May 21, 2008 in the wee hours
· Filed under Uncategorized, rant
a few light-to-medium thunders later last night, main power to my house and the neighborhood was cut around 7:40pm. The power was restored only after 11:40pm. I reached their IVR, when I called the power company at 8:10pm. My wife scoffed the to-the-minute accuracy when the power company projected to restore power by 10:27pm.
I suspected the projected restoration time of10:27pm was just a WAG or SWAG added onto the time when the repair team was dispatched. From our past experience (6+ years in the neighborhood), power usually gets restored a lot quicker than projected.
This time, it took a lot longer, a full four hours, to restore the power. The APC UPS for the blog server stood up two hours after the outage. However, its WAN connection served by Comcast went offline with the main power too. Our modern life was cut short by four hours tonight, Read the rest of this entry »
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February 22, 2008 in the wee hours
· Filed under VPS, information security, infosec, vmware, xen
Yesterday I worked on a Xen-based CentOS 5 VPS server. Out of curiosity how Xen stacks up against VMWare, I sniffed TCP traffic on the Xen virtual server, since I noticed VMWare guests can see the host’s traffic and vice versa. (More details can be found in my early post: Security Alert : bridged vmware guest can sniff host, guest peers, and vice versa)
I chose to sniff TCP/80 traffic this time, using tcpdump Read the rest of this entry »
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January 7, 2008 in the late evening
· Filed under information security, networking, vmware
On a CentOS 5/i386 server, I set up an Asterisk server recently in a VMWARE guest running CentOS 4.4/i386. The VMWare guest is set to use bridged networking and to obtain its TCP/IP settings from the same DHCP server used by the host server. I installed X-lite softphone from Counterpath on the host server, and configured it as a SIP extension to talk to another SIP extension on my wife’s Windows XP laptop.
Read the rest of this entry »
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January 7, 2008 in the late evening
· Filed under wordpress
I just did an in-place upgrade of this site to the latest wordpress 2.3.2 release.
It is neat the update reminder is embeded in admin dashboard.
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December 4, 2007 late at night
· Filed under Uncategorized
Like most people of my age, I graduated from RCS, to CVS, then to Subversion. Recently, a friend of mine implemented bazaar on production servers at work and urged me to check it out.
I did.
- It is written in python. some modules are written in C for speed.
- functions are pretty much complete, yet the control of publishing is more of a P2P model.
- Bazaar’s notion of personal branch is appealing. Any user can just start a branch and the repository database is stored in a directory named ‘.bzr’ right there, in the working directory. This sounds scary, for sys admin and release manager alike who are more used to centralized RCS (revion control system). Yet, such a concept is really similar to what you do in the old RCS, you make a directory named ‘RCS’, then start to check in (ci) and out (co) . If you don’t make a directory named RCS, the revision db file will coexisting with your working copy.
- I don’t like the fact the revision db is right there with the working directory.
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