blog.sarlok.com

Well, today was full of interesting moments.

The early part of the morning went fairly well. Smoothly I guess is the correct term I'm looking for.
Mid to late morning... meh, so-so. Back to business as usual I suppose.
Early in the afternoon I experienced a new benchmark for the term 'awkward'. That said though, I have no-one to blame other than myself. Silly, silly me.
Mid afternoon, I was very abruptly introduced to something closely approximated to terror. Rampant fear aside, it makes for a good story I suppose.
Late afternoon, was painful - just some incident involving a head and large immovable metal thing.
And as the evening settles in... I dunno. It's gone kinda quiet.
Spooky.
Clearly this calls for some music.

So, with the router for tomorrow flashed, programmed, and ready to, that's just about 30 hours this week.
Wonder what my chances of taking Thursday and Friday off are. Actually, I don't wonder, I know what they are - still, it's fun to imagine.

So, that VRRP thing I mentioned, the simulation went pretty well.
The fun part was when the two routers backing each-other up lost sight of one-another from their LAN.
This would happen because in reality, the two routers are not connected to the same 'physical' L2 segment. There's a half-dozen Point-to-point links bridging the two together (Awesomeness!).
Each would become master of the other's subnets. Not a big deal, except now there's two identical gateways and subnets in duplicate locations.
That threw me for a bit of a loop until I discovered the easy way out by tweaking a few OSPF interface costs.
Admittedly, it feels like a total hack and it's still not perfect, but at least it prevents the nasty stuff like routing loops to non-existent hosts on the LAN among other things.

Also, new favourite song of the month. I may have to throw some Audiosurf at this one on the TV later... then again, work starts at 06:30 tomorrow, so maybe tomorrow.

Incidentally, if you buy the album off iTunes, it's only 11.99 and comes with 28 songs 80% of which are awesome *and* the music video.
Damn you iTunes, damn you.

So, I'd like to rant about the sim I dabbled with for VRRP tonight.
But... as I was on call this weekend and things have gone from bad to bleak, and I'm getting up to drive to - then up a mountain in 5 and a bit hours, I might save it for another time.

Here's some moar Deadmau5

Also, I'm not sure how we got onto the subject, but I was discussing this intro over sushi the other night. I gotta get me one of those helmets.

Today I was subtly reminded why piling 3 class C's onto a single 802.1q sub-interface is a bad idea.
1327 broadcast packets per second, spat out again on 8 other ports wasn't a good thing. 12,000 packets per seconds of garbage tends to be a significant wrench in the works on a router that peaks at 20,000 under ideal circumstances. I'm sure there's some quirks I'm not accounting for with the performance lost over the module rather than the router itself, but meh.
Fortunately, it was from a single host with, what seems to be (after a closer inspection of the packet capture), a seriously damaged D-Link router. I know, I know! You can hardly believe it... a messed-up D-Link router!

As a result of this occurrence, I realized I should probably test MAC filtering on a router with IOS, as it's come up once or twice before for other various amusing reasons.

Unfortunately, the only feasible way I've found that works seems like a bit of a stupid hack.
Seeing as MAC filtering ACL's can only be applied to an L2 interface, ports configured for VLAN access or routing are a no-go. Though I was surprised that a dot1q trunk wouldn't work either... I may have to look into that one further some other time.

Soooo...

Works:

Does not work:

Now, if I could just get that to work with vlan sub-interfaces, it might be more useful. Oh-well... maybe if I'm feeling bored one day I'll give it another shot.
There might be a typo or two in there, but I've already shut down the sim and can't be bothered to start it up again to pull out the configs I wound up with.

Huh. 00:18am. On the plus side, It's friday I guess...

Work get's an honourable mention today, but for not any particularly good reason.

This is a pretty neat song. Deadmau5' album "Random album title" is yet another of the few I've ever come across that I fully enjoy all of the tracks therein.

These guys are also quite different.
Yet another case where I can't get this song on iTunes... oh-well. Wiretap to the rescue yet again!

<edit>
Youtube video was pulled. Too lazy to find it again. Was by Something ala Mode though.
</edit>

It's odd how one's tastes can change.

Quello è tutto.

I needed a good laugh.

That is all.

It suddenly dawned on me about 10 minutes ago, just how incredibly reliant on Quicksilver I am these days.
As far as productivity based apps go, I can't really remember how I managed without it. It's a shame all the windows spinoff's are so kludgy and stupid... Using it on my laptop at work would be nothing short of fantastic.

Heh, I was showing a friend of mine after telling him it's "The best app evar!!!1!one!". That very instant, I managed to find this amusing bug. Never before has "Disappeared in a puff of logic" been more fitting a term.
I'm happy to report, it was fixed last release. :]

On the note of cool apps, I actually sat down and used the Espresso web editor for a while tonight. I got it sometime last year as part of the Macheist bundle 3.
Where useful, tasteful, and easy to run with apps are concerned, this is right up there.

Humm... 1:30am again. Go figure.

<edit>I reckon It would be kinda neat to be able dance like this guy, on demand. And I'm not just saying that because almost all the songs on his uploads are in my playlist somewhere...
Heh, the carpet's pretty sweet too.</edit>

I was telling a friend of mine about this comic over at Three Panel Soul.
To the uninitiated, it's a jab at Massively Multiplayer online games, where you pay a month-to-month fee to play and do the same things over and over. If you're lucky, you get enough points from doing the same thing over and over, and are rewarded with a level. This lets you do the same things over and over again in new and exciting ways at no extra charge!

In other news, I learned that running 'debug arp' on a router passing a little shy of 11,000 packets/sec is not a good plan.
Given as soon as I punched in that command, it starts spitting the data out of a console port at 9600baud, which I can guess would have been 960 characters per second in a perfect world (which I'm sure it wasn't).
At about 80-100ish characters per arp, It really didn't end well.
I'm sure 960CPS is way out (9600bits/sec, 10bits/char), but It's close enough I can be bothered to guestimate without getting carried away.

For those that do such things, enabled the RSS feed-majig.
feed://blog.sarlok.com/?q=rss.xml.
It even gives me a little RSS picture (the thing) below the random image ticker. Wee.

Also, stupid work. It's ruining my ability to MUD...
...among other things.

Looking for some problems in one of our vast network segments, and came across this little gem that made me chuckle.

Surprise! Who has my net? Nevermind the fact that the MAC addresses it seems to believe it's net exists on are non-existent and seem to change a little while later.
That's almost as amusing as the device I saw that was arping for itself a while back. I should try and find that again, don't think it was ever fixed.

Weee...

Nothing significant to say today.
I may have mentioned a thing or two about Dwarf Fortress, but here's another exciting story depicting the epic goodness that can unfold from within a budding city.

Also, this quote from a PC Gamer interview with Tarn Adams, one of the two developers, left me quite bedazzled as to why these 'bugs' weren't left in as features.

PC Gamers: Do you have any favourite hilarious bugs or test results from over the years?

Tarn Adams: My favorites are the one where the farmer walked over to the furniture stockpile, grabbed a bed, walked over to his farm and planted it, and the one with the injured hammerer. The hammerer is the dwarven executioner. When both of his arms were broken and he was unable to hold his hammer to administer Dwarven Justice, he still went ahead with the punishment, but he bit his victims. This included shaking his head vigorously and tearing their arms off, which he then held in his mouth for years.