Coredump

Wow! Two servers at once. Okay, I have to think this through thoroughly.

1. Compaq Proliant ML370 G2 will be the domain controller running Windows 2000 Advanced Server.
2. HP Proliant ML370 G3 will be the mail and web server running Fedora Core 1.
3. G2 and G3 have three Ultra3 SCSI 36.4GB disks each. One SCSI disk from G2 will be transferred to G3. Why? For fault-tolerance as it will be a mission-critical server. (Domain control is not that critical for now.)
4. G3 SCSI disks will be configured for RAID5: three (disk distribution) + one spare.

That’s my roadmap. Off I go…

Finished reading The Cuckoo’s Egg by Cliff Stoll. It’s an engaging techno-thriller set in the tailend of the Cold War: an astronomer discovers evil hackers cracking into US military sites from his computer. He lays traps, plays cloak-and-dagger and hide-and-seek with the sinister forces behind the black-hatters. He saves the day for Truth, Freedom and the American Way.

Not!

A astrophysicist in charge with maintaining computers in Lawrence Berkeley Labs is fascinated by a problem: the 75 cents missing in their computer usage accounting. So he analyzes the problem, build tools to study it, and stumble upon a hacker that insidiously steals connection time to crack into military sites in the Arpanet and Milnet (remember these?).

This leads to a convoluted tale of hide-and-seek, of outguessing the hacker, of laying down traps to trace the culprit that lead to his eventual arrest, of frustrations with the supposed authorities on computer security.

The tech is good, the writing is even better. Combined with slices of Berkeley counterculture, and a dissertation on privacy issues and the internet, the book is a hodgepodge of ideas that reveal the *true* hacker ethos. Makes for fun science, as well.

Stoll is quirky. He’s a bit of a Neoluddite, but a hacker, nevertheless.

And, oh, about the sequence: go figure for yourself. Quite simple, actually, once you think of it.

Cleared up the mess here in my network operations center (NOC). Got rid of rotting furnitures and fixtures; tucked away the 17″ monitor behemoth and a kludgy old Acer Aspire; and re-laid-out my work area.

I also got another KVM cable for the switch. Now, I can access the servers from one console, instead of moving back and forth between monitors. Of course, I could always ssh to the other servers but now that I have connected them to the KVM switch along with an XP workstation, I can easily select servers at the touch of a hotkey.

The data cabinet looks neater, too. None of that old spaghetti rat’s nest wiring.

I’m a bit contented now that I have done all these. I can go away happy.