I have installed quite a few apps on my Motorola Droid since I got it, one of them being Nagroid.  I installed it and have been using it, with a few annoyances:

- The phone vibrates/rings/alerts me whenever there is a warning.  This is fine, but it’d be nice if it was more configurable.

- My bigger issue with it is that it alerts me to SOFT alarms.  In the Nagios world, alarms/tests in a soft state are ones that have not failed enough consecutive tests to actually register as a service or host error.  For example, Nagroid will alert me when HTTP fails one test on http://jester.u13.net, even though Nagios itself won’t send a notification e-mail.  Nagios is configured to only send alerts if it enters a HARD state, which happens after 3 consecutive test failures.  I’d greatly like to be able to turn off notification of SOFT states on Nagroid, if not only for the annoyance factor but also to save battery life (with it vibrating every 10 minutes over nothing).

I put in an report into the Google Code Issue tracker for Nagroid, feel free to add a comment, star it or otherwise join in the discussion if you have anything to add: http://code.google.com/p/nagroid/issues/detail?id=10

Tonight I started getting rapidfire spam messages with subjects like: SU:  Blitzpenny.com : Online Penny

It took me a few minutes to realize that SU is StumbleUpon.  The bodies look like:

Hi,

Check out this site I found using StumbleUpon!

Blitzpenny.com : Online Penny Auction Site UK, US,
Canada

http://www.stumbleupon.com/redirect.php?t=i&u=37633890&d=http%3A%2F%2Fblitzpenny.com%2F&l=2&c=gl9xttrq3w6dp5jp

blitzpenny.com

http://www.stumbleupon.com/redirect.php?t=i&u=37633890&d=http%3A%2F%2Fblitzpenny.com%2F&l=2&c=gl9xttrq3w6dp5jp

- Atul

The first thing I did was check the headers to see what was going on. Sure enough, these are coming from SU directly, they’re not messages being spoofed by someone else. I compared these headers to a legit e-mail from SU I had received long ago:

Received: from smtp.stumbleupon.com (smtp.stumbleupon.com [74.201.117.226])
by mx.google.com with SMTP id 4si9603790iwn.92.2010.02.25.22.35.28;
Thu, 25 Feb 2010 22:35:29 -0800 (PST)
Received-SPF: pass (google.com: domain of service@stumbleupon.com designates 74.201.117.226 as permitted sender) client-ip=74.201.117.226;
Authentication-Results: mx.google.com; spf=pass (google.com: domain of service@stumbleupon.com designates 74.201.117.226 as permitted sender) smtp.mail=service@stumbleupon.com; dkim=neutral (body hash did not verify) header.i=@stumbleupon.com
Received: from www.stumbleupon.com (sv4web58-be [10.10.20.58])
by smtp.stumbleupon.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id 97A886EA3
for <flieslikeabrick@gmail.com>; Thu, 25 Feb 2010 22:35:28 -0800 (PST)
DKIM-Signature: v=1; a=rsa-sha256; c=simple/simple; d=stumbleupon.com;
s=mail; t=1267166128;
bh=UcKOhRQW13r8mzvxMcJzMfAeQMJGESQQlpWqc/5bGVI=;
h=Date:To:From:Subject:Message-ID:Sender:MIME-Version:Content-Type;
b=n/lFHbejnGb4fl9tqEg0wH9RMhQT3zYmLdZOomRTnNvTHHytHlK5QjrMjdbuetO2I
oUNgKtQz49A+3CeqznkgkK6cXuemD7rUeewTJ1bQVmQ2xnoiuHTcWX+QJKaRWdhBYd
SrTW2vrr0nudcyPIhc9iL+4m2rWL6N8WstwVx7uk=
Date: Thu, 25 Feb 2010 22:35:28 -0800
To: flieslikeabrick@gmail.com
From: atul143 <noreply@stumbleupon.com>
Subject: SU:   |Madbid |Australia, spain
Message-ID: <7800d6e975a78aa6849b13dbe2115cb8@www.stumbleupon.com>
X-Priority: 3
X-Mailer: PHPMailer [version 1.73]
Sender: service@stumbleupon.com
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: multipart/alternative;
boundary=”b1_7800d6e975a78aa6849b13dbe2115cb8″

These are the same as the legit message, down to the PHPMailer bits.  Great, I wonder how long I’m going to get these (Got 10 in the past hour, which went through to my inbox).

If you run any Soldat servers off of my server (Outcry), know anyone who does or see anyone else who refers to Soldat servers and other things on Outcry by the IP 67.106.77.193, please make sure that it is updated appropriately with the name ‘g1.u13.net’ or ‘outcry.puttynuts.com’

This IP will stop working very shortly.  Please use the new hostname.  If you must use an IP you can use 204.80.93.33 but it would be a much better practice to use the name so that this issue does not occur again.

