Nov 30

New Modem

By linc F/OSS, Home Life, Programming No Comments »

I wrote a little bit ago about my writing a little service monitor script, OpenServerMon, yes, I know the name has changed already. Well, the reason I wrote the script initially is I wanted to be notified when my home internet service went down. Wouldn’t you know it, it worked…. A LOT!

Apparently, I put this thing into place right at the right time because my cable modem started to go on the fritz. My service shut off sometimes several times a day, and each time I was paged. Obviously, this means my script works great, however, I became quickly annoyed about my crappy cable modem, and it was only a year and half old. Well, tonight after resetting it twice, I finally hit Walmart, where I bought a nice Linksys cable modem.

To my amazement, this is the very first time I called Comcast and dealt with someone who wasn’t a complete idiot. I got a nice fellow in the phone who simply added my mac address and I was up and running. Now hopefully this will be the end to my home internet problems, and the annoying 3am pages about my service going down too!

Now as far as the OpenServerMon, I promise, I will be putting that up to share as well soon :-) I would really like to see someone else use/test it before I make it available to the masses though (if you want to beta for me, shoot me an email).

Nov 19

Happy fuzzies

By linc Home Life No Comments »


There is nothing like having happy fuzzies.

Nov 18

Ferret Math

By linc Home Life No Comments »

Ferret math is a curious mathematical oddity whereby one ferret mysteriously becomes many. It can happen a million different ways, but almost certainly it will happen to most ferret owners. This is how it happened to me just this past weekend.

When last I wrote, my friend Benny had to be put to sleep. They think he had cancer and we knew for sure he had an enlarged spleen and a heart murmur. He sure was a great little fellow though.


Benny’s death left Stinkerbell all alone. Somehow, in the midst of mourning, my wife and I ended up at the local SPCA *just to look*, the idea being that ferrets are such social critters and we didn’t want Stinkerbell to be lonely. Well, it was probably that we were feeling pretty lonely too. Ferrets my be pretty small critters, but they have huge personalities and leave big holes in your heart and life when they are gone.

At the SPCA we found 2 little female ferrets who badly need a home. Unfortunately, my landlord was a little slow on the draw returning their phone call, and they have some other draconian adoption policies which prohibited us from adopting the 2 of them right then and there. The people at the SPCA have their hearts in the right place, but they obviously know nothing about ferrets whatsoever.

Somehow (ferret math here we come), a couple hours after that, I ended up looking at ferrets at the local PetCo with my wife and daughter. After a quick ferret-jedi hand wave, 2 of them were riding home in my car. Don’t ask.


The first of the 2 we called “Cake”. He was a beautiful cream colored ferret with a loving personality. We brought him home, introduced them all together for some good play time and, after the ferrets were finally worn out, we put them to sleep in the cage. They were all happy and getting along famously. Unfortunately, the next morning, Cake would not get up. He wasn’t particularly sick looking, just didn’t want to move. We took him back to the pet store who got him to their vet where he died some 20 minutes later. The vet believes that Cake died of insulinoma and had some tumors as well. And he was just a baby. It was sad.


The other ferret we brought home that day is “Teddy”. He is aptly named because he is just like a big cuddly teddy bear. He’s only 5 months old or so and very affectionate and REALLY soft and nice to hold. I think it is a ploy to get him a good home, and it worked. Although Teddy has not been to our vet yet, he appears to me to be quite healthy and exhibits normal youthful ferret behavior, ie he can’t sit still when he is awake. This is a good sign. He also gets along with Stinkerbell pretty well (although not famously yet).

If your counts are correct, that’s 2 ferrets down in less than 24 hours and 1 pleasant addition.


I had mentioned during this ordeal, I think when we were looking at ferrets at PetCo and picked up Teddy and Cake, that I had always wanted an albino ferret. Well, after I found out the bad news about Cake from the vet on monday afternoon, my wife was calling around to see what ferrets the other local PetCo’s in the area had and the next closest store had 1 ferret there. It was a 9 month (I think – old for a petstore) albino ferret which we learned later was born on my birthday. Of course I went to look at him and, you guessed it, he had to come home with us too. We named him “Puff” because he is SOOO soft, and white like a little powder puff. Although a bit older than Teddy, Puff has crazy energy. Initially I was hoping that he could keep up with Teddy, because Stinkerbell is getting old. I am quickly realizing that it’s Teddy that is going to have to keep up :-)

I don’t know what more to write about my fuzzies here except I am happy to have them all. One dog, one cat and 3 ferrets. It takes a little patience and a lot of love to be owner of a fuzzy farm like I have, but the rewards are immense. Losing them really sucks, but not having had in my life at all is surely worse.

