not much
haven’t really been doing too much lately. i’ve been absorbed in home improvement and other maintenance stuff for the last couple of months. i planted grass seed and the wind blew it away 2 days later. replanted, grass started growing and then rabbits started snacking on it. now i’m trying to figure out how to repel rabbits. i’m leaning towards fox urine powder, but unfortunately it’s a lot harder to find locally than it should be.
last week, i had to pay almost $700 for rear brakes since carmax decided when they “repaired” an issue with my rear brakes when i bought my truck, that they wouldn’t have to follow a TSB issued by dodge that would address the problem at its root and prevent its recurrence.
while it was up on the rack at midas (no way i’m touching drum brakes. too many little parts for me to lose) they pointed out that the front brakes were ready to go as well. i ordered some rotors and “premium semi-metallic pads” from brakeperformance.com and had them delivered tuesday. wednesday, i spent 6 hours replacing the rotors and pads. it shoulda been a straightforward thing since the truck is equipped with a floating rotor assembly (the rotors are held on by a bracket and the lug nuts) but since the truck spent its early life in colorado, the rotors were seized to the hubs. 3 hours of beating and spraying w/wd-40 freed them and i was able to get them replaced. stopping distance is much improved, as is noise. pedal feel kind of sucks but i can live with it so long as the truck stops straight and the wheels don’t fall off.
next on the list of things to do to the truck is a bedliner. i’m leaning towards a bedrug because it’s soft and chemical/dirt resistant and can be rinsed like anything else. i’ll plan on doing that sometime later this summer. after that, maybe i’ll do cat-back exhaust or something equally snazzy. maybe some new weathertech floormats if they ever sort out their production capacity issues.
i’ve started playing star trek online. i found that it’s a good trade-off between the sci-fi stuff i loved about EVE but without all the know-it-all assholes that have populated the EVE universe since mid-08. i don’t feel like i’m missing out if i don’t play for a few days and i can easily kill a couple hours doing space combat missions without really having to do any away team missions (they’re boring, derivative MMORPG crap for the most part)
it’s also a very pretty game.
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- ENGAGE….or something
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- OOOOOO…nebulae….
moving hosts again
sharkspace has been great for a year, but i haven’t been able to get a decent path to the shared server so my upload speeds were always suffering. in turn, i’m switching to superb.net gridiron platform, which seems to be pretty intriguing from a shared hosting standpoint. now, i miss managing all my own email/www/etc, but competently managed shared hosting is fine by me.
if you’re looking for a webhost, i’d totally recommend superb.net – their pricing, support and speeds are great.
that’s what i get
rant rant rant.
last year, in may or so, i moved from using a linode vps for my mail and domain hosting, to using hosted exchange for mail and a shared host for the sites. the shared host for the sites has been perfect. i’ve had 99.999% uptime, the only time the sites have been down is during maintenance. this is better than my own uptime with my vps. (i should say that wasn’t any fault of linode who are totally awesome and if you’re in need of a vps, you should look them up.)
why do i pay for mail? there are a few reasons.
1. i don’t trust people with my data. companies that offer enterprise-grade email and communications platforms have a lot more incentive to keep shit private and protect your stuff.
2. i like uptime, i like reliability and i like being able to contact the host to have stuff resolved if something happens, rather than getting to lose mail or something.
3. i like supporting businesses who offer competent, well-engineered, reliable services.
i started off with the hosted exchange company, sherweb, who when i signed up were offering a competitive blend of services and price that was too good to pass up. i really like exchange and i really like outlook and owa. they’re extremely well-integrated, well-tested, reliable platforms for mta use, pc clients and web clients respectively. after having service with sherweb for around 4 months, i started noticing that it seemed like they had downtime two or three times a week. of course, this isn’t a huge deal, but the loss of performance and issues with their (terrible) barracuda hardware firewall/spam appliance made me want to try something else. i read some reviews and against my own better judgement (i despise google) i signed up for google apps premier.
google does lots of stuff i don’t agree with and lots of things that make me really nervous. they don’t do any one thing terribly well. their search algorithms aren’t all that great. their maps platform hasn’t really evolved since it was first released. gmail offers free mail at the expense of letting google rifle through your personal stuff. their metrics allow them to track user site visits and stuff, which is interesting in that you can see who sees your site, but you’re also doing a big disservice to your users by allowing google to follow them around. they’re just a creepy, orwellian company who make money from your personal information and other net-metrics.
getting back to signing up for google apps, i don’t know why i did it. the thought of having what i felt was a somewhat reliable infrastructure keeping my mail flowing and my information safe (their apps privacy policy at the time was very strict and decent, all things considered.) i ran into numerous quirks and broken features and google had their instances of downtime that people seem to have absolutely no problem with. at any rate, the price was right, it was $50/year for mail, contacts, calendar access, documents and it’d sync with my pre. this in itself was significant, because it saved me approximately $60/year over my current hosted exchange provider. i purchased my service, waited for it to be provisioned, then moved all my mail over, set mx records, waited a week, then was ready to roll. i had a total of 12 incidents where i couldn’t access my mail for 4-5 hours at a time. a few of those were reported on as they affected their regular gmail services as well as the premier apps service.
