Oh, yay. They’re going to give me a free copy of my credit report because they really appreciate my business. Okay, sounds good… and then here comes the pitch. Along with that, to show just how much I am appreciated as a customer, I’m being given the opportunity, if I accept the credit report, to find myself enrolled in a $9/mo program I don’t care about… if I accept the gift of appreciation.

Read the rest of “The Slimeballs at MBNA Just Called” »

I very much enjoyed Silent Hunter II, so I was very pleased when Silent Hunter III was recently released.

Read the rest of “Silent Hunter III” »

If you have ever been interested in hacking your TiVo, dealdatabase.com has an excellent forum that covers all kinds of hacks, in detail. Hack on!

It took my box a while, but it seems I finally hit a routing cache issue in 2.6.9. It seems the cache overflows.

Read the rest of “Routing Cache Fun with 2.6.9″ »

After much time, I have finally completed my guide to using Dirvish for snapshot backups. The guide covers what a snapshot is and how it’s created, then walks through obtaining, configuring, and using Dirvish features for creating snapshot backups nightly. In the future I may add rsh and rsyncd as transports. rsh is nice for speed when you really cannot handle the overhead of encryption, but that’s rarely a huge issue today. rsyncd as a transport is interesting, but it’s unencrypted, must be setup on each target system, and either OpenSSH or rsh still need to be configured for pre- and post-scripts to run on the target system.

If your key just expired on you, fear not. Gentoo apparently has a free pass. Fetch the key and burn away.

Read the rest of “Bored with cdrecord-ProDVD expiring?” »

I have looked at gnucash a few times over the years. I first evaluated it when I switched to Linux on my desktop back in 1999, but it wasn’t ready. Flipping through the excellent on-line documentation it ships with, it seems like it might finally be ready.

Read the rest of “gnucash time” »

It’s nearly time to publish my first major revision to my Dirvish snapshot backup guide, which includes a section on using some of the more advanced features. Only a few additional sections and the guide should be complete.

I finally parted with my GeForce4 440 MX SE, 420 MX PCI, and Sapphire 9600 SE. The latter was fanless and quite nice. It sold for 66% of what I paid for it a year later. I also parted with a 3Ware Escalade 7410, my AMI MegaRAID, an older Adaptec UW, and a SCA hotswap 18.2GB Seagate disk that was quite noisy. My hardware balance for the year might actually be negative, which is unusual indeed.

The box hung again last night. No messages anywhere. Last time it happened after some kind of cfq scheduler error. I thought it was a good time to compile 2.6.11 with Con Kolivas’ 2.6.11-ck2 patchset. CITI’s 2.6.11 patches for NFSv4 applied cleanly on top, which includes all Trond Myklebust’s NFS fixes and CITI’s NFSv4 implementation. At some point I might actually get around to setting up NFSv4 even.

Read the rest of “Upgraded Fileserver to 2.6.11-ck2 with CITI ALL-4″ »

I have nearly finished my guide for using Dirvish for snapshot style backups.

I finally left Blacksburg, VA around 8:40. It was overcast, but cleared up as I drove south. I managed to avoid getting lost the whole way back. The initial leg of the journey, back down I-81 and then I-77 through a moderately large group of mountains, was breathtaking. It had been quite dark by the time I arrived at I-77 on the way up, the previous week. Thereafter, the journey was rather dull. Being a Sunday and all, it was hard to find anything interesting to listen to on the radio. I listened to Car Talk for a while on NPR in the morning, which is rather entertaining. The rest of the day I spent hunting for interesting things to listen too, including some classical, Jazz, and modern Rock. I was back in Gainesville by 5:40.

Read the rest of “SANS Blacksburg, VA Day 8 / Departure” »

Our final day of class, we discussed various attacks and ways of correlating data to corroborate events. Class ended by 4:30. Some people stayed behind for a final, quick presentation on advanced data correlation and analysis.

Read the rest of “SANS Blacksburg, VA Day 7 / Lecture 6″ »

I seem to have discovered the Solitare crowd today. Several people plugging away, hardly working. I’d surf the Web instead, but that’s just me.

Read the rest of ” SANS Blacksburg, VA Day 6 / Lecture 5″ »

Attended a BOF on incident handling, which was discussed at length.

Read the rest of ” SANS Blacksburg, VA Day 5 / Lecture 4″ »