Internap, Firewall, MT upgrade

Was awoken this morning by a call from some number I didn’t recognize. Then another call shortly after from my co-worker. I answered the second, and he was on the phone with the first. The first call was Internap NOC calling to tell me my circuit just dropped. This puzzled me a bit, as last I heard it was still with the installation coordinator and not passed over to the NOC yet. I was also pissed because I purposely avoided these people, and we weren’t even using the T1 yet, and it was early (like 1130), and now other people were calling me to see if I need to talk to the people I was trying to avoid in the first place ARGH ARGH ARGH.

After calming down a bit I first checked the firewall at work. It had been up 17m. The answer was obvious: it had been rebooted. I merely needed to catch the culprit, a person who took it upon themselves to understand what needs to be rebooted and what doesn’t, and what works and what doesn’t. I called my boss at the office and naively asked, “can you reboot the firewall for me?” Naturally, he said “I just did.” Busted! Tongue-lashing ensued. He agreed to call me next time. I found out that he needed to get to an online auction. My ass.

Then I checked my e-mail and found, while I slept and snored, the circuit had tested clean for 24 hours (Internap: we keep pinging until we go 24 hours without an error) and so had been passed over to the NOC without a call to me. I’m not really upset about this, just surprised. So I call the NOC, calm them down, and inform them of an outage later on in the evening. No problems.

I did switch out the firewall with the new Athlon system. Seems to be working fine thus far. BTW, old firewall that was rebooted (above story) locked up like it had been within about 30m of booting; prior to that it had probably been running 24h without incident. The S508/FT1 (ISA card) we were using is no longer in use, and has been replaced by another S514/FT1. So there are now two of those in use in that box. Noticed that several USB devices, ide2, ide3, and eth0 were all on IRQ 9, so I opted to change that: told the BIOS to move PCI slots 1/5 to IRQ 14 and disabled USB. Now that I look at /proc/interrupts, though:

[root@rand root]# cat /proc/interrupts 
           CPU0       
  0:   19391669          XT-PIC  timer
  1:        491          XT-PIC  keyboard
  2:          0          XT-PIC  cascade
  5:       5935          XT-PIC  wanpipe2
  8:          1          XT-PIC  rtc
 10:    6673503          XT-PIC  wanpipe1
 11:     929167          XT-PIC  eth1
 14:    4756336          XT-PIC  ide2, ide3, eth0
 15:          1          XT-PIC  ide1
NMI:          0 
ERR:          0

My Ethernet card is being stalked by ide2 and ide3. Maybe it’s Al Queda. (There we go, now I’m on Echelon. Hi, boys!)

Did a bit of rewriting of firewall rules, made sure some things that weren’t working worked, set up DHCP server. Need to work on pipt some still. It has things ranging from annoyances to bugs that probably should be fixed. Shouldn’t be too difficult, either.

Bad practice tonight. We have too many players to fit all on one team, so I got stuck on the opposing team a bunch. Nothing like getting ass raped by your friends. Lost hunted miserably, too, and I was the hunted. Terrible. Practice on that map needed.

I wasn’t real motivated to code tonight so I upgraded to Movable Type 2.5 instead. I guess I’m glad that I’m no longer “spam pinging” weblogs.com. The upgrade procedure wasn’t too bad, but the documentation I was reading seemed to imply no mod_perl stuff, which seems silly. Especially silly, since a bunch of things (trackback, xmlrpc) can now be run from mod_perl directly like the main CMS and comment modules were. (Note that I’m no mod_perl expert, so what I’ve just said might not make sense to you. Check out the mod_perl documentation in MT 2.5 and look at the Apache config changes from 2.21.)

I’ve changed time zone stuff yet again. I think it’s correct now, with help from the DateTags plugin for MT. If I ever change time zones I’ll have to go back and change the templates, since I’m just using the MTDaylightOrStandard tag, and in the process all my old entries will probably get fucked. So I can never leave EST/EDT.

Also had to do some upgrading of my RH 7.1 box for the MT upgrade. Needed Perl 5.6.1, Locale::Maketext, and I18N::LangTags. I took the Perl package from RH 7.3 and it (surprisingly) installed fine, but then I later found I would need to upgrade Apache from RH 7.3, db3, mod_perl, and install the perl-CGI and perl-DB_File packages. Surprisingly, though, this all installed without a message like “perl is required by <every fucking package on your system>”.

I went ahead and installed RPM::SpecFile too, since I wanted the cpanflute2 that comes with it. The cpanflute2 that shipped with older RPM RPMs doesn’t support --noarch or --buildall, I don’t believe. I bet it doesn’t do dependencies correctly either. (Or maybe dependencies are really a function of RPM and its scripts. I think this is the case, actually.)