Looks like a Dalek that survived Chernobyl.

Can you move out of my network connection? btw, your skin is getting dark spots.

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/05/a-wireless-network-with-frickin-laser-beams-on-the-ceiling/

Ig: It is still a mess, if you look at the source of most pdfs, it is an unholy mess. They only began with the latest release a "block oriented" approach in favour of their previous "line oriented" approach. Ever wondered why copying text from a 2 column pdf was so hard?

I still love to send people pdf files of my finished texts, but only because it is more cross-plattform compared to office files. It also looks better than .rtf or .txt and is read only for most people.

people started wrapping bitmaps by a pdf container.

If PDF really is that flexible, one must wonder why it has not become the native document format for pretty much anything and everything.  What are its limitations?

There are also pdfs which you can edit but then you not save the edited version. At least not with the free windows stuff. With the proper Acrobat, you can. But it is alright to use vesion 5 or 6 of it, you do not need to buy the whole new CS. Also, sometime you want to correct text in a pdf, dunno if gimp or any other tool does that yet.

But "pdftotext -layout" probably is the best ever tool to convert pdfs into a plaintext file while preserving the layout. You can then use perl or awk chew down the data. This might sound uncomfy, but some pdfs which look fine and ordered to humans are a pain if you want to extract the contained data mechanically.

you could probably also use open/libreoffices pdf printing for non-bitmaped pdfes

It is a bit like a religion, especially since there is only immaculate conception.  Try re-selling maculate Adobe suites, at least commercially, that is very tricky. (At least in germany it is, MS and Adobe come done with armies of lawyers at you.)

Not surprised. My Cit is currently on Amazon until I get my new server built.

well, two wintendos with the same guid would also make magic things happen.

Hey, it's more realistic than you think.  Remember NetWare?  If two NetWare servers saw each other using the same license key, Bad Things™ would begin happening.  One or more of the servers would actively harass you.

I realy like running ntop at the gate outside.

Wed Mar 21 2012 10:29:54 PM EDT from IGnatius T Foobar @ Uncensored

That's no fail, that's a Real Computer (tm). Check it out at http://ripsaw.cac.psu.edu/~mloewen/Oldtech/Tandy/Model6000HD.html

*sigh*

I miss computers :(

Thanks for the link!  That was really cool.

I had I Tandy 600HD back in the 90's.  It ran Xenix.  I never thought I'd see one again.  It was the coolest lookibg computer I ever owned.  I wish I would have kept it......sigh.

Wed Mar 21 2012 05:11:39 PM EDT from IGnatius T Foobar @ Uncensored

<yorkshire accent>

You were lucky to have wifi! When I was in high school we had to carry floppy disks around.

</yorkshire accent>

Uphill, in the snow, both ways.

Dead beef cafe - ha.

Miss old "dead dad" we used to use for the IPX/SPX address on the Novell test server back in the day.

Wed Sep 14 2011 01:26:40 EDT from the8088er @ Uncensored

Does anyone have any experience setting up a long range ewireless ethernet bridge? I'm looking at using Motorola Canopy equipment to span around 4.1 miles.

We used Ubiquiti (2.4,g) equipment to go much further than that - assuming you have LOS or NLOS.

It is cheap, and it works - you only need to get a good higain grid or panel antenna to pull it off..

We covered 6000km2 of jungle with wifi, and hooked up to 35km at the longest link.

If you are trying to look through a building, a hillside or whatever then it is a different story altogether.

We considered the Canopy system for about a year before deciding it was simply too unreliable and expensive..

-- 
TheOneLaw

Thu Sep 15 2011 11:12:52 EDT from IGnatius T Foobar @ Uncensored

Neat stuff, but it sounds like the8088er is dealing with at least some amount of budget to purchase "real" long haul wifi equipment.

