Wow! I haven’t written in nearly a month. Much has happened since then and I can only cover parts of it.

Toward the end of school, things slowed down and I was forced to study for finals. On the 11th, me and two friends, Ken and Papp, took a trip to Thailand. We returned on the 28th. It was absolutely beautiful: the people, the culture, the warm, humid climate, the food. I wish I could move there. Perhaps in a few years. I plan to create a few pages about the trip in the near future with pictures and all.

I’ve been trying to catch up on Restek news lately. I returned to a lot of indirect e-mails which needed to be read. Somehow something on Alvis broke while I was away. It appears to have something to do with PAM being upgraded, or something of that sort. Anyway my sudo is broken but we will hopefully get that worked out soon.

I’ve patched the Depts. server and recompiled the kernel. This addresses three security advisories that were released: bzip2, ipfw, and tcp bugs. I will install the kernel this evening, when the server is idle, and reboot. I’m going into the office tomorrow. In the event that anything goes wrong, I’ll be in Bellingham that afternoon to fix it locally. I don’t think that will happen though.

So far this summer I have read Tuesdays with Morrie, and Flowers for Algernon (which I bought yesterday and finished reading this morning. I was very impressed with it.) I am still reading The Fountainhead. I bought (40% off) two of Mitnick’s books: The Art of Intrusion, and The Art of Deception. We will see how those are.

Nick, Mike and I were supposed to meet with J.Scott today and discuss the implementation of a failover plan in case Fibercloud goes down, or I think even UW’s service goes down. The basic idea is that we would have the two routers communicate using BGP and the rules that we currently have in place on our firewalls/packeteer would be mimicked on the router. If, for example, we lost connectivity to Fibercloud, our router would failover to the UW route (K20?) and go through there. BGP allows the routers to communicate to eachother that a route is no longer available. The reason for mimicking the rules is that we wouldn’t want to flood their pipe with garbage traffic like P2P. The important thing to note is that routers aren’t meant to do filtering like our firewalls and Packeteer do. Mike was talking about the possibility of keeping Packeteer and the filters in the route so that the only difference in event of failover is that the final destination is different. This really seems like the only reasonable way to do things and I don’t think it’s actually that difficult.

The meeting was actually canceled but the three of us went to Nick’s place and had some burgers and discussed summer plans. Some interesting ideas came up and I’m 100% confident this will be a very fun and interesting summer with a ton of stuff to learn.

Nick wanted to set up Nagios to execute shell scripts on Farva. He plans on using parallel ports to set up lights that are indications of service problems, e.g. printers, or a main service like mail. He wrote two shell scripts for this. Tomorrow I will configure Nagios to execute the right “event handlers” for each service and probably do some testing. This should be useful as a visual of what’s going wrong, but it’s also fun to set up.

I’m not usually stressed out over work and school…but this week is an exception. I seem to have had a ton of homework lately, and on top of that I have to keep up with work and learn all that I can before summer/fall comes. My dad also asked me to fix his site, which is no big deal. But thanks to the designer, the layout is absolutely terrible. There is absolutely zero organization in the file tree, and it even uses spaces (“ ”) to align things. It’d be nice to simply say “No, I will not edit it” simply because of how frustrating it is to deal with the layout, but that’s not very possible.

Can’t wait to just be done with school and go to Thailand.