yaleman.org

Yesterday we had an issue with one of our 100 megabit connections to the outside world, which runs most of our WAN traffic. I’m posting this to try and convince ya’ll on the interwebs to double-check my thinking.

So, here’s the timeline:

• Approximately 1305 outbound usable bandwidth from our active GWIP link dropped to an average of ~20Mbit/second. The maximum outbound packet rate sat on approximately 5000 packets/second. Inbound data was not affected.
• Investigations started at approximately 1330, it was originally believed that power brownouts which affected many sites in the SEQ region at approximately 1215-1220 could have been affecting services.
• At approximately 1415pm a job was logged with The Vendor.
• The job was escalated within The Vendor to Tier2 at approximately 1500, and I spoke with some Vendor reps about the escalation approximately ten minutes later.
• As of approximately 1515, packet rates started to rise and outbound bandwidth started to increase.
• I spoke with their tech at approximately 16:15; he advised that during the impact to services we were over-utilizing the link.
• The Vendor claims that due to the fact that their systems show 5 minute averages and ours 1 minute, this explains the 80Mbit/second disparity in traffic displayed on our respective systems.

Other facts:

Once in a while I actually get to remember enough to help someone - with something I’m actually interested in - not often, but just sometimes. 🙂 Generally I do as much learning as helping along the way.

Someone asked about a slow MySQL query on #sage-au tonight. They had been asked to look into a small e-commerce site that’s been having issues for a few years, slow page loads and the like.

It’s fairly common to find how-to’s that show you how to use .htaccess to block hotlinked images, but it seems a lot of them show you to redirect to an outside file. Not sure why that’s a good idea, or not mentioned, but meh.

Now, the important rules are in the second and last lines. The last line redirects any hotlinked images (which don’t come from your sites’ domains. The second line un-blocks the redirect protection for only that image.

If you think your save game in Crime City has gone missing, do the following…

1. Reset your phone
2. Wait for the USB media check to stop (and close all other apps)
3. Load the game

If that doesn’t work

1. Go into task manager,
2. Kill all running non-system apps, including backup/sync programs etc.
3. Try again

If it can’t access storage (such as when startup is happening) it’ll flip out and not be able to get/save to the cached files it needs to. I dare say this probably happens with Modern War by Gree.

I present to you my evil nemesis, the spider with the evil eye.

This thing had so much heft that while walking along the floor you could hear his feet go tickticktick etc. Scary as hell.

Scarier still, there was a bright red reflection visible to the naked eye from one of his eyes. Maybe he’s actually a terminator?

I think this chatlog sums it up, really:

21:56 yaleman: ffs

[Read More]

This is how it looks currently, with a chinese-copy EOTech and some Magpul MBUS’ front and rear. The hand grip is an airsoft 4″ long one, which looks much less out of place than the alternatives, which are 7″ or so, and would cover the barrel.

It shoots incredibly well, seeing as it weighs a couple of KG’s (exact weight to come) and it’s only shooting 22LR 🙂

It seems when I was messing around with our printer a few months back, I may have changed an error message or two for the fun of it.

Somehow, it took over three months for the message to actually be noticed - a workmate came to me asking what I’d done to the printer - I wonder why he came straight to me? 🙁

Thanks to bigkahuna on the Fritzbox forums (edit 30/4/16: now defunct) I found a working configuration to get OSX clients connecting to a Fritz!Box 7390 router’s VPN.

Before you start

Setup a dynamic hostname of some sort, this makes it so you don’t have to keep working out what IP you connect to. Dyndns.org is a good supplier. Configuring that is outside the scope of this article, but from my experience it’s been just a case of enter the details and it works.

So, RMB’s had a pair of the beautiful Samsung 931B’s for a few years now. They’ve been quite reliable until recently, when one started flickering on and off.

This actually had been happening for a month or two, and if you turned it off then back on again all would be good. Eventually this turned into just plain not working - acting like someone was just tapping power all the time. As this started, the other one started flicking on and off periodically.

Squeeee! It’s preloading!