Tag Archives: debian

A New Theme

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Yesterday I applied for a summer job at a Christian camp a few miles away, I’m hoping to be a counselor (leader) for the summer, should be about 10-12 weeks of having fun with kids. I’ll be staying there overnight the whole time, though Kelly will be able to come and visit when she gets off babysitting and we can have Saturdays together too. Initially she didn’t like the idea, but just kinda realized that it’ll probably be good for us and we’ll appreciate the time we do get together rather than spending every other minute in the same house.

It’ll also be nice to actually do some real work and earn some real money. Against my will, though there was nothing I could do about it, I’ve spent nearly a year in the US and not been able to work, so while it has been nice to do nothing at all, I also feel as though I’m letting down the team and taking advantage of people and their generosity. While that is the case, and to a large degree I have been, it’s not by choice, and given the chance I would have been doing a lot more to earn my keep. Also, while it is hardly IT related, I’m glad to have another stateside work reference with a real organization with standards etc. While I try to work to high standards when working with friends and family doing computer repair etc, there is hardly a gauge to measure by how well I did something.

I was also getting bored with the old theme on my blog, and felt it was time for a change here too. The photo in the header may change some until I find something I like that fits and works, but for now it is a crop of this image:

dscf06801

I took this during the Assemblies of God New Zealand National Conference in October 2007, the week I had my interview with Gen-i. A couple of the guys in the music team are jamming, in the immediate foreground are the power, video signal and communication cables for the stage roaming camera, resting on the base for one of the front speaker towers. I think Mike was programming lights, or he may have just been playing. I know I was the photographer and only touched the lighting board if it was absolutely necessary (mostly “TURN OFF NUMBER 11, TURN ON NUMBER 12” while he was wandering the stage checking things).

In other news I have successfully installed Xen on Debian, so I have a Debian Dom0. I also have a Debian DomU that I’m playing with LDAP with, in an attempt to setup a prototype for web/shell hosting. I’m trying to figure out how to create DomU’s from ISO’s under the Debian Dom0, I have some FreeBSD CD’s that I’d like to build a VM from if possible. Otherwise I can install QEMU back on the Mac and create QEMU images for Xen that way.

Also trying to debug a regex in my logcheck system on Telly. Ever since I installed IPv6 I’m getting annoying messages in the logs every hour that I’m trying to make logcheck ignore (they’re not important, thus I don’t want to see them – unlike people trying to bruteforce my SSH or Mail servers). I have one more thing to try before I go looking for help, as soon as my apt-get dist-upgrade is done (because opening a new tab and SSH’ing a new session is *so* difficult!)

{Last Minute Update!} Just had a phone call from the camp director, he’s put out all my references and is waiting to hear back, then will set up an interview next week perhaps.

IPv6: The Way Of The Future

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Tonight I set up IPv6 on my home network. While it feeds a house of 5, only 1 will notice any difference whatsoever!

Basically I loaded the IPv6 HomeBrew customization for SmoothWall (See the forums at community.smoothwall.org), and got myself an IPv6 block (/64) assigned and a tunnel to use it through (see Hurricane Electric, or TunnelBroker). I’ve set up Yoda (smoothwall), Telly (Debian) and Big Bird (macbook) to use IPv6 addresses and so far everything works wonderfully. It still relies on my router as a SPOF, but they have their own world-accessable IP(v6) addresses. I guess I should work on firewalls etc..

If anyone is interested in testing my IPv6 IRC server, it’s linked to the United Christian Chat Network and is accessible at ipv6.i-al.net! (6667 for standard, 6697 for SSL)

Productive

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Today was fairly productive. Kelly, for the last 3 nights, hasn’t slept much at all. Thursday night she had Nyquil, and Friday night was Tylenol PM, partly for her sick, partly to help her sleep. These were an epic fail, resulting in not sleeping longer than 10 minutes at a time, and being paranoid about all kinds of things (mostly my alive-ness). Wednesday night she had Nyquil and was fine, except for a short patch where she rolled onto me, looked up towards me and said “WHAT?” before rolling back over and being quiet again. I prefer this to being constantly asked “Are you OK?” and giving the same answer “YES” — in her defence she thought I was dying.

Anyway, last night she didn’t sleep either, though this time she didn’t have the paranoia either. She instead slept all day, and it worked out as I had planned for Sunday School too. We’re working our way through Romans, last week reading chapter 1, today looking at it a little closer and reviewing the importance of Romans to the bible and to Christianity as a whole.

This afternoon Matt and I went and picked up about 15 boards of cherry wood that a family friend is giving away to anyone with a good use for it, I’m planning on building a special coffee table – more on that later. I also played Command and Conquer (Yuri’s revenge), and beat 3 brutal enemies having lost my construction yard (the first one was eliminated by the other two computers, and I was able to commandeer an MCV from one of the two remaining – my good income had allowed me to create enough troops to overpower the enemy base.)

I also did some more rough plans in church regarding how I want to set up I-aL/Infinitech, particularly server utilisation and what-goes-where type stuff. Small web stuff will go on Rizzo, the VPS. Also probably 10 paid eggdrop accounts, and the administration server for the entire thing. Rizzo will also likely be the master DNS server, and secondary MX. Rhapsody, Mack’s server, I’ll be able to utilise for web, secondary DNS (he’ll be using it as primary), and secondary MX. Telly will be secondary DNS, master MX, and also house backups. I plan to write a basic secured administration site to run from Rizzo providing dynamically updated DNS zone files, Apache Virtual-hosts files etc, and potentially controlling who can and can’t log in and how.

Also, I’m trying to decide between postfix, exim4 and qmail for each server – I’m guessing that the secondary MX’s should be configured the same as the primary rather than mixing MTA’s, the question is which.. All 3 servers are running debian, and all three have a different MTA. Fortunately Rhapsody is likely to be reinstalled this week, and Telly may be going the same way soon too, that just leaves Rizzo with a reimage if required..

Finally, today also marked the completion of the immigration package. We put together all the paperwork that has been requested to date and a folder will be purchased tomorrow to permit the sending of the paperwork to USCIS on Tuesday. We continue to hope and pray that this time we have everything together, and that everything will be approved quickly (or we’ll be told what we need to do and we can do it quickly).

Rizzo

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Tonight I started the process of renting a VPS (Virtual Private Server – in short it’s a server on the internet). To be named Rizzo, it will fit in with my muppet-names nicely.

Plans? Nothing specific. Mostly vague surrounding eggdrop shells, and web/mail hosting. Will also be hosting two IRCd’s, one on each of the networks I help admin. I’ll also shut down the IRCd on Telly.

The VPS will be running Debian, and I’m looking at writing a control panel for webhosting at least.

In other news, I started working on my ticket system for fault management etc again, this evening was mostly consumed in that area with drawing diagrams on paper and playing with the XML-RPC functions in PHP. Still trying to decide how to do user authentication and security options and such, but that all runs through a security function (which returns ‘yes’ or ‘no’, depending on whether the user has access or doesn’t, respectively) so would be trivial to change to LDAP or a proprietery authentication system. If I write a control panel, it’ll likely use the same database, and I’d try to tie in with FTP and such for user-accounts on the VPS too.

So, if you’re interested in webhosting (with or without domain) or an eggdrop/BNC (no interesting vhosts, sorry) account, let me know. They won’t be free, sorry.