Anycast: IP-SLA HOWTO

The complete configuration necessary to implement anycast DNS using Cisco IP SLA, though it’s a little weird without the background.

Anycast: DGRAM vs. STREAM

For internal anycast services, it doesn’t really matter if it’s using TCP or UDP, so long as your routing protocol fails over quickly.

Anycast: Handling Routes

For internal services, you probably want to have them fail over between sites. Dynamic routing protocols will let you do that.

Anycast: The Interface

If you use a loopback interface for your service, you can share the IP address between two different servers, even on the same LAN.

Anycast: The Loophole

A nifty hack that’s possible in IP networks is the ability to share an IP between servers thousands of miles apart.

Anycast: Networking Introduction

Anycasting is a way to scale geographically by having multiple servers sharing the same IP address.

Zenoss Swap Threshold Fixes

One of the recurring problems I have with Zenoss is fixing the swap threshold issue. Basically, if your swap space is less than 1G, you’re stuck with an alarm informing you that there’s less than 1G of swap total. The options are to hack it to increase the threshold (by decreasing the minimum-free threshold), or […]

Thoughts on Privacy

This post is pretty heavy on the pontificating, but I’ll tie it back into GNOME at the end, I swear. I’ve been thinking quite a bit about privacy lately. Most of the shiny things here on the internet are some type of service where you abandon some degree of privacy to an intermediary in return […]

Ubuntu Ruined My Life

[There’s a whole bunch of meandering academic pontificating and me taking myself too seriously. About two thirds of the way down it gets really good, though. I promise. Also, the woman is now online and back in school. -JC] So apparently, someone was trying to take online courses, ordered the cheapest Dell with a CD—which […]

Apps Hungarian Rocks

I’m currently writing a plugin for an open-source tool that will let me use LDAP as a backend store. Rather than let it become vaporware, I’ll just post a note about it and what it does once I’ve submitted the patch. In the meantime, I’ll note that having a clearly defined standard for naming things […]

FIY

It’s probably worth noting at this point that there are a few lessons to the debian OpenSSL debacle: There is now a corollary to “do not write your own cryptographic routines”: “do not fix bugs in someone else’s cryptographic routines.” If there is a annotated view of the OpenSSL tree (I don’t know/don’t care), the […]

Living with Telcos

Your network engineer orders four T1 lines from locations in City A to a datacenter in City Z via a large telco. He leaves the week before these are to be dropped, and of course, does not document what he was doing or even keep copies of the contracts. Either way, the lines are in […]

Unknown Environments

Here’s Knuth in an interview: As to your real question, the idea of immediate compilation and “unit tests” appeals to me only rarely, when I’m feeling my way in a totally unknown environment and need feedback about what works and what doesn’t… Hmm, people who are “feeling their way in a totally unknown environment”… Like […]

Cracked Screen

Took me a couple years and a couple laptops, but I finally dropped one just good enough to shatter the LCD. AppleCare doesn’t cover broke-it-yourself physical damage, only the deep center of the bathtub curve, so it’s basically pointless to drop the money on it. Again, if you’re buying a Mac, save your pennies and […]

Last To The Party

Upgraded my own install of Zimbra to 5.0.4 today, haven’t played with IM yet. Shared documents, a task list, seems cool. BTW, don’t ever, ever, ever modify the LDAP schema in Zimbra. Even via their own “posixAccount” extensions. It’s just bad news all around. Also, I’m enjoying muxtape.