Now go and pet *your* fuzzy.

Nov 15

RIP Benny

By linc Home Life No Comments »


The bad part of being a pet owner is that, in eventuality, you have to deal with the death of a friend.

Today I had to put my friend Benny to sleep. He had been quite ill much of his life with some undiagnosed illness and mass in his lung, not to mention his heart murmur. Today my wife noticed his rear end was paralized. It was time.

Benny was a great ferret. Jubilant in his youth, he was a happy and loving companion for his whole, short life. We’ll miss him.

Nov 13

An interesting project perhaps?

By linc Humor, Internet, Linux 1 Comment »

The posts today are flying from my fingers! I guess watching Kitchen Nightmares has somehow gotten my brain and fingers working in conjunction with one another…

I mentioned that with my router troubles I had taken some pleasure in watching the people in my neighborhood connect to my unconnected router because it was unprotected and try to surf through it. It would sit there and blink like a dozen crazed fireflies half the night long.

Well, that got me thinking. If (and I do mean *if*) I can do some sort of reset magic and get my old router to function a little again, what about setting up a sort of science experiment? I am thinking of setting up a lone linux box, connected only to that default and unprotected router (except maybe a real admin password) and have that doll out connections to these people and have all web traffic redirected to a local page. The thought had crossed my mind to have all the web traffic redirected to a local goatse page, but perhaps that is too nasty. Maybe just collect all the statistical info I can get from their machines and redirect them to a page notifying them that I did just that and that and this connection wasn’t going to get them anywhere.

So, to that end, I am looking for ideas and suggestions on how to accomplish that feat. Perhaps squid? That might be a little heavy though, and I am under the impression that somehow we can do this with just iptables? There has to be an easy way. So, again, please let me know if you have hints, tips, or suggestions. This just might turn out to be some real fun!

Nov 13

OpenNetMon

By linc Linux 3 Comments »

I just mentioned how my internet connection went down in the middle of the night. Of course I don’t check my network when I get up in the morning until I get to work and try and get access to my email. At that point, if it’s something I can’t walk my wife through, I am out of luck until I get back home. That sort of scenario is most annoying, not only for me but also for the rest of my family who depend on the internet connection for their communication, entertainment and research as well.

That being the case I decided that what I really need is some sort of notification when that type of thing happens, so I can address it quicker. I started looking into different network monitoring packages and came up short. At work I use Nagios, which is a great piece of software, but tough to set up and overkill for what I really need. There are several others as well, but nothing quite fits the bill and everybody you ask tells you to use Nagios anyhow, so using anything else is not exactly confidence inspiring.

Several years ago I wrote a junky network monitoring script in bash. I decided to harvest a little bit from that and my newfound knowledge of the workings of better programs and have another go at it. I put together a very simple framework that I’ll call “OpenNetMon” unless something better happens along. This framework, written in bash scripts, allows me to write different modules for different types of monitoring, and different types of actions and chain them all together with specific servers and services that I need to be watched. It was very quick to get going, has a lot of flexibility, and so far, seems to work pretty well. I slapped the pieces I needed to use onto my account on Danns server (Hi Dann) and I have it checking icmp, http, ssh and imap access on 5 of my servers every 10 minutes. It takes less than 3 seconds to do so, including maintaining a service status change log and emailing and paging me with service changes.

Not quite sure where this is going just yet, but if you’re interested in tinkering on this project, just let me know.

Nov 13

How to ruin an uptime

By linc Email, Home Life, Humor, Internet, Linux No Comments »

I had this old Belkin wireless router at home, and I knew it was on the way out for some time now. The symptoms were it would occasionally just stop allowing any new connections. A couple weeks ago I purchased a nice little Netgear wireless router to replace it with, but as luck would have it, I didn’t do it fast enough.

