ABC News Online reports:

Scientist believes Atlantis found off Cyprus

The quest to find the lost city of Atlantis has begun in earnest off Cyprus's southern shores. A US-led team of explorers claims the ancient city lies on the seabed between Cyprus and Syria. With the aid of unique underwater maps, a US researcher claims to have assembled evidence to prove the mythological island of Atlantis really existed. Using sophisticated sonar technology, California-based Robert Salmas says he has not only been able to pinpoint Atlantis to a sunken land mass off Cyprus's southern coast, but even discern its geographical features as described by Plato.

The alleged discovery has been greeted with barely concealed mirth by the Mediterranean island's tourism office.


The Pakistan Daily Times says:


Hunt for Atlantis leads to Cyprus

A US researcher who is convinced the fabled city of Atlantis is lurking in the watery deep off Cyprus will launch an exploratory mission this summer, he said. “We believe our discovery will put Cyprus at the centre of the world stage forever,” Robert Sarmast told Reuters.

Sarmast said the east Mediterranean island is actually the pinnacle of the long-lost city and the rest of it is about one mile below sea level. Using deep-sea maps and clues found in Plato, Sarmast said he has discovered a sunken rectangular landmass stretching northeast from Cyprus toward Syria.

“We are going to sail 70 miles offshore Cyprus, directly over the spot where we believe Atlantis City lays submerged and waiting to be discovered,” he said. The mystery of Atlantis — both whether it existed and why it disappeared — has fired the imagination of explorers for centuries. Many believe the ancient civilization was destroyed in the biblical flood and that it was possibly the site of the Garden of Eden. Greek mythology says Atlantis was a powerful nation whose residents were so corrupted by greed and power that Zeus destroyed it.


That there is something like Atlantis is pretty clear according greek mythology and especially Plato's reading material. The current location that is speculated is around greece and makes it pretty believable that it's really there.

Here at work we are currently using an Merlin Gerin (MGE) S11 UPS to supply our equipment with emergency power when power fails.

It has an external battery pack that will supply power for approximately 1 hour and 20 minutes at normal load (8 amps).

As this UPS is currently end-of-life at Merlin Gerin I have supplied the documentation here.

We have another unit standing by as backup UPS, however we believe its broken :(

UPDATE: At the moment we are using both MGE Comet S11 upsen in our colocation room. They are both being monitored by NUT which sends us an SMS message to our mobile phones if there are any power related issues. They are providing 9.2 and 3.7 amps respectively. They also generate a nice clean output voltage of 229 volt (deviation less then 1%).

After some problem reports concerning skinny proxy 1.47 ,which I've put online here, I noticed there still was the 1.48 release in CVS.

It fixes some problems concerning program crashes after phone calls. I've put it also online for all users that still are using the skinny proxy (which I'm also gonna use again as Kirsten uses NAT at home and is also getting an skinny IP Phone).

You can get it here.

Bug reports go to proxy@ipphones.nl !

After discovering some troubles syncing my laptop, palm and mobile phone using iSync and having some weird bluetooth problems, I decided to reinstall my Apple Powerbook.

After backing up all files (rsync++) and repartitioning and installing the base filesystem, I discovered that Palmdesktop wouldn't sync at all with my Palm.

According palminfocenter.com this is a well known problem in Palm Desktop 4.1 and Mac OS X 10.3 (aka panther). There is no fix available yet. Stupid software makers, I tought they designed API's and shared libraries for this purpose.

Well at least my Bluetooth will work again so I can use the Internet again in the train :)

It seems there is a vulnerability in the TCP protocol that can cause existing connections to be reset. This will affect BGP sessions without an MD5 authentication. Now you understand why everybody was so urgent on settingup MD5 sessions ? :)

The complete scope can be found here

There may be more discussions about this on NANOG.

ISPs that peer with Unilogic Networks (AS28788) can contact me to setup a secure MD5 peering session!

Yesterday Kirsten and I bought our (and Harmen's) tickets for Rock Werchter in Belgium. This festival will be held 1,2,3 and 4 juli 2004 in Werchter. Another 390 euro's well spend (for 3 people including camping!).

We where at the shop at around 11:00 and we where number 25 to buy our tickets. We have ticket numbers 049523 to 049525 (and Kirsten wanted 050000).

That means our summer holiday is really packed at the moment with events. First in Juli, Rock Werchter, maybe Megabit. Then in August NE2000 and Lowlands. Include a few birthdays in those two months and it will be a nice summer this year! :)

This evening I was fiddling around with the new proxy setup at work. We use DNS roundrobin to spread the load among our two proxy servers. I was wondering if there was any possibility to specify priorities for these 2 servers. As they are different in specifications. Then the following idea came into my mind:

- Give the 2 A records for proxy different TTLs
- e.g. proxy1 has a ttl of 600 and proxy2 a ttl of 1200
- proxy2 is the big box, proxy1 the smaller box

Why will this give priorities ? Well clients that resolve proxy and use proxy1 will refetch the proxy record after 600 seconds. And thus making use of this proxy for a minimum of 600 seconds. The same is true for proxy2 but this proxy will be used for a minimum of 1200 seconds. As the selection of A record for proxy is almost random, this will provide some sort of prioritizing.

I've configured this setup for our proxy round-robin setup and will see the results tomorrow as all customers start bashing our proxy servers. I'll keep you posted!

UPDATE 07-04-04

It seems the current TTL settings of 600 for proxy1 and 1200 for proxy2 don't have the desired effect. Loadbalancing seems almost 50/50 at the moment. I have now adjusted the TTL's to 600 for proxy1 and 3600 for proxy2. Tomorrow evening I'll have more info if this approach is effective.

UPDATE 09-04-04

Ok, using TTL's for DNS prioritizing does NOT work. Our proxies are both evenly loaded (approx 5% difference). So using TTL's for DNS priority loadbalancing will not work in practice. I'll write a new article summarizing this issue after I get back home.

Blocking MSN messenger is a question we received at work from a customer (primary school). It looked quite easy at the beginning. The idea was as follow:

- Nullroute the IP range of messenger.hotmail.com (207.46.104.20)

Well that idea backfired, as MSN tries to use the configured proxyserver in IE if an direct connection to messenger.hotmail.com fails. So we are now trying the following setup using squidGuard:

- Nullroute the IP of messenger.hotmail.com in the local CPE.
- Blacklist messenger.hotmail.com in the proxyserver

Hopefully this setup will work. We'll see tomorrow if the customer wil test it.