Year: 2005

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A lesson from the Pantera

image What model year would you believe this car to be? I saw my first Detomaso Pantera for sale at Al Smith Buick/Dodge in Raleigh back in the late 80’s. It was $68,000. I thought it was a new exotic car I had never heard of. In fact it was a 1971 model, just like the one in this photo. Most people have never heard of these cars. That’s unfortunate for the Honda Civic go-cart kids who think 260hp is a lot. These Pantera’s typically pack between 400 to 700 horses. The only thing new that can compete is the upcoming Mustang Shelby Cobra.

I read this week that the most stolen car last year was the Acura Integra “probably because of it’s powerful engine.” What a joke. When I was in high school (yes, back in the day) we had Mustang LX 5.0’s and Formula Firebird 350’s that would smoke all these little rice traps right off the lot – no modification necessary. If someone actually took the time to modify one it would become illegal in most states. I feel bad for the kids that slap a go cart muffler on an Acura and throw a stupid looking carrying handle on the back. Here’s a hint: you look gay. Stop.

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Even though it’s in remission…

It’s time for another round of me vs. Crohn’s disease. This coming Tuesday I will spend the morning having a colonoscopy. I will take many more iron pills and a new medication, Colazal. Then on Friday I will have a series of X-rays and MRI’s in a procedure known as an Upper GI Tract. Yey.

I’m really not having any problems except for a stomach flu last week. All of this is just preventative maintenance. All I know is the cost better be minimal.

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WRAL.com – News – Times Reporter Jailed For Refusing To Divulge Source

WRAL.com – News – Times Reporter Jailed For Refusing To Divulge Source

Hoorah! Noone should expect to enjoy complete immunity. Especially the press! Imagine if this reporter had been told of an upcoming terrorism plot and then refused to reveal her sources. It’s the same thing. In matters of national security “protecting my sources” doesn’t mean crapola.

If you don’t want to be known as the source of information, don’t tell your story to a reporter. Judith Miller can rot until she talks as far as I’m concerned. Send her to the darkest hole in the federal penal system.

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Using Ipchains

Using Ipchains

I’m really digging getting back into using ipchains. I really like the off server logging I was able to set up a while ago. I like working on my box much more than the PIX 515 at work.

I’m going to write more about this after I determine how to discuss it without revealing my configuration specifics.

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New Gang Symbol

image Have you seen this symbol? More and more of these decals are appearing on the bumpers of cars all over the country. You have to be a “member” of a law enforcement agency to buy one (by providing a verifiable badge number to epolicesupply.com). So it’s a symbol for the nationwide law enforcement gang “the thin blue line.” A symbol of pride? It’s more like “I’m a fellow cop, so don’t pull me over if you see me speeding in my civilian car.”

Mike Davis made this point: If I want to put one of these stickers on my car what’s to stop me from printing one out of Photoshop? And once I have what laws going to say I can’t have this sticker on my car? Would I be arrested for impersonating a law enforcement official because I have this symbol that can only be sold to cops? I’m sure plenty of people who don’t dive have diver down front license plates and stickers on their cars. So if I think this is a pretty black and blue design no law I’m aware of can stop me from putting one on my car, forehead or front door.

I really like this bumper sticker on the epolicesupply website: “Sometimes there’s justice, Sometimes there’s just us.”

Sorry Officer(s). There’s only justice – no gangs allowed. It’s your job to enforce laws and that’s the extent of it. It’s an individual job. Okay, so sometimes you might need back-up or manpower to perform your job. Just remember that gang symbols and slogans don’t put you above the rules of engagement set forth by the justice system and legislators. Of all people cops ought to recognize that the “thin blue line” is a term used by the civilian public to pronounce distrust of officers involved in scandals and cover ups.

Identifying law enforcement symbols should be banned on all civilian possessions and clothing to protect the integrity and trust of the profession. I particulary like it most when a girlfriend or wife of a cop has one of these decals. It says “my husbands/boyfriends a cop”. Um, so what? I guess they’re entitled to some special treatment also.