for the most part, their service was alright. i hate gmail’s interface. their calendar support is alright, their docs support is actually pretty good. other than the aforementioned downtime, the system was pretty reliable. fast forward to february, this year. last month, i’d been reading some pretty screwy/scary statements made by folks at google that sort of confirmed my opinion of them re: data security/information as a commodity. it made me nervous, but i still had just a few months left until my apps acct would lapse and i could move my domain somewhere else. one night, i was bored at work and read a bunch of stuff that made me wonder about google’s apps privacy policy, so i went to read it. i wish i hadn’t.
i immediately began looking at my options as i only had a few months left on my account and decided that i’d just go back to another exchange provider. i settled on one, set up an account and was ready to go. except, the new company didn’t process my order. i had to call the following morning, and spoke to someone who finished processing my order for me. thinking that was that, i logged into the control panel, and saw that postini had hung on provisioning and my account wasn’t ready. i called the provider again who explained that the postini provisioning api had stalled because my existing domain had postini service. it didn’t, so i thanked the guy and went to research it a bit. i learned a few really wonderful things about the google apps platform. you can’t have google apps premium and separate postini service. there’s no reason it shouldn’t work aside from google either being too fucking lazy to figure out a way or just flat-out not wanting users to be able to do it. at any rate, i researched a bit more and found hundreds of threads on google’s forums and on other forums stating that they couldn’t move from premier to free apps without deleting their domain and having mail service downtime because google has no way to migrate between services. i also found out that when you disable service and delete your domain, it takes them 5 days to delete it. well, that’s what they say on their site, but from what i read, it can take 6-8 weeks in some cases, even with constant contact with google support, for them to finally release your domain. only then, can you add additional services or make changes to things. they also make it impossible to change your domain once your account is provisioned. also, they make it impossible to change your username without using their provisioning api. is it really that hard to add a ui element to let users change their address?
after doing some research and submitting a ticket to google to have postini deleted from my account so i could provision my new mail service, i logged in to get my support PIN and noticed i had no mail. zero mail. i checked docs, that too was empty. looked at my calendar. blank as well. well fuck. at this point, i’m livid. i have my mail backed up in preparation for moving to a new host, so it’s not the fact that i lost my mail that made me mad. it’s that there’s no recourse for it. according to their phone system, it’s not an “emergency” because i have less than 10 users. at this point, i’m so angry i just contact the new host to see if i could get a temporary MX record to just get the fuck off google apps til i can get them to remove my services. of course, since my luck is so awesome, they won’t do it. i started scouring the interbutts for another hosted exchange provider who might give me a temporary MX record and happened upon the message center. they said they had 24/7 support, so i figured i’d give them a shot. i called their support number and spoke to someone who gave me some suggestions for removing postini/apps stuff from my domain and gave me their phone # on file for google support (which isn’t published on google’s site, btw). the dude also told me that their provisioning system would give me a temporary MX to use until i get squared away with the google bullshit. great.
so i got my mail set up, migrated over, changed my MX records and now i’m waiting til tomorrow when i can actually (hopefully) speak to someone at google and get them to remove their broken fucking apps service and other bullshit from my domain so i can get provisioned with postini service and return to ignoring their existence.
google pledges enterprise reliability, but doesn’t actually have 24/7 support, nor do they actually answer email tickets. i found numerous threads where people hadn’t heard from google in 6-8 WEEKS since submitting a ticket, their issue was still unresolved (and in some cases, totally unacceptable) and yet people still continue using their services. i don’t get it. if they treat their paying customers like shit, what do they do for the folks who use their “free” stuff? gross.
dsl madness
according to one of the regional vps for qwest i contacted earlier this year regarding their fttn (fiber to the node) deployment, they weren’t planning on having it available at my address til next year. imagine my surprise, when i got a postcard from qwest saying that they would be deploying it by year’s end, and then further my surprise when i saw it was available as an upgrade when i went online to pay my bill. i ordered 12/5 service for $52.99/month and was overnighted a vdsl modem to replace the adsl2 modem they’d sent me originally.
i received the new modem and installed it in preparation of the new circuit going online sometime before 1700 that day. unfortunately, qwest’s ordering system didn’t finish processing the order and it necessitated a call to customer service to get it completed so their engineers could finish provisioning. after that was settled, the line was up on the new vdsl circuit…but…the modem only trained at 6.5 mbit/sec. this was obviously disappointing, as my previous adsl circuit trained at a full 7192kbit/sec without issue. i contacted qwest support and they noticed there was a problem with errors incrementing at an insane rate. their engineers were pretty confident it was an external line fault, so they issued a repair ticket.
