Searching for Tao, 7573 Kilometres from Home

November 10, 2005 04:31 +0000 | Employment Geek Stuff 0

this post is completely geek-related so if you know nothing about networking or linux, you may want to just skip it.

i've been working for weeks on and off on a problem i just couldn't wrap my brain around. you see, i never went to school for networking (or programming for that matter). everything i know is self-taught. so a lot of the time i find myself doing something i've never done before and often i have no schooling to fall back on, let alone anyone else to ask. my boss expects me to find out how to do the job and get it done -- he doesn't care much how.

the problem? take a block of ips and route the traffic to a few servers by way of a filtering firewall on a new cisco switch. on this same switch, we also have a private lan using unrouteable ips.

now i know how to setup a standard home network. map the one live ip you have to your gateway/firewall and forward ports through to the appropriate 192.168.x.x ips behind. i remember at one point a long time ago that this process (NAT) involved overhead that you shouldn't depend on for high availability situations, but for a home network this is ok. the only problem is that i need to design this network to be able to take a serious slashdotting or massive ad serving campaign. packets have to route and i thought that NAT might not be up to the task.

my (assumed by me without any prior experience) solution was to have the firewall filter all the packets through, but not translate the packets. ie. the firewall would have a routeable ip, the servers would have other routeable ips and the lan machines would have non-routeable ips:

internet -- gateway (12.34.56.78) +- server (12.34.56.79)
                                  |
                                  +- desktops (192.168.0.x)

it's taken me weeks and lots of enquiries with various geeks to find out that this will not work. instead, you have to assign all the routeable ips to the gateway and use NAT:

internet -- gateway (12.34.56.78) +- server (192.168.0.1)
            gateway (12.34.56.79) +- server (192.168.0.2)
                                  |
                                  +- desktops (192.168.0.x)

the sad part? this is how i set it up initially. i didn't know how to do what i thought was The Propper Way so i put together what i thought was a quick hack to make things work. ...it just turns out that my hack was The Right Way all along.

maybe i should have gone to school for this. regardless, i'm chronicling my ignorance here in the hopes that it might help someone else like me one day.

November 04, 2005 14:20 +0000 | Employment Personal Life 2

i finally bought some shoes. at $150something from mountain equipment co-op, i'm reasonably happy with them. they're not a perfect fit, but hey, they don't suck and at $150 i can't complain. i also went to a chiropodist, that's just another word for "foot doctor" or "podiatrist" who told me i have high arches and that's why my feet hurt all the time. she told me what to look for in a shoe and also recommended some nice insoles.

then i went to work late to find out that nearly everything to do with the big company project had been blown offline by our sysadmin. my hands were tied and i basically sat there, poking at my keyboard trying to find ways to avoid his mess only to find that my alternatives were broken as well. it was terrible, like being bound and gagged while you watch someone break into your house and wreck your stuff.

but then kathryn called and we decided to go see the new zorro movie and my night got better. the movie was kinda lame though. to use oz's words: "i don't know, i usually enjoy lameness and this is leaving me kinda cold". don't waste your money on the theatre, but it's still got some fun swordfights.

afterword we walked... really far. new shoe's right? why not take them out for a stroll? we walked from the paramount theatre all the way to davisville station. for the non torontonians that's a long, long way. about 2hours or so, uphill. we hand a lot of good conversation though so it made for a pleasant evening.

the site that was broken has miraculously been fixed, so i guess today will be damage control. great fun.

October 28, 2005 23:32 +0000 | Employment 1

things are getting better on the work front.

i'm getting more responsibility in the areas i'm most interested in. i'm learning more about networking and sql than i had originally thought possible and despite the headbutting i run into constantly with those guys in vancouver, we're making headway on our primary project.

but the really sweet news came today when the boss haulled me into his office for a surprise review: all good things, no bad things and a raise! sweet ass, i now make 2k more/year than i did before.

sure, it's not a lot more money, but it's nothing to sneeze at either. i'm going out with lara and kelly tonight for ice cream in celebration.

in related good news, i finally bought a real winter jacket for the nasty-ass winters they have on this side of the country. i'm finally prepared to wait out there in the cold if need be. and at the same time i was buying the jacket, i checked out mec's shoe section and found some that look ok, and next week i'll probably pick them up since they don't have any my size this week.

lastly, i also won the draw to do the volunteering at the sled setup in a couple weeks at the rosedale location. this means i get to stand in the cold in a new shiny fleacy vest exchanging plain outdoor lights for l.e.d. ones that are more efficient, and near unbreakable. apparently, there'll even be a great big l.e.d. christmas tree setup for me to take pictures of so you can expect something here in a couple weeks.

ok, i'm hungry, going home now.

