DotBlag dot Com

  • State of the Firewall

    Or the stateful-firewall.  Interesting little thing to get bit by.  But to understand it at all I have to go into a little bit of explanation.  We use LVS in what’s known as a Direct Routing (LVS/DR) configuration.  We have a (large) number of VIP’s that the load balancers handle.  The VIP’s are not on […]

  • Web Formatting, or Mis-Formatting in this case.

    Looks like the <pre> tag I put in this post didn’t cause the layout to expand like i thought it would.  Oh well.  Looks like yet another case of mis-formatting.  I’d look into it, but I’m really not an HTML/CSS guy so I’d barely know where to start.

  • Immutable Flash Processes….

    OK If you’re a hardware designer, or embedded systems engineer/designer, make sure when you design your flash process to be customer recoverable.  Bad flash’s happen.  Also, blade manufacturers, other activity on the management module, shouldn’t interrupt a flash process.  Looks like I’ll be returning an  Intel SBXD132 due to a fragged SMP (System Management Processor — Embedded management module) that […]

  • Where’s the RAID? I’ve still got a bug!

    Some days it’d be nice to be a cockroach, life would be simpler that’s for sure.  So in a previous post I mentioned the trials of getting an ARC-1280ML working with 16+ drives in JBOD.  We’ve decided to go with a pair of the same controller, less ports the ARC-1231ML.  Hopefully they’ll fix the limitation […]

  • Blades, but not the sharp kind, seriously.

    Just plugged in a couple new (yes I know discontinued) Intel SBXD132‘s.  Naturally, BIOS and Embedded Management (SMP) is code is out of date, 1.06 is current, 1.04 is installed, and I’m not entirely sure about the SMP version numbers.  Flash the BIOS uneventfully, then, go to flash the SMP.  SMP nearly completes, taking it’s […]

  • No whammies!

    As our new SysAdmin is fond of saying, No Whammies!  The aforementioned afflicted Supermicro PDSMI+ SYS-5015M-T+B chassis is now in one piece slogging through burn-in testing thanks to one VERY helpful comment.  

  • Wow, someone reads this crap?

    I have to say thanks to mickrussom because he gave me the heads up/answer as to WHY our Supermicro PDSMI+ system wasn’t working.  Turns out the Intel 3000 north bridge ONLY supports up to 1066MHZ FSB speeds, despite the specifications on Supermicro‘s site clearly claiming “Supports a Dual-Core Intel® Xeon® 3000 Series processor” — Their emphasis, not mine, […]

  • Of Domains and Duhmains

    So.  This is the story of trying to register dotblag.com.   I’ve used joker.com as my primary registrar for some years now.  They’ve been reliable and responsive in the past when I’ve needed manual intervention/help.  However.  Their CC validation system lately has been, to say the least, persnickety.  Wonk.  Very wonk.  To the point that […]

  • Kernel Bugs … No, not corn kernels, the other kind.

    This one is shorter than usual.  Things have been busy but I wanted to muse on this, because, thankfully, I didn’t get bit by it. Linux 2.6.17 to about 2.6.24.1 or so has a nice little bug in the vmsplit syscall, wherein it fails to validate parameters.  Thus, one can get root.  Well I set […]