the qwest tech tested the lines between the premises to the termination point in their CO or RT, and it was pushing 12.1mbit all the way, when he tested at the jack in my office, however, it was only showing the same speed the modem had shown, indicating it was an interior wiring fault. he suggested finding the splices and wiring the jack directly to the plant coming in from the telco.
i managed to find our wiring and it turns out the contractor who built the complex didn’t follow best-practices for telephone wiring and used telecom beanies to splice together a total of 6 wires.
beanies are designed to handle a maximum of 3 wires each, so there was obviously an issue with this. after i identified the pair coming in from the office walljack, i directly connected the plant wiring to the jack, as the qwest tech suggested. when i fired the modem back up, it trained at 12122/888. it’s not the 12192/5192 that i was supposed to get, so i contacted qwest and it turns out they can’t provision my circuit for the 5mbit upload speed yet.
suffice it to say, i’m happy with the 1.4MB/sec sustained downstream and sort of happy with the stable 600kbit/sec rate-limited (qos) upstream. the line is nice and stable and after a couple weeks, i’m going to investigate whether qwest could remove interleaving from the line, so i could get sub-10ms first hop ping times like i had with the adsl2 circuit.
i love incompetent sysadmins
A message from
-> xxxxx@inrocks.com
was considered unsolicited bulk e-mail (UBE).
Our internal reference code for your message is 13927-01-42/1K6zyFLMGD5V
The message carried your return address, so it was either a genuine mail
from you, or a sender address was faked and your e-mail address abused
by third party, in which case we apologize for undesired notification.
We do try to minimize backscatter for more prominent cases of UBE and
for infected mail, but for less obvious cases of UBE some balance
between losing genuine mail and sending undesired backscatter is sought,
and there can be some collateral damage on both sides.
First upstream SMTP client IP address: [217.115.161.163] smtp1.integra.fr
According to a 'Received:' trace, the message originated at: [79.144.143.2],
ivassdo 79.144.143.2
Return-Path:
Message-ID: <004b01c4c18b$2df7dc07$f29ba330@ivassdo>
Subject: =?koi8-r?B?REVBUiBQaWVycmUgU2lhbmtv?= =?koi8-r?B?d3NraQ==?=
Delivery of the email was stopped!
Reporting-MTA: dns; antispam.integra.fr
Received-From-MTA: smtp; antispam.integra.fr ([127.0.0.1])
Arrival-Date: Sat, 25 Apr 2009 11:12:42 +0200 (CEST)
Original-Recipient: rfc822;xxxxx@inrocks.com
Final-Recipient: rfc822;xxxxx@inrocks.com
Action: failed
Status: 5.7.0
Diagnostic-Code: smtp; 554 5.7.0 Reject, id=13927-01-42 - SPAM
Last-Attempt-Date: Sat, 25 Apr 2009 11:12:42 +0200 (CEST)
Final-Log-ID: 13927-01-42/1K6zyFLMGD5V
Return-Path:
Received: from smtp1.integra.fr (smtp1.integra.fr [217.115.161.163])
by antispam.integra.fr (Postfix) with SMTP id CD7CC106D3
for
Received: (qmail 26774 invoked from network); 25 Apr 2009 09:11:58 -0000
Received: from unknown (HELO p1host4.provider-one.net) (87.236.89.7)
by smtp1.integra.fr with SMTP; 25 Apr 2009 11:11:58 +0200
Received-SPF: none (smtp1.integra.fr: domain at omfgoggles.net does not designate permitted sender hosts)
Received: from ivassdo (79.144.143.2)
by p1host4.provider-one.net; Sat, 25 Apr 2009 10:11:58 +0100
Date: Sat, 25 Apr 2009 10:11:58 +0100
From: =?koi8-r?B?Q2hyaXMgVmFuIFZvcm91cw==?=
X-Mailer: WebMail_
Reply-To: =?koi8-r?B?Q2hyaXMgVmFuIFZvcm91cw==?=
X-Priority: 5 (Low)
Message-ID: <004b01c4c18b$2df7dc07$f29ba330@ivassdo>
To: =?koi8-r?B?UGllcnJlIFNpYW5rb3dza2k=?=
Subject: =?koi8-r?B?REVBUiBQaWVycmUgU2lhbmtv?=
=?koi8-r?B?d3NraQ==?=
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: multipart/mixed;
boundary="----=_NextPart_000_0049_01C4A330.F29BDC07"
So…yeah. Someone spoofed my address, sending a message from a completely unrelated mail system, which isn’t an MX of my domain(s). The receiving system is concerned about spam and reducing backscatter. So they don’t look at their own scans of the message and determine that it didn’t originate from my system, but they reply anyway telling me it was unsolicited bulk mail. Pretty awesome. They want to reduce backscatter, but they reply to spam messages? Get a fucking clue, morons.
SOCIAL MEDIA EXPLOOOOSION
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