Trying a new SPAM filter -- spamhaus

We will see how it works!

Been working on a few things lately. I got my old Ditto tape drive to work, and have been doing backups to tape of the server. You can see a screenshot here. The device seems to work better than it ever did under Windows!

I am playing around with centralizing my user authentication using LDAP, but I don't seem to be making much progress. I don't know if the support programs are just not out there, or if I haven't found them yet. More about this later.

Found a neat little tidbit about my DSL on the web. I had the problem that when there was an upload happening at the same time as a download, the download would all but die, and the response time of any connection was terrible. My ping times would go to 4000+ ms! It turns out the reason for this is that there is a buffer in the DSL modem, and the upload fills the buffer so that any traffic (such as a ping or ACK during a download) has to wait in queue to be sent. The solution to this situation was to use my Linux firewall and iproute2 to limit the output to just under my upload speed. This causes the buffer in the modem to always be empty, and therefore pings and ACKs can be sent right away. Here is the iproute2 statement that I found on the net:

tc qdisc add dev eth0 root tbf rate 125kbit latency 50ms burst 1540

Now uploads don't kill all my interactive traffic such as http and ssh!

Ahhh... Been a while since I updated the news page.

My Athlon 800mhz machine took a dive this past week. The motherboard is totally fried. Since it was useless with a toasted board, I took the 20G drive out and installed it in the server for extra space. I took a bunch of stuff I had stored on the 10,000 rpm scsi disks and moved it over, so now users should have plenty of disk space to use.

While I was at it, I took the cdrom out of the server as well. I figured that it wasn't getting used, so why have it in there?

I am now using a dual ppro 200mhz speedster (aptly named speedy) as my main box--it gets the job done for the most part.

Added some formatting to the news page.

Updated "distanthaze.com" image on main page. Finally got the gif to look almost as good as a png would--too bad IE doesn't support png transparencies as nicely as Mozilla does!