I've done some of that, but the distance was only a quarter mile or so. Line of sight is key.

the problem is, that if, they want to sell you some uber-special equipment, which equals weight in gold, and isn't as fast either.

so... a little antenna workshop, and a visit at radio shack (do they still do electronic parts?) would be the best thing to do.

maybe ax25 is the right guy (or knows some of them ;-) to get it set up and running properly.

http://www.usbwifi.orconhosting.net.nz/

I saw a page with them creating parabolic mirrors with spanning meshes over wooden base construction

generaly spoken...

http://www.google.com/search?q=diy+made+wlan+antenna+&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:unofficial&client=iceweasel-a

gives you other approaches too.

Maybe it would be better to ask what are your questions specifically?

Wed Sep 14 2011 01:26:40 AM EDT from the8088er @ Uncensored

Does anyone have any experience setting up a long range ewireless ethernet bridge? I'm looking at using Motorola Canopy equipment to span around 4.1 miles.

Give me a day or two, I believe my ex-boss set up something.  I will see what he says.

That's because you didn't eat the ginger ones.

so, twitter and facebook ditch a bunch of ther RSS/Atoms:

http://www.staynalive.com/2011/05/twitter-and-facebook-both-quietly-kill.html

twitter still seems to support:

http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/[ID].rss

and facebook rss'ing your own wall.

The fat client / thin client circle has now gone around one and a half times, and different people will tell you one or the other is better. It also might be that the registering-yourself thing worked well in small networks but doesn't work well at the internet level for some as yet unforseen reason.

We're not talking about registering your host with DNS at the "entire Internet" level.  What would happen (and in some cases is already happening) is that your host registers itself with your local nameserver.  In a well-integrated network it'll actually happen automatically.  (This was easier when there was such a thing as DHCP, but we'll get there anyway)

Well, yes, it is possible to operate a rogue IPv6 router and fool the local machines into using you as their default gateway, but it's just as possible to operate a rogue DHCP server on an IPv4 network.  It's an issue but it isn't a new issue, nor is it a show-stopping one.

heh, the XKCD is just in time for this ;-)

well, working in a big company now... everybody is bitching around with the windows xp images we have to use.

(thank god meanwhile everybody accepted the fact that willi can't live with a wintendo alone, so I still have my linux desktop around, and use the laptop to accept meeting invitations via outlook, and if I need a faster browser, or watch a video with my headphones so I don't have to crawl under the desk to plug them in...)

but there were rumors that a virualized XP under the gemalto xp runs _faster_ with less pain than the native os.

Tue Feb 08 2011 12:36:18 AM EST from Harbard @ Uncensored

Is there any reason they can't run both systems in parallel for awhile?

Its already being done at Google, the problem is that if they turn on AAAA today for everyone, a small amount of users will break (buggy ISP DNS servers, broken 6to4 etc.), or slow down (far away 6to4 or tunnel).

So at the moment ISPs can apply to be whitelisted if they operate a proper v6 network: http://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/

dig AAAA www.google.com

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;www.google.com.            IN  AAAA

;; ANSWER SECTION: 
www.google.com.     48216   IN  CNAME   www.l.google.com.
www.l.google.com.   296 IN  AAAA    2404:6800:8004::68

;; AUTHORITY SECTION:
google.com.     23060   IN  NS  ns4.google.com.
google.com.     23060   IN  NS  ns3.google.com.
google.com.     23060   IN  NS  ns2.google.com.
google.com.     23060   IN  NS  ns1.google.com.

;; ADDITIONAL SECTION:
ns1.google.com.     85456   IN  A   216.239.32.10
ns2.google.com.     12381   IN  A   216.239.34.10
ns3.google.com.     31819   IN  A   216.239.36.10
ns4.google.com.     84751   IN  A   216.239.38.10

;; Query time: 35 msec

;; SERVER: 2001:44b8:1::6#53(2001:44b8:1::6)

;; WHEN: Fri Feb 4 15:10:14 2011

;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 216

The main .google.com services have AAAA's, but not YouTube or Groups.

It seems like a wise plan to me.

hm, why not simply add a 1x1 gif to the ipv6 URL and check the relation between the download of that image and the ipv4 users?