So a lot has happened over the past few months (in no particular order):

• MM’s server shit the bed today
• I got a Motorola Droid (and have rooted it, installed openvpn and got IPv6 to it via 6in4 )
• I got two fantastic cats
• I rebuilt my file server
• I moved to Syracuse for a network engineering/operations job with Time Warner Cable

Over the next few days/weeks I’m going to do what I can to write about each of these and then some more.  Hopefully there’s someone out there still reading this, maybe following along on RSS and will see me come back to life… again

For the past 2 years or so, I’ve been very religious about composting.  I’ve noticed more and more benefits from this over time.

I started doing it because I wanted to be able to use the rich soil produced by composting for future gardening, indoor plants, or for fertilizing new grass that is being planted (or old grass that needs some more nutrients).  The nutrients from kitchen waste generates rich soil and plants/etc benefit greatly from having these nutrients (for this same reason, you should use lawn mowers without bags or other mechanisms for catching grass clippings.  Letting these grass clippings stay on the lawn keeps those nutrients in place for the grass to use.  Carting them off to your woods or putting them out for waste collection will ultimately remove nutrients from your lawn and you’ll be required to fertilize or otherwise bring these nutrients back to your lawn.  Anyway…).

The next best reason to do it is your garbage will never smell again.  You can compost any food waste as well as extremely dirty paper products (think paper towels used to clean up food or other kitchen messes).  Don’t compost any paper towels or anything used to clean up things like motor oil, gasoline or other things that shouldn’t end up outside.

With recycling, we take our garbage out every 2-3 weeks.  If we didn’t compost, the garbage would have to be taken out due to the smell at least weekly.  Putting a half-empty garbage bag out for pickup results in the plastic from the garbage bag ending up in the landfill without maximizing the utility of it first.  Ideally we’d all be using biodegradable garbage bags instead of plastic (they are available, in biodegradable plastics and paper forms), as well as buying products in bulk (no packaging) or in large quantities that only use biodegradable packaging.  Unfortunately, our garbage we generate now consists almost solely of plastic packaging from foods and other things that are not recyclable.

In short, separating out your food waste and unrecyclable paper products to compost them outside makes your garbage smell less, keeps nutrients in your soil for later use, and as a result of taking the garbage out less it keeps some unnecessary plastic out of landfills.  It feels really great to generate so little garbage as a result of recycling (we recycle plastics 1,2,3 and 5 here, as well as all cardboard and plastic products, and scrap metal) and composting.

http://news.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/04/15/1930234

If you have Road Runner or any other Time Warner service, please take a bit of time to call up any of their support numbers, get a real person on the phone, and tell them that if they bring those caps to your area, you will be dropping their service for a competitor like Verizon FiOS/DSL.

I have done this.  I have Road Runner Internet service at my apartment in Troy, and when I heard that they wanted to roll out this new capping plan to a wider area, I called up and asked them if they were planning on bringing it to my area.  This was a few months ago, but they said “no, we have no plans of that right now.”  With these recent mentions of them wanting to roll it out more, I think I’m going to call again and check, and this time more strongly let them know that if they bring it here, I will instantly be giving my business to Verizon for FiOS, or even going for their slower DSL service (if FiOS isn’t here yet).  I really urge everyone to do the same.

Time Warner and other cable companies have always advertised their Cable Broadband services as “always-on, unmetered/unlimited access” yet now want to introduce these obscene caps because apparently more people actually wanted to use the unlimited access they were duped into buying.  Think about all of the people who have been paying this flat rate for their service for years, and maybe watch a lot of youtube and other streaming video, maybe even for-pay subscription services.  Would you want to pay for something like a MLB.com subscription and then have to pay your ISP even more/month just because you want to enjoy the subscriptions you’re paying for?  I thought not.

I don’t understand why they’re doing this, it would almost certainly hurt them in the long run.  With FiOS making major advances in the markets that Time Warner is in (home phone, cable TV and Internet access), this is pretty much giving Verizon the business on a silver platter.  To get this new “unlimited, no really this time” access from TW, they are going to want $150/month.  That’s over three times what I’m paying now.  Their caps are going to start really low, I think the article above mentions the details ($20 or so/month for 10GB.  seriously).

Even if you’re not a TW/RR customer (or any of their affiliate ISPs) and you think this is a bad idea, find a sales number for a local TW-affiliated ISP.  Ask them about this, and tell them that you will not ever get their home broadband service as long as this is their plan.  US broadband access is already far behind that of western Europe and east Asia, and this is another few steps back.  Verizon is actually finally bringing real competition to the US broadband market by marching into territories firmly held by RR, Optimum Online (Cablevision), Comcast, RCN and others, and my proverbial hat goes off to them for doing so.  These government granted monopolies are what have kept the state of US broadband so far behind, and this latest move by TW is merely the status quo.

So yes, I’m still alive and almost every day I think about things I really want to post about.  I know I say this every 6 months or so, but I’m really going to try writing more again!

Google has some features built into their search (and maybe other services) to prevent web crawlers/scripts/spiders from abusing their database.  Typically, most people don’t run into this unless they’re up to something quasi-evil or worse, but I’ve hit it once or two before.  I’m pretty sure I just found a bug, a sure-fire way to trip this safety they have and get a page saying

We’re sorry…

… but your query looks similar to automated requests from a computer virus or spyware application. To protect our users, we can’t process your request right now.

