November 2008 – Steve Dougherty's Blog

Rig Changes

I added my old 120GB server hard drive to my eMachine. Windows and Ubuntu now have drives to themselves. I spent what was probably literally half an hour staring at the JKDefrag screen, until I realized that because my Firefox profile was on the Linux drive I could browse without locking up too many files. QDB FTW.

When I put the drive in I was hoping they would be cable select, (ATA >.<) but they weren’t. Luckily, I had taken one of my 20GB drives from the school over here, and took a jumper from that to set the drive to secondary. Before installing Intrepid, I tweaked the BIOS. Apparently I had reset it to defaults after messing with the fan speeds, so I once again disabled the onboard sound and video. After some research, I also enabled ROM shadowing and some other stuff in the hopes of extra speed. Intrepid is shiny.

It’s nice to have more space. The extra space allowed for a thorough defrag. I ran JKDefrag twice – once to sort everything alphabetically, another to defragment. Woo.

Ext3 Inode Problems

I recently did a fresh install of Intrepid Ibex because the upgrade button didn’t give me all of the new features, and my system was getting strange anyway since I installed PulseAudio from source. When I tried to mount my new partition, (with Ext2 IFS) Windows proclaimed:

The disk in drive L: is not formatted. Would you like to format it?

I could still mount my old partition, a fsck turned up no errors… I eventually discovered that the driver’s limitation of 128 byte inodes was the problem. Ext2fsd supports larger inode sizes. (Mine is 256 bytes.) Its UI is somewhat clunkier, but still perfectly usable.

I’m also catching up on all the South Park I missed. Good stuff.

Kexec

It looks like kexec is quite usable, which is nice to know. Now I won’t have to reboot to apply that nagging kernel upgrade on my alarm machine. Eh, even then it might not be worth it.

pfSense

I read a large part of the feature list. This part made me sad.

Limitations

Only works on primary WAN interface – multi-WAN support is available in 2.0.
Can only update one account with a single provider. 2.0 enables the use of unlimited accounts.
Only works when pfSense has the public IP assigned to one of its interfaces. If you have a modem that obtains your public IP and gives pfSense a private IP, the private IP will be registered with the provider. In 2.0, there is an option to determine your actual public IP and correctly register it.

Given that I do have a modem that assigns a private IP to whatever is connected to it, I’ll either have to use the unstable version if this stuff has already been added, or just stick with what I’m already using, which is really messy and involves duplicate python scripts in cron. If I get the time and will to do so I might hack the script apart so I only need to run it once and it searches the router more efficiently, but… EDIT: D’oh. I can set the script to check multiple domains. I now only run one instance of the thing.

Left 4 Dead

Left 4 Dead is coming along nicely. One of the really useful things with the dynamic difficulty thanks to the Director is that wide skill ranges can play. My dad’s fairly new to these things and he didn’t die, and I think it was his first time playing with another human, perhaps third time through the map outright.

I hope to get a dedicated server up, and I also hope that 56KB/s upload is enough…

I like the matchmaking, it works well and makes it very easy to find people to play with.

PS: Looks like ZoneEdit has been working for a while in pfWall. Now I need to get another NIC and get the hole in the wall…

Server Move Complete!

The server has now been moved to the Pentium 4 box! It was a surprisingly easy move. All passwords and data should be preserved. Let me know if there are problems, all the data remains on the former server as well.

RSA key fingerprint is now:

3f:04:a3:9e:d5:c2:77:9a:f1:ef:56:43:6c:4c:b2:ed

I tar’d up my main web directory, tar’d one other person’s stuff, and just moved another’s one at a time. (Only 2 files, so…) Moving them over network was okay, although maybe not as fast as I might have hoped – going from the P3 to the P4 was about 6.5MB/s. Tar preserved the permissions. Then I moved over the MySQL databases using PhpMyAdmin. I needed to move the MySQL users too, so I exported the users table of the database “MySQL” and restored the lines I needed. I hope I got the system user passwords moved successfully as well – I recreated the users, then moved the /etc/shadow lines for each user from the P3 to P4 box.

Homework

I hope I’ll be able to learn my lesson this time: if it’s assigned more than one in advance, it’ll take more than an hour to do it. I stayed up until 1:30AM to finish an econ essay, and I will have Spanish vocab studying, a Brit Lit essay, and whatever else I get today for after school. Bleh.

The Left 4 Dead demo is set to release sometime today, and the Valve server admin mailing list is spazzing out because Valve announced there will no longer be a server browser in Left 4 Dead – servers will be added to a pool of available ones, and people will be matchmake’d into them. The only control over settings server admins will have is the MOTD and a banner image. They’ve said they’re taking the piles of feedback into concideration, though, so hopefully a traditional server browser will be included. The reason they get loads of servers for only the cost of software distribution is because people get to put up a server for themselves, and they control it, call it home, and are able to possibly get a better experience if they upgrade their servers. In a pure matchmaking setting? Doesn’t seem like it. I want to be able to pick the server I play on.

Server

All the BOINC Zombies are now running Rosetta@home. I figure even if we do find aliens, what will we do? How would we communicate? I mean it’s taken us this long just to FIND them. Would they even still exist by the time we got and found some of their radio transmissions? Would they be friendly? Advanced? Then there’s the question of whether they would even be using radio waves or something different.

Also the Zombie Master dedicated is now installed, and later today I might also switch over the web server. I might want to install Mani Admin Plugin, too.

LAN Successful!

Brad was sick, 🙁 and everyone else showed up eventually. It was a scramble to get uplink – we ended up sticking a cable through a hole in the floor left over from the water radiators way back when. I didn’t get the Pentium 4 box up in time, but it seems to be doing okay now… We played StarCraft, and Pat beat me. (It was 7-person free-for-all.) We also played CSS with lots of bots in a futile attempt to simulate Left 4 Dead. Then we played Zombie Master. That was very fun indeed – I killed many people with my wonderful undead minions.