I have told stories here about my penchant for procrastination at home. They are all too true I assure you. It’s sort of like that old adage that the mechanic’s car always is in need of repair Likewise, so it is with the System Administrator as well. I went week by week without the gumption to actually configure this new router and dig through the pile of ethernet cables and power wires to replace the old one. I will have to note, however, that I did take a perverse glee from seeing people in my neighborhood connect to my new and powered on but not connected router and try to surf the web. More on that later….

Back to the old router. As you may have guessed, I waited just long enough for it to die while I was not in a position for an immediate fix, throwing my wife and daughter into the thralls of several hours of internet withdrawal. For some reason, at 3:30 in the morning, it dropped it’s connection to my cable modem and steadfastly refused to grab an address from it again. My internal network was working just fine and you could connect to the wireless here, but could not get out through the intertubes whatsoever.

The fix was lengthy, mostly because of poor planning and much haste to get things running again. I put the new router in place fast enough, but, of course, I had to configure it for my specific network needs. This is where the trouble was. I had to change the base addressing to reflect my normal subnet. That was easy. I also had to change the password. That was a snap. I added in my port forwarding information. I turned off the router’s dhcp (I run a dhcp server). I had to fight through several resets of the router and cable modem to get the cable modem to hand out an address to my new router. The real rub came with my dyndns though. You see, in order for me to get into my email, my mail config points to my dyndns address. Well, due to my piss poor planning, all my dyndns account information was (you guessed it) stored in my email. Can’t get into email because no dyndns, can’t set up dyndns because account info in email. Sheesh, what a pain. I spent maybe an hour trying different account names and a dozen old passwords until I found the right combo.

None of that tells you how the uptime was ruined though. That was just an absolutely stupid moment I had. I take great pride normally in pointing out to windows users that you almost never have to reboot a working Linux/unix system. It’s just not necessary unless you can’t get a shell somehow. Well, I must be working too close to the windows guys because before I figured out why I couldn’t get into my email, I spent a good 20 minutes or so troubleshooting and getting increasingly frustrated until, you guessed it, I played the old “lets just reboot the server and see if that fixes things” card. How humbling it was to lose my 195 day uptime and of course the reboot helped nothing. It really was one of those “I could have had a V8″ moments.

So what are some things to be learned form this? Normally I keep a file tucked away that holds all my various logins and account information and passwords. Of course, my dyndns info was missing from this. You can rest assured it’s there now. Although it does not sound like good security practice to do that, there just is no other practical way I can think of to manage all that info than to keep a list somehow. The other thing is, by all means, when you start to get frustrated with a problem, step away for a moment and/or ask someone for advice before you make it worse. I guarantee that if I had stepped away and maybe called Dann or something, I would have realized what a dope was being before I finished dialing the number. Instead I just blundered my way through because I was tired and irritated causing myself even more downtime than was necessary.

Nov 02

Politics – The Lone Dissenter

By linc Politics 12 Comments »


I don’t oftenshare my political or religious views here. I save those for other sites, but this is of particular importance to me as a Christian and a parent. I would like those of you considering voting for Obama this election to hear this one fact and plea.

As a Christian and a parent I value human life greatly. I believe that a human is a human from the moment of conception on and therefor, aborting that life, unless there is a severe medical reason, is murder. Plain and simple. Now many of you reading this may disagree, and that *IS* your prerogative and right to do so. What you *SHOULD* agree with me on is MY right not to have to pay for something I believe is federally sanctioned murder. You see, my vote in this election hinges on the fact that Obama and his crew want to push into legislation that every female person should be able to get the abortion they want, regardless of the conditions, including their ability to pay for it. That puts ME in the position of paying for what I believe in most cases is infanticide. Now surely there are other reasons too for my choices, but that’s the first sticking point.

Now I am sure that you all have your opinions and stories about the “Chistian Right” and all that. I have heard people poking fun at the GOP for being so old-minded about such things too. I have even endured all the hillbilly jabs. But in all honesty, it’s issues like these, the big issues, that those Christian Right Wingers are concerned about and maybe everyone else should give a brief thought to as well.

Just my $.02.

preload preload preload