del 10.0.0.5/24

* unrelated rant #1-- Why the hell are FreeBSD ethernet devices named according to the driver that supports the card? This annoys me, and I don't see the point. I never know what the device might be called unless I happened to have just installed the nic, which is usually not the case.

** unrelated rant #2-- Why the hell is windows so lacking when it comes to ip aliasing? AFAIK, you can configure IP aliases only if the primary address is static. If it is dynamic then you are out of luck.

Posted by ra in computerish at 21:27 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

.... or do I no longer have viagra in my email? Aha, it is the lack of spam!

Drug spam, stock spam, sex spam; you name it, I don't have it. Another five days on the new filters saw the successful identification of ALL incoming spam to my account, and with zero false positives too. That puts my 10-day accuracy rate at about 99.8%. I think I can live with that.

Posted by ra in computerish at 00:34 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Like anyone running an email server these days, spam has been a major problem for me over the past year. Late last year, the problem only got worse when the bastards behind all that pump-and-dump stock spam really opened their taps. Since then I had been struggling to keep the inboxes on my server from being overwhelmed with crap. Well, I've recently made significant improvements, and although it may be a little early still to proclaim outright victory, I am going to take credit for a major blow to the shit-spewers; in the context of my server, anyway.

I've relied on SpamAssassin for spam filtering ever since I first felt a need to filter spam. Over the years there has been a clear, yet unsurprising, pattern to its effectiveness. After a new release, SA is deadly effective at spam filtering, but after some time (during which the spammers presumably test their spam against the latest release and tweak it to evade the default ruleset) it begins to miss more and more spam. I have gotten used to adding my own rules and tweaking the SA scores to help prop it up a bit between releases, but that has yielded mixed results. These days there is sa-update, which can help avoid to erosion of effectiveness, but that isn't what really turned the tide for me.

Posted by ra in computerish at 02:55 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

I recently decided to re-rip our CD collection. My existing ogg files only represented less than half the albums we own, and I had ripped them at quality level 5 (~160 kb/s). I wanted to get the entire collection ripped, and I figured I would go for higher quality too, what with the low cost of data storage these days.

It occurred to me that there was no longer any reason to be making lossy rips at all. So, I used a gift certificate I got for christmas and picked up a 250 GB SATA drive and started ripping lossless FLAC files from our CD's. Choosing to make FLAC files was easy. The alternatives were WMA-lossless or ALAC-- both proprietary. FLAC is free, well supported (especially under Linux) and makes great sounding rips which require little work to decode.

It took several weeks of ripping to get through all 200 CD's we own. The FLAC collection takes up just over 60 GB of disk space. The nice thing about having lossless files is that I can put together a compilation and burn it back to CD without having to feel silly about making a disc that is lower quality than the original. I can also resample the FLAC files to make OGG's or MP3's or anything else for transfer to an iPod, etc. I intend to write a script or app to do that on the fly, and keep the transfer process easy.

Anyway, for now I just sicked amarok on our new flac files, and set it to random and sat back and relaxed. It's been really cool listening to some of our older CD's that had been somewhat forgotten, and they all sound great.

Posted by ra in computerish at 01:57 | Comments (2) | Trackbacks (0)

I've concluded that my favorite smtp server is postfix. I recently switched from courier-mta to postfix on my main server, and I couldn't be happier with the switch. Courier isn't actually all that bad, but it is definitely... quirky. I remember the first time I set it up it too me over a week to tweak all the 'bofh' options (i'm not making that up) and get mail flowing properly in and out. Postfix, on the other hand, is as easy as pie to configure. I had already been using postfix on my backup mail servers, so creating a config file for my main server took no longer than 15 minutes.

Posted by ra in computerish at 23:19 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)