I haven't really updated my blog in ages.. Mostly that's because I blog most stuff on my hyves profile these times.. It's in dutch, and more personal, then this one... So check that one out if you're interested at http://cliffalbert.hyves.nl/

A lot has happened in the last 1.5 year, of which I haven't written an lot here.. A little summary for those who don't speak dutch:

•  I have new furniture in my home
• The job is going great!
• Participating with Carnaval
• Starting a social live uhuh!
• Meeting a lot of new old friends
• Started doing a lot of sports! Mountainbiking, Running, Snowboarding
• Went to Pinkpop and Urpop for the first time in my life :)
  
• I met a wonderful lady and fell in love, unfortunately that was not mutual :( Altough she still wanted to be best buddies, which is something that seemd to be very difficult for me unfortunately :( Miss you girl!
• Started playing the Cornet (ok, i must admit, she had something to do with it)
• Started to learn riding a motorbike, unfortunately my wrist was fucked up so I had to give that up for a while
• Visited quite a few concerts, Kamelot, TurboNegro, Marilyn Manson and Motorhead
• Went clay pidgeon hunting in Kentisbeare with friends
• Celebrated a great christmas!
• Started a great new year :)

So that is a little summary of what happened in the last 1.5 year :) More to come maybe.. but when, I wouldn't know :)

My weblog is now hosted on my new server! The new server name is dropkick

It has the following specifications:

• Intel Pentium 4 3.6Ghz with 2MB cache
• 2x 1GB DDR2-533 Mhz
  
• 4x Western Digital 320Gbyte SATA-2 disks
• Areca ARC-1110 PCI-X raid controller
• SuperMicro 5014C-MT barebone 1U server

The disks are in a RAID-5 setup for reliability (I started hating failing disks after 3 Maxtor disks died in one week). It's running Debian GNU/Linux instead of Solaris (which ran on Polaris).

I moved the webserver to Apache 2. It currently also serves all my other websites and my mailserver (which I moved off phoebe towards this one)

A couple of years ago I bought my first Mac, it was an iBook G3 and at first I was totally in love with the Mac. After the iBook G3, I bought myself a G4 Titanium Powerbook for more performance and it was good. However the last year I started hating Mac OS X more and more.

On my normal workstation (intel based linux machine) I use PWM  as an window manager. Great to use, very minimal and very fast. And it has the one thing that I really require in a windowmanager, and that is sloppy focus. That brings me to point #1 why Mac OS X sucks - No Sloppy Focus

Another point that is very annoying in Mac OS X (according to myself ofcourse), is the fact that the title bars and menu bars are using quite large fonts. I like them small so I can cram more on my display (which is needed with the relative low resolutions that the iBook and Powerbook have).

Another thing I miss in Mac OS X is that there is no default package management system, ofcourse you could install fink or darwinports, but still it stinks.

A little related to the above point is the fact that there is no default development tools installed, you have to download this enormous package yourself. No way to download individual tools, no you got to get them alltoghetter. Which is a pain in the ass if your normal OS is Debian.

Also there is no 'advanced' mode tot configure things in the GUI, these have to be done in the old fashioned text style way. The problem with this is that these changes are going to clash with changes made GUI wise.

Why Mac OS X Sucks in 5 points

1. No Sloppy Focus
2. System fonts way to large
3. No Default Package Management
4. Development Tools not included by default
5. GUI tools do not understand manual changes.
   

Recently I got an invitation for PaiQ, a dutch profile site, but totally different. There are no profiles on the site, the site generates matches based on information you input. You can also speeddate with a random other user of the site but stay anonymous. The only thing you know about the other person in the beginning is sex, age and status. A vague picture will be there also, but the nice thing is that this picture will become more clear as longer as you chat with the other person.

People that are looking for invites for PaiQ please contact me. I've got some left.

Currently we are using an Asterisk PBX server at work to process or incoming calls in queues and to support logging and make things automated. Our setup consists of a Debian Linux server with an HFC-S ISDN PCI card. We use ISDN4Linux to interface the ISDN towards Asterisk.

