MisterX Tech

In trying to uncover the version of a CLI tool I uncovered this small Easter Egg.


# nbd-client -v
nbd-client: unrecognized option '-v'
E: option eaten by 42 mice


Just a quick note for others to enjoy…

To most folks gmail meets the near 100% uptime and for freemail services is the top dog. I just want to remind folks that even the best take a few seconds off from time to time.

Aug 27 20:40:58 XXXXqmail: 1377650458.833799 delivery 10985: deferral: 
173.194.77.26_failed_after_I_sent_the_message./Remote_host_said:_421_4.7.0_Temporary_System_Problem.__Try_again_later_(MU)._w5si2150276obn.152_-_gsmtp/

Why did I post this ? Because after a decade at a ISP and hearing “well my gmail never goes down” this log message made me smile a little :) Now lets get back to  enjoying our 99.9999% uptimes!

Here is a real error I got after making a system config change recently. Can anyone guess what that change might have been. To give a little hint I got this on a new session opened up in screen on the system that had the change.

[I have no name!@*****]>ssh ******
You don’t exist, go away!

Customer had started a fsck and didn’t set it to auto fix issues. Got into the check and , after several minutes, found the need to hold the “Y” key permanently. Since he was ready to eat lunch I hooked him up with some ghetto engineering.

If you do a :

telnet misterx.org 1701

You can get several MoTDs and some info on Star Trek online. Why did I do this..who knows…I was bored one night waiting for a FS benchmark to finish. Heck I dont even play Star Trek online I just was playing with a way to parse content in a bash script.

This totally geeky waste of time is brought to you thanks to : Steam, lynx, DJB (TCPSERVER+DAEMONTOOLS), and IMDB.com!

Was troubleshooting a coding issue for a customer the other day when I noticed the number of requests currently being processed. I am going to write about this in the coming days. Basically there was a code issue (we do not support code for this customer) that caused a large number of “sleep” states in MySQL as well as a huge number of ‘W Sending Reply’ states in Apache.

Current Time: Thursday, 11-Feb-2010 11:47:54 CST

Restart Time: Thursday, 11-Feb-2010 09:17:12 CST

Parent Server Generation: 0

Server uptime: 2 hours 30 minutes 41 seconds

Total accesses: 226733 – Total Traffic: 10.8 GB

CPU Usage: u1812.56 s80.08 cu.04 cs0 – 20.9% CPU load

25.1 requests/sec – 1.2 MB/second – 49.8 kB/request

1337 requests currently being processed, 113 idle workers

Just a few thoughts I had while battling the endless waves of canned meat I fight daily. Some of these are out of anger, some are out of frustration, and  some are there just for fun.  I will let you, the end user, determine which one is for what reason.

In no particular order:

1. Get rid of free email providers.
2. Make all new domains registered setup and understand SPF/DKIM or similar DNS based technology
3. Make email cost more per box with reasonable limits. I mean seriously who needs 500 boxes for a company with 10 people. A little extra cost can go a long way.
4. Tougher Laws on people that send UCE (Unsolicited commercial e-mail). A little can go a long way here as well.
   
5. Make violators found guilty of sending UCE  watch endless internet phenomenon based movies for weeks at a time. Think the “Dramatic Chipmunk” and all its variants for a week flowing into the spammers brain Clockwork Orange style.
   
6. Make ISPs stop tell the truth when telling its customers what their spam filter policy really is. Mark it as spam and the person you think isnt going to find out might just know you marked their message about family holiday cheer as spam.
   
7. Catch-All accounts need to go away.Their day ended almost back in the days of the ARPA net.  If we can end spam maybe these will be ok but till then its not a good idea, ever.
8. Vacation/Away messages. You just told a spammer that not only is the mail box they are sending real but that the person there loves and misses them and will be back in a week.

(more soon real work calls)

From a single “badmail” folder on a Windows Server 2003 box. Amazing how bad script writiers are as almost all of these were related to no “From” being set in the script.

This Winzip install is on the same fragged Server 2000 box in the last post. This screen shot was taken Jan 7th 2007 but sadly I cannot get a new shot as a overzealous engineer uninstalled winzip last week for some strange reason.

What do you think ?

This was a VERY old Server 2000 install that had been forgotten about. Seems time wasnt nice to the filesystem…or maybe the Sysadmin was a sadistic BOFH who is into filesystem S&M ?!