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Microsoft Single Label DNS Names

Microsoft suggests not using single label DNS names. In my recent experience, this should be more than just a suggestion.

I had to open a call to Microsoft this week because some brilliant systems integrator from Alphanumeric decided to leave off the domain suffix from the name of first Windows 2000 domain controller at Dillon Supply. It was dscdc1 instead of the required dscdc1.dillonsupply.com. This server is also one of two DNS servers for the domain. What this means is that the domain controller was unable to update it’s own entry in DNS because Microsoft Active Directory integrated DNS does not allow for single label DNS names by default.

So my options were thin. I tried the registry hack in this Microsoft Knowledgebase Article but it didn’t do much to help (in fact I couldn’t see that it did anything). When I ran netdiag -v I still received a fatal error that the domain controller was not registered with any DNS servers. Some websites suggest demoting the domain controller (dcpromo), changing the machine name to include the domain suffix, and then promoting it again. This is a risky venture because you gotta pray the replication takes place without error to another DC and since your DNS is hosed you will need the luck of the gods. Here’s an alternative: don’t do it.

My call to Microsoft payed off in the form of a .vbs file that will append the domain suffix to any machine name and correctly register the machine in DNS. I have only used it on a Windows 2000 server running SP4. I don’t know how it will work on any other OS version. If you download it run it at your own risk – I’m not responsible for what you do to your systems. All I can say is that it worked flawlessly for me. After running it netdiag showed successful DNS entries for the DC on all AD DNS servers.

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BT Unveils Mobile Phone-Landline Handset

BT Unveils Mobile Phone-Landline Handset

I’ve been talking about this for over three years. Someone has finally done it. Of course it wasn’t in the US since we’ve decided not to be the front runners in telecom innovation. Don’t worry BT; I don’t see a mobile phone that can turn into an IP based land line as much of a gamble. It’s definately the future. For all countries except ours that is. Our Ma Bell’s will stiffle the technology for as long as they can.

You hear that Bell South? Eventualy you won’t be needed anymore. May you perish in bankruptcy court.

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And the winner is….

image IBM! For five weeks I’ve been drilling through performance specifications for eight way x86 servers to replace Dillon Supply’s HP DL580 four way Win2K SQL server. Through this I’ve learned the TPC-C rankings for almost every four processor AMD Opteron dual core (aka – Opteron 875) system available as well as every eight processor single core Pentium Xeon MP solution in the marketspace.

As of yesterday it looked like we would be going with the SUN V40z four chip Opteron 875. SUN has not submitted this server to the Transaction Processing Council (TPC) for published performance results and therefore I had to rely on the results benchmarked by the HP DL585 4 processor Opteron 875 which also had a strong quote in the running. The DL585 server delivered unmatched performance with a record-breaking TPC-C benchmark of 187,296 tpmC configured with 64Gb of RAM and 8Mb of L3 cache. Unfortunately the SUN V40z cannot address more than 32Gb of RAM. But like I said, as of this morning the SUN was still in the lead primarily because of a non-hardware factor: Veritas Storage Foundation 4.2.

Within the last two weeks I became convinced that Storage Foundation (formerly Veritas Volume Manager) was a good fit for some of the off-site LUN duplication we’re trying to achieve and the SUN vendor had superior knowledge and experience with this product. All things being equal, including pricing, we were ready to make the call for the V40z.

But in the 11th hour the Mayor of Creedmoor NC, Darryl Moss, who is also our IBM sales rep for Champion Solutions Group, through us a curve ball that only the big blue powerhouse could. They discounted their SAN solution including an IBM xSeries 460 eight processor 64-bit Xeon MP by an astonishing $50k+, meaning their offer was not only the lowest in price but also the fastest in performance. This server holds the world record for 8-way systems clocking 250,975 tpmC. That’s the same system we’re buying (minus 96Gb of RAM). Previously we hadn’t given this server much consideration because of cost but with a discount of that magnitude our minds were literally changed in a matter of minutes. Thank you Mayor Moss.