While we where setting this up we discovered a little problem with this setup. The problem is that when a caller hangs up while there is some automated playback and the next caller calls it will hear some remains of this automated playback. The Asterisk Wiki did not have anything to tell us about this issue. However a Google on 'isdn4linux vbox buffer' did reveil us with the following patch for ISDN4Linux inside the kernel:

Please change the code in hfc_pci.c function hfcpci_clear_fifo_tx :

	bzt->za[MAX_B_FRAMES].z2 = bzt->za[MAX_B_FRAMES].z1;
in
	bzt->za[MAX_B_FRAMES].z2 = bzt->za[MAX_B_FRAMES].z1 -1;


This will solve the problem. Asterisk will function correctly afterwards. 

(more)

Currently we are blocking bogon advertisements by using a prefix-list which we are updating manually. The problem with this approach is that whenever an address block is delegated by IANA to a RIR this list has to be updated manually. According to Team Cymru there is an easy fix for this problem and that's peering with there bogon route server.

In theory this looks like a nice solution to the problem, a centralized organ making sure the lists are up-to-date and spreaded to connected participants within a minute. However I was thinking about this today and there is a tiny glitch. And that is "what about more-specifics?". The bogon route server project makes sure you don't get another route matching the exact prefix, but a more-specific route will be accepted by your bgp process and nicely inserted in your routing table. So it looks like this approach only has very very little effect.

Some people use the argument that with the route set in your routing table packets destined for these locations will be blackholed, however in the DFZ you will never have these routes for starters so they already will be blackholed. And if they do appear they'll be routed to that destination, but that will also occur if we use the cymru bogon server (but only in the situation where this means more-specific routes).

The case that a more-specific bogon is announced is more common then that an entire /8 network is announced, so I think the bogon server is absolutely no solution for this problem, unless they are going to announce it in de-aggregates of say /27 it has some effect. (more)

Last year I built my self an Cisco/Foundry BGP config to RPSL generator to create RPSL for in an routing registry (I primarily use the RIPE database). I did this because there where only tools that could do the other way around, generate a config from your RPSL entries in the routing registry database. As I currently can't find any tool in the wild that can do this I'm hereby opening it to the world.

It's written in perl and is focused on the RIPEdb. It can be found here. It has some examples incorporated for it.

It currently defines it preference and as-set we announce by peer-groups in the router config. I was busy rebuilding it so it can figure this out by it self and only needs the router config to be fed by stdin and automatically find out which AS-SET is being used and which preferences and metrics are going to be used.

Feedback is very welcome as well are updates, patches and bugreports. There is still a little todo list to add to the script which includes communities and metrics.

Notice that it only builds import/export and remarks line, the rest of the aut-num object has to be build around it.

Update: Version 20041127-2.pl has been released. This version incorporates automatic localpref, metric and community setting in the rpsl object. Unfortunately AS prepending does not work. The RFC2622 describes it, but the RIPEdb (which I test on) does not accept it.
The next step for updaterpsl.pl will be automated local interface detection. In the far future also announcements can be auto generated from the configuration. Currently this is hardcoded in the file.

Update: I just found a tool that does about the same but is less portable because it relies on SNMP to do the trick. You can find it here

I'm getting sick of movable type. Everyone thinks it slow, and it is. It is written by retards, every new release incorporates more bugs then the last version.

I think I'll go and migrate MT to something that works, even a php solution would be ok. I first choose MT because it was written in Perl. But now a PHP solution will satisfy me as wel..

There are only two requirements for this new app.

1) It must support postgresql
2) I must be able to import my movable type entries

So anyone with suggestions, please leave a comment :)

Currently on the testbench:

• Pivot
  Pro: does not require a database, does rebuilding, works directly out of the box
  Con: has no import or export functionality
  


• Blog:CMS
  Pro: has extensive features, import possibility for movable type
  Con: requires MySQL which means it's instantly disapproved
  


• Scoop
  Pro: perl engine, very mature software
  Con: requires MySQL which means it's instantly disapproved