The occasional musings of Andy Scheffler
So it’s 3:30, and the IS Guy isn’t here yet. He’s not answering his phone or responding to email, but I know he’s here today because he dropped of the machine this morning before I got here.
I’m afraid to leave my desk for the shortest amount of time, because I know he’ll show up when I’m gone.
I really have to go the bathroom.
So I’m supposed to get my FreeBSD machine at work upgraded, but there seems to be some sort of disconnect between the IS guy and me. So here I am, spending almost half my day so far with my old machine off, waiting for him to show up and plug in the other computer that’s just sitting in my cube.
It’s about now that I realize how much I hated my job when I didn’t have the UNIX machine on my desk. It’s very difficult to do my job with only Windows NT to help me. Especially when I’m in the middle of doing mundane tasks and I click on a link in IE, and the entire OS crashes. Blue Screen of Death. Yay Microsoft.
Die Die Die Die Die.
I am rather disappointed right now.
I started wondering to myself today when I was working remotely on my linux machine and all of a sudden the connection got very laggy. I figured a bunch of people must be viewing my webpage at the same time. So I ran a command to see how many open connections I had, and I was very distressed to find that it was one user causing that lag. Let me explain a bit of back story.
We have DSL from Pacbell which is 384kbps/128kbps. That means we get 384kbps (about 7 times faster than a 56k modem) downstream and 128k (about 2 times faster) upstream. This is exactly what I had before at my old apartment through Verio.
(As an aside, be glad I didn’t have this journal when I was going through my hell with Verio… in a way, I wish I did, because then I’d have an account of it, but anyway…)
The upside of this arrangement is that the 384 is a lower limit. We actually get speeds approaching 1.5Mbps, the theoretical maximum for DSL. Yay us… blazing fast downloads and all that rot. The downside is that the 128 is an upper limit, which means that if we ever had the possibility of downloading faster, some piece of hardware on Pacbell’s end limits the bandwidth.
So, if you do the math, if two people using 56k modems hit my webpage simultaneously, they’ve pretty much sucked up the entire bandwidth of the DSL. If that one person happens to be on a faster connection, they’re probably going to suck it all up themselves.
This is distressing, because this machine is not the only machine on this connection. There are three other machines, as well as a mishmash of other random devices, that all use this bandwidth. Let’s say Ken’s in the middle of a Counterstrike match and someone goes to my photos page… all of a sudden, he gets a bit of lag and dies. Not a good thing, ’cause then Ken’s gonna take it out on me.
Now you’d think that I would have seen this coming. The thing is, as I said before, I had the exact same numerical specifications for upstream and downstream with Verio, but I never had any problems. Verio must not have been doing the bandwidth limiting thing.
Hrm. Pacbell isn’t exactly the most user-friendly company to deal with. I have very little leverage, as the only other pricing option on their webpage is three times as much per month for 384 upstream (which then comes with a proportional increase in downstream). Which makes sense, numerically.
The other option is to move my webpage elsewhere. But at 45 megabytes and growing with every photo album, I’m highly unlikely to find a free, or even cheap option that’s going to meet my needs.
Argh. Argh argh argh. I think I’m going to call Pacbell. If they won’t charge me a fee to transfer service over to the higher rate, I’ll see if Luke and Ken would be interested in making some sort of uneven split of the monthly charge, so that they don’t pay much more than they are now… (in theory, since we haven’t made the first payment yet.)
Luke now has a matching pair of Ken’s ears.
Oh, I’m talking about Diablo II, of course.
If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you wouldn’t find it funny anyway.
But anyway. I’ve finally gotten everything network related mostly working in the office. Only a little hiccup with the win2k machines not being able to see the linux machine. Hope it works.
I will then no longer have any more reason to rant on LJ about my computer problems. Yes, I know you’re all sad, but you’re going to have to deal with the loss.
I just printed a test page on my printer from my linux machine.
I then printed a test page from my pc using samba.
I am done. Now onto the next project.
EFNet is totally hosed, due to excessive DoS attacks. It’s very frustrating to think that some 15-year old in his parent’s basement who thinks it’s c00l to take down servers is inconveniencing thousands of people. But one person inconveniencing lots seems to be a theme in my life recently.
And yes, I checked. My machine hasn’t been hacked again and doing the DoS’ing.
Someone call the Internet repairman, it’s broken…
I wonder if it’s still under warranty…
Okay, so we get a bunch of little updates, as if they were separate entries. (This is what I get when I only get to use a computer once a day… what a raw deal!)
Before I get my two voice messages, I am treated to a system message warning me that, starting July 3rd, I have to hit ‘#’ instead of ‘1’ to access my voice mail. Keep in mind that it’s July 4th. Grrrr.
Current Mood: frustrated
That is all.
Okay, so my webpage is working again.
I was very happy when I finally got my files back.
I have now made my machine secure again, as far as I know, so no more hacking attempts… I hope.
Now, I can actually attempt to get the printer working… remember the printer? The thing that started this week-long mess?
So, yesterday I was able to recover three of the four partitions from the old hard drive. Of course, the data I need is on the fourth partition.
I spend most of yesterday trying to figure out some way of automating the process of trying every single partition boundary, then checking if a legitamate filesystem starts there… and I think I thought of one right before I went to sleep, but I don’t want to think about it any more, so I go to bed.
This morning, Luke knocks on my door to tell me that Ken had to shut down my machine because it was hosing the network. (Luckily, he just disconnected it, not turned it off.)
Long story short… I got hacked.
The bastard hacked root access, used my machine to DoS other machines (which was sucking up our bandwidth) and then cleaned his tracks. Turns out there’s this nice little program out there on the dark side of the Internet that allows any script kiddie to do this quickly and easily, and all they have to do it point it at a machine.
You see, because I’ve been reinstalling Linux so many times, I’ve forgotten to close certain ports… and paid for it.
I just want things to work again. I literally broke down and cried last night. I just can’t let it be. I can’t go out and enjoy myself, because I know that this problem is still there waiting for me.
Oh, and it goes without saying that if I ever find out who you are, you bastard, I’ll kill you.
(Kick a man while he’s down… what a miserable excuse for a human being.)