We’ll restore your access as quickly as possible, so try again soon. In the meantime, if you suspect that your computer or network has been infected, you might want to run a virus checker or spyware remover to make sure that your systems are free of viruses and other spurious software.

If you’re continually receiving this error, you may be able to resolve the problem by deleting your Google cookie and revisiting Google. For browser-specific instructions, please consult your browser’s online support center.

If your entire network is affected, more information is available in the Google Web Search Help Center.

We apologize for the inconvenience, and hope we’ll see you again on Google.

Here’s how to get this:

1. Go to http://google.com
2. Change your preferences to display 100 results per page
3. Search for: site:archive.soldatforums.com FliesLikeABrick
4. Try going to results page 3 or 4
5. Magic

I’m not sure why this sets off their anti-abuse system, but it does.  I’m in the process of trying to find the correct channel to report this into.  I suspect there are other similar ways to cause this, but I haven’t looked for any (using different site: and query combinations).

I came across this while trying to look up my oldest post on the old Soldat Forums.  My plan was to search through these results for my oldest post, but due to this problem I could not get past the second page of results.

With my birthday being at the end of August, I had some extra cash. … And being the geek that I am, I wanted to buy some network hardware with it.

After thinking long and hard about what I wanted, I decided I wanted a Soekris board. Scratch that, I wanted two of them so that I could create a more complex environment to learn in. I ordered two of the net5501-70 boards and looked around for a case. I decided to get these so that I could learn about OSPF on Linux and BSD by running those operating systems on the boards. I also ordered one of the awesome 1U rackmount cases for the boards from kd85.com. kd85’s business model is neat, it seems like their profits (or at least part of them) go to aiding OpenBSD deveopment in Europe. This helped me justify paying $250 for a 1U rackmount case (weak exchange rates, etc).

Within a week or so I received both boards and the cases. I put Ubuntu on them at first just to make sure the hardware worked and to familiarize myself with PXE booting the boards. The Ubuntu Wiki has a pretty good page on PXE booting Ubuntu installs on there, and some changes needed to make the installer output to serial in a sane fashion. So far, so good.

Next I wanted to put FreeBSD on. I tried this, and encountered problems with the pxeboot loader not handling the serial console properly. This is a problem with the Soekris boards, my understanding of it is that their hardware takes what would be ouput to the graphical display and ouputs it over serial (assuming it is not graphics). I read some instructions that said how to patch the pxe bootloader so that this was more friendly with the Soekris console emulation (there’s one line in a Makefile that needs to be commented out to turn off font coloring/forwarding). However I was unable to get the bootloader to compile, regardless of whether the change had been made or not.

The OpenBSD installer had a problem as well, I don’t recall what. In a few weeks (when I have time again), I will try the OpenBSD install again to see what the issue I had was. I’ll also try to compile the FreeBSD loader again once I get a chance, though since I don’t normally have a FreeBSD machine handy, I need to fire up a virtual machine for it.

As of right now, the boards are sitting in my rack running Ubuntu. I look forward to successfully putting FreeBSD on. I wish I could buy another one or two of them so that I could keep a combination of them running Ubuntu, OpenBSD, and FreeBSD. Once I have them up and running in my ideal configuration, I’ll try to post about my experimentation progress.

Everyone has probably heard of Spore.  I was thoroughly interested in the game until I heard about its DRM.  I was going to buy the game, and I typically don’t buy Windows games because I’m just not interested in gaming.  I’m not saying I pirate them, I just don’t play games enough to care.  I’ve only bought/played a handful of games over the past 10 years or so: StarCraft/BroodWar, Soldat, Half-Life, Half-life 2, CS1.6/Source, Portal, and various other games on Steam (… including Peggle).  Now, as you look through this list you may notice that almost all of these games work in Wine.  I either play them in Wine, test them in Wine regularly, or boot into Windows on the rare occasion that I feel like playing ones that don’t work in Wine quite yet (or at least not in my crappy hardware).  That happens about once every 6 months or so.  I was ready to buy Spore, even if it meant booting into Windows any time I wanted to play to play it for the foreseeable future…

… and then I heard about the crazy DRM complaints and policies.  As such, I have no interest in buying the game anymore since DRM usually means to me “Windows [and sometimes Mac] Only,”  and this is the same reason I don’t use any online means to purchase music.  The online-purchase model is great, except DRM and crappy music qualities cripple it.  I can’t use any of the current services in Linux or copy the media to Linux to play it.  For the few that can, the quality typically blows.

So yeah, no Spore for me.  The even funnier thing is that I’ve heard loads of people talking about how they’re playing a cracked copy of Spore (shame on them?).  So it seems the DRM is easily circumvented, and annoys the hell out of the people who bought or wanted to buy the game.  Fantastic job, EA! Glad to see your head is in the right place!