Is there any reason they can't run both systems in parallel for awhile?

I suspect not, as I don't know if anyone has ever heard of world IPv6 day.  I certainly haven't.

Wed Feb 02 2011 12:43:09 AM EST from Harbard @ Uncensored

 

I thought we had a backup plan: IPv6.  Wasn't that ready to be implemented?

Its here. Blame the beancounters if your ISP doesn't have it.

Looks like the internet is full up.....

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/02/110201101621.htm?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+sciencedaily+%28ScienceDaily%3A+Latest+Science+News%29

I thought we had a backup plan: IPv6.  Wasn't that ready to be implemented?

Yeah, in some ways, I don't understand why the west coast would have these problems.  You'd think someone could route around them.

We did something kinda cool today.

A caption company wants to do captioning in Israel, but obviously can't afford either the phone lines to Israel, or to hire/train writers in Israel.

So, they want to use our TCP/IP based solution.

Unfortunately, their writers kept having drop-outs and so on when they tried to connect to our machine over there.  But, we didn't have these problems.

After examining some network packets, it seems there's something very bad that leads to occasional dropped IP packets and such when the west coast tries to communicate to this box.  But the East coast doesn't have these problems.

So, we routed the a/v and steno feeds to one of our boxes in the east coast (where the writers have no problems connecting), and had the writers connect to the east coast instead of directly to Israel.  Worked like a charm!

This would not have worked if we hadn't designed the product in a unix-like way.

Ok.. this is odd.

From work, with my web server and citadel server running, I can't access any of my other ports except for 80.

When I disable (shutdown) the VM's for web and citadel, I can connect to all of my other ports. (5800, 10000, etc...)

Is there any explaination for that or am I going insane?

I havent tried running web and citadel on a different machine on network because i dont have a 2nd machine to do so...

-- 
Stephen D King
Network Admin
Blurred Vizion Studios
outsider@blurredvizionstudios.com

I use a pair of HomePlugs, they work well, get around 80mbit/s sustained throughput without issues. Latency is around 3ms.

If you are looking for one, make sure they use the 'AV' standard (200mbit/s physical layer), not the earlier models.

hm, maybe an USB plug one would allso do the job? you can put a longer wire inbetween the thumd thing and the PC to find a place with better reception

they call it bridge these days.

yes, its possible.

Never mind.  There is no replacement firmware.

I just spent two hours updating the firmware in my router.  It was 7 years out of date.  Why two hours?  The updater on the router's server will only work with Internet Explorer.  Not Chrome, not Firefox, not Safari.  No mention of it in any manual or on Cisco's web site.  I don't think they even realize it.  They wrote a special program for people having problems...Windows or Apple only of course.

Now on to my question...is there any good reason not to change the firmware to some open source firmware?  if any is available....

Oh, you meant the shared firewall.  Yes, it is a single point of failure.  We actually have two of them, with the configuration replicated to the standby unit in case the primary one suffers a hardware failure.

Yes, if it were to experience a problem, that problem would have an effect on all of the subscribers.  However, the service is priced substantially lower than a dedicated firewall.  "It's in the cloud."

Heh.  I remember when PSInet was telling everyone that they could get you on and off of their network at any two points in the world in one hop.  Turns out that they just connected all of their POPs together with ATM, so all you saw was the IP hops, not the ATM hops.

Speaking of IP ... I realized this week that no one calls it TCP/IP anymore.  That's a good thing, because it was kind of stupid to call it TCP/IP even if you weren't using TCP.

most of all boxes (linux too) default to 1500.If you have GBit ethernet, you might want to try Jumbo frames for higher transfer volumina;

during connection establishing the hop with the tiniest MTU is responsible for setting the MTU for that IP connection.

