Time of death, 7:35 AM Eastern Time.

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My last two sets of cables arrived yesterday. Nothing quite like finally having a real KVM with decent cables. Now I can hop between machines with ease. I can even chain the Belkin KVM with another if I need another four ports. Very slick.

I don’t know what it is, but this happened last Spring too. For reasons unknown, any and all SSH sessions I open to the firewall end up dying when I try to do anything interactive, like run top or use tunnels. Last time this happened, I tried everything I could think of, but nothing seemed to help. I finally rebooted and that resolved everything. At the time, I was using a much earlier version of OpenSSH and a different, 2.4.x series kernel. Today I’m using the current version of OpenSSH and 2.6.6. The only thing I can think of is either a kernel bug or an OpenSSH bug, or both.

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I grew bored with the default Solaris package management tools.

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If you are upgrading to the new packages for OpenSSL 0.9.7d and OpenSSH 3.8.1p1, privilege separation is now compiled in by default and you must follow the steps outlined on SFW or OpenSSH will not start. It’s helpful to be aware of this before you proceed with the installation as opposed to afterwards.

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Posted to LARTC:

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I can’t think of a better place to test to mess with traffic shaping on router than tunneling HTTP and AIM over the Danted SOCKS proxy server whilest SSHing into the router itself. Fun. Digital Downtown is alive and well, it seems, even on my cheap Linksys WPC11v3.

Buyer beware. softwareandstuff.com, also known as surpluscomputers.com, bait and switched me on a recent 3Ware Escalade ATA RAID card purchase. They claimed to be selling a UDMA 100 3Ware card, which they did not identify further. However, the card they shipped me was a much older 5000 series Escalade that is not UDMA 100 capable. They were unwilling to resolve the situation sensibly and I am calling them out. SurplusComputers is genuinely unresponsive by both phone and email when there is a problem, and it took the threat of a chargeback before they were even willing to speak with me about my purchase. Obtaining an RMA requires filling out a lengthy MS Word document. I am now disputing the charge with my credit card company who also cannot get in contact with SoftwareAndStuff. What a sleazy company.

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I took some time to play with my Omni View SE today. While it is a little old, it’s still a solid device. It has multiple inputs on the rear, including all the inputs for the console, unlike cheaper KVMs that have some or all of the console inputs on the front. With a special cable, you can chain multiple Omni Views together. This unit requires male to female VGA cables and supports serial mice, for those that may still need that functionality. (Anyone?)

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I have been messing with IPP2P and CLASSIFY, both extensions for Netfilter and IPTables. I have a functional shaping configuration that works better than when I was using tcng in about a fiftieth of the time.

I happened upon a good deal for a DVD burner, so I finally stepped up and bought one. Now I can reduce my CD collection to a seventh of what it is now. Should make storage a lot easier. I also ordered another KVM switch.

I brought up the new firewall box last night and it’s performing its duties adequately. The firewall is now a Celeron 333MHz with 128MB of RAM, a 4GB 7200 RPM SCSI disk, and three 8139too chipset Fast Ethernet cards. One is internal, one is external, and eventually one will be for the wireless gateway so I can drop some firewall rules on it and DMZ the attached 802.11g access point. I still need to buy such a device, though.

I picked up a Linxcel four port electronic KVM switch from Ebay last week. It arrived today along with four sets of combined cables, DIN 6 male to male.

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