September 21, 2005 21:01 +0000 | Employment 0

i'm likely to have very little free time in the coming week. i've received two new projects from jay and a bigger project for a low-budget Canadian movie worth a pretty penny. the good news is that both of these things mean a lot of money which i can then turn into a paid visa. the bad news is that i'll be very busy for the next little while. and i also have two birthday parties to go to this weekend. ....i'm getting tired just thinkgin about all this.

August 18, 2005 21:02 +0000 | Employment Geek Stuff 2

95		quintillion
636		quadrillion
954		trillion
925		billion
771		million
17		thousand
120

that's how many times our shiny dual xeon machine will have to attempt a password crack for an ssl certificate no one can remember the password for. by jacky's estimates, that's about a year's worth of work for the poor machine, but i have hope.

May 12, 2005 12:37 +0000 | Employment Personal Life 2

i was going to go to bsdcan this weekend, but decided against it last night on my way home from my tev meeting. the idea was that the company was going to pay for a rental car, my 3 nights in ottawa, food while i was there and the conference itself, and in exchange i'd give up my weekend +friday to learn all about the wonders of freebsd. sounds like a sweet plan, and since it was my idea, i'm sure my boss was confused after i called him last night to tell him i couldn't do it.

my reasoning is that i need to know my limits and i'm sure that this trip would definitely take me over them. i've all of the following stressing me out lately and i don't need a weekend in ottawa to compound it, let alone take away a weekend that i should be used for packing:

moving into storage, and into the new place 2weeks later

disconnecting cable and setting it up at the new place
getting a toronto hydro account for my new place
getting insurance for my new place and making sure it covers everything in storage (suggestions?)
packing

flying home for 2weeks

working out which day(s) i'm going to be working at our vancouver office
working out who i'm staying with and what days in vancouver
i'm doing the grouse grind when i get there

this whole ordeal with wakestock

i get about 3-5 calls a day while i'm at work from all parties involved, and having never done this before, each call is new territory for me

freecyclers are lining up to get the stuff i'm giving away rather than move into my new place
money is tight and expenses are everywhere (see above)
and did i mention that i have no love life to speak of?

adding a weekend of geeking in ottawa just really wasn't an option when i reviewed the above. i just hope my boss doesn't think i'm incapable of ever going to one, 'cause that'd suck big time. regardless, all of this is why i haven't been blogging much lately. lots has been happening with regard to the "ordeal" mentioned in that list, but i just don't think my nerves can take re-capping it all right now. when it's all done i'll post the results. wish me luck, and if you have any herbal remedies for stress, please let me know ;-)

May 06, 2005 22:01 +0000 | Employment 0

we all promised that we kept her secret, but i thought it'd be funny to share. the company took us all out to see a show with mysteriously yours last night, a whodunit kind of show where the actors mix among the audience enacting a sometimes funny, oft-times absurd play in which some poor soul died and the lot of them tried to solve the mystery. the characters included "dr. jerry bruckheimer", the famed psychiatrist, "irene", the mysterious lady, "mrs. hudson", the owner of the in in which they were all staying, "lestrade", a british bobby, "watson" and "sherlock holmes". the acting was pretty good and absolutely riddled with one-liners that somehow managed to be funny more often than jokes that bad really should. a credit to the actors i suppose.

so who was the murderer? well i'm not telling. it was a fun night out though, the food was decent, though should have been much better and i took a bunch of pictures, most of which didn't turn out. this was probably the best of the lot. these girls make up the majority of x chromosomes in the sales & marketing department. aren't they pretty?

April 27, 2005 16:13 +0000 | Employment Geek Stuff 0

in most cases (when using the NOARP option) you need alias support. Some Unices have no support for aliased interfaces or only limited, such as QNX, Aegis or Amoeba for example. Others have interface flag inheritance problems like HP-UX where it is impossible to give an aliased interface a different flag vector as for the underlying physical interface (as happens with Linux 2.2 and 2.4 - Joe). So for HP/UX you need a special setup because with the standard depicted setup for DR it will NOT work. I've done most Unices as Realserver and was negatively astonished by all the different implementation variations of the different Unix flavours. This maybe resulted from unclear statements from the RFC's.

my company has me learning how to setup a linux virtual server and it's kicking my ass. anyone understand what the hell the above means? and if you do, i'll buy you dinner if you can explain some more of this.

March 22, 2005 17:56 +0000 | Employment 1

one of my favourite prophets of modern media said: "tact is just not saying true stuff" and there are days that i couldn't agree more... days like this. there's a time for diplomacy and there's a time for a swift kick to the head and if you ask me, diplomacy is seriously overrated -- especially when you have to deal with people like him.

March 17, 2005 21:38 +0000 | Employment 1

anyone want a free computer desk? it's dark red wood (at least, it looks like wood, feels like polished wood... could be anything) and quite pretty. comes with one of those nifty keyboard trays and sits in the corner. my company is giving away two of them (one may already be spoken for though) and we just want them gone.

free to anyone who'll pick them/it up.