(I think thats called Path MTU-Discovery)

so once the tcp connection is established, the maximum MTU for the way (the least common denominator, aka the smallest possible MTU) should be found out correctly.

if some device on the way is configured wrong, fragmentation won't work, packages get clamped.

me just sees that the replies are clamped..

and if I lower the mtu of my workstation to 1400 everything is fine.

first time I saw the vpn-device had some absurd mtu, and that was it.

second time they just wanted to show me the webinterface of their smoothwall (or whatever it was, some fedora embedded cruft) and were offended as I told them I wouldn't believe what some webinterface prints, just ifconfig counts.

This time I just requested changing the mtu on the vmware instance, and easily got away without any discussion.

well, at $work we run into MTU problems now and then.

indicators are rather clear that its misconfiguration on our side. though our admin team doesn't seem to be able to track down the issue. (I sometimes get the feeling they don't want to)

Wed Jul 21 2010 11:11:56 AM EDT from Ford II @ Uncensored

we had the best time when ibm bought one of our vendors. It used to be that they'd pawn problems off on each other saying the problem lied with the other guy.
But now since IBM owned everything, it was ALL their problem and they had to fix.

Filenet?

Well, after weeks of this kind of nonsense, it gets harder not to point out the nature of our working relationship.  They've been abusing the hell out of our technical support contract, and we don't appreciate it.

The plot thickens.

Yesterday through today, the spare box we sent them worked well.  The box that they returned to us showed absolutely no problems, so we shipped it back without changing anything on it (except to ensure nobody could modify the executables).

They swapped the two boxes out, and now the box they returned to us is dead on their network again.

One difference between the two boxes: the spare we sent didn't have an a/v capture card, so it didn't make sense to install all the bits that allow it to stream a/v content to stenographers... which is the one port that needs to be exposed to the internet.

I'm starting to wonder if the network engineer was forwarding the port in some bizarre way that floods the box.

I also wonder if he opted to use a MAC address to forward stuff... such that the other box wouldn't have been a problem anyway (because it didn't have the right MAC address).

In the end, I told them that the box worked flawlessly in our facility, and that the problem must therefore be with their network in some way.  When they said the other box worked fine, I told them I couldn't explain why (which, technically, I can't... I have no idea how they have their network set up).  I then told him that I didn't particularly care what their network policy was, or how they have their network environment set up... I am only responsible for ensuring our equipment works properly, and it does.

We'll see if they ever figure it out.  In the meantime, their customer is going berserk.  I wonder if they'll lose the account.  I wonder if someone out there will get fired for this.  I wonder who that person will be (the network engineer who screwed up their network and is protected by the CEO, or his boss, who can't fire him).

Heh... so we can repair it from the damage of improperly securing the network?

At the moment, the box is safely in our own facility.

But someone out there would need to investigate it, not me.

I think your assessment, though, is spot on.  Someone is hammering the box from outside their network, and they aren't handling it properly.  Likely, the problem will go away if they just put a firewall in place and forward the port we want.

I have what might be a sort of fun issue for you guys to ponder.  I'm not really asking for advice, although I'm curious as to what you might think about the situation.

A customer installed one of our boxes in their facility.  The box stopped working properly a couple of days ago.  They sent the box to us, and it's working without any issues at all here in our networking environment.

When it was out there, if I used a remote login service to connect to the desktop of the box immediately after the box booted up, I could log into it.  Otherwise, I couldn't access the box at all.

When I was finally able to get into the box, I noticed our services couldn't be restarted.  Upon start, they would generate an error message indicating that the box itself was out of networking resources.

Have you ever seen that before?  Personally, I've never observed that problem on a box.  I guess I've always been in networked environments that were properly configured and designed.

None of our other boxes out there have this kind of problem, but admittedly, this box is kind of special, in that we have to have a single port made available to the outside world.  Not a big deal, really... just port-forward to our box, and everything is peachy-keen.  Nobody else has a problem doing that... but I suspect these guys did something "different"... since he was concerned that port-forwarding was a security issue.  He felt more secure just exposing the entire box to the outside world and dropping our internal firewall.

(Note: The box doesn't appear to be infested, in case you're wondering... virus scans find nothing on it).