Technology

Still no FiOS for me

Well now my uncle has FiOS and my boss just stopped in to say they were installing it at his house today. So I decided to call Verizon and see when it will be available in my neighborhood. I was informed that it will be a few more months. So my question to them was how come my uncle who lives in Lawrenceville has it and I can’t get it. It’s because I am on the Trenton CO and they aren’t doing Trenton yet so I am stuck for a bit with no new technology in my house for the summer. Bummer…..

Listening to: Funeral For A Friend / Love Lies Bleeding – Elton John – Goodbye Yellow Brick Road Disc 1

Verizon SMTP Servers not accepting mail from my domains.

Last month my uncle got the FiOS Internet service from Verizon and with it a Verizon E-mail address. So yesterday he sent me an E-mail and when I sent my reply to him I got the following failure notice:

Hi. This is the qmail-send program at mailhost.bilancio.org. I’m afraid I wasn’t able to deliver your message to the following addresses. This is a permanent error; I’ve given up. Sorry it didn’t work out.

xxxxxxxxxx@verizon.net:
Connected to 206.46.232.11 but sender was rejected.
Remote host said: 550 You are not allowed to send mail:sv22pub.verizon.net

At first I thought that my IP address for my mail server was on an RBL, but after some checking I found that wasn’t so. So then I went out and found someone else with a Verizon E-mail address. Again I was unable to send to him with my bilancio.org address, but if I sent something from my @lguip.org address it went through. I was also able to send E-mail to my uncle with that address as well. …till this morning now I can’t even send him E-mail with the lugip.org address.

I called Verizons Abuse number and the recording told me to go to www.verizon.com/whitelist and fill out the form. After Googling this problem I found that Verizon has been blocking E-mail from domains from outside the US since the beginning of 2005, but that shouldn’t effect me since my domain is hosted here in the US.

So I have filled out the whitelist form so now the wait is on to see how long it will take for Verizon to let mail in from my domains. This wouldn’t bother me to much but my parents have bilancio.org addresses and I am just waiting till my dad calls me to tell me that he can’t get mail to his brother in-law or his sister. We are a very spread out family and E-mail is a way of life for us.

So if you have a Verizon account please go to http://www.verizon.com/whitelist and fill out the members form and request bilanco.org, lugip.org and haverling.org be add to the domains that can send mail to Verizon users…..
Listening to: Come Talk To Me – Peter Gabriel – Secret World Live (CD 1)

UPDATE 4/7/06:

Got an E-mail from Verizon last night:

Subject: RE: Whitelist Request for IP Address 66.89.234.157

Thank you for contacting Verizon Online Security.

After a thorough investigation of your issue, Verizon Online Security has determined that normal e-mail delivery should be restored within 72 hrs.

Sincerely,

Verizon Online Security
http://www2.verizon.net/policies
abuse@verizon.net

We will see if it’s fixed by Monday night…..

I was a BBS Sysop…it’s all rock ‘n roll 1

Last night I went to the new Princeton Library to see bits of “BBS: The Documentary” and meet the director with Ed and another member of LUG/IP. It made me think of how things were back in the days before the internet became a big thing.

I remember the day I talked to my wife about starting my own bulletin board. We were living in Princeton in an apartment over my godparent’s kitchen. We had a living room, bedroom, bathroom and a room in the attic. We shared the kitchen with my godparents, Our main food was take out pizza. We didn’t have a lot of money and we were expecting our daughter. I had checked out a lot of software and other BBSes in the area and had decided to use the Wildcat! a product from Mustang. It was a well thought out program and a had a lot of good sysop tools. The problem was it was a good amount of money for a guy making $13hr and had a baby on the way. The first computer for the BBS was a 386sx with a 40 meg hard drive and a 2400 baud modem….can you say slow. I purchased the Single Line version of Wildcat! and turned on the “It’s All Rock ‘N Roll BBS” at 609-252-0260 in the fall of 1993. We offered all the popular door games as well as message boards. The BBS was a member of Fidonet (node 1:107/370 ), Wildnet, CollNet, Tekkernet, and Throbnet. I tried to offer a lot of files for D/L and I also offered adult material but the person had to send me proof of age in the mail. The big upgrade for the BBS in Princeton was taking the winnings I got from Atlantic City when my wife and I went on our honeymoon and buying a Zoom 9600 baud modem….a little faster…

I ran the BBS for a year in Princeton and then we moved to Trenton and the board’s number changed to 609-695-9319 and my Fidonet number changed to node: 1:266/155. I also changed to the multi-node version of Wildcat and added a Novell server and 2-1 GB SCSI drives. I ran the wildcat software off of a 486 machine with 16 megs of ram and a used 14.4K baud modem and OS/2 as the operating system. With the multi-line version of Wildcat! I was able to interact with the BBS from my desk in the living room instead of having to go to the basement where the server and main node of the bbs were. On August 9th, 1994 (2 days before my wedding anniversary…my wife was so proud..not) I started offering Internet E-mail with the Domain Name rocknroll.com, I was one of the first BBS in the Central NJ area to offer internet E-mail and access to UseNet newsgroups as well as owning a domain name. The board stayed up till late 2000 when I decided that cost of the phone line was draining my pocket of much-needed fun money and I was just tired of the work that went into it or I just grew up. Also, the World Wide Web came along and there was more to see and more to do, call volume dropped and the world moved on. I had a lot of fun doing it and I met a lot of people online, it was a community when you were on a good board. Today the internet is more one-sided not as much a community more of little fish in a big pond. I actually have the whole BBS zipped into one big file….some day I will unzip and fire up a machine and take a tour down memory lane. 🙂

The movie last night hit a few spots of nostalgia. I recommend downloading it (it was released under the creative commons license so it’s legal to download) and enjoying the interviews with sysops and users of the BBSes around the world.

More to come on this subject at a later date I am sure……If you were a user of It’s All Rock ‘N Roll send me a message. Also, check out bbsmates for other BBS you might have visited.

What was I thinking?

So yesterday was Friday the 13th……and I stupidly reboot the main server at work in the morning. I broke 2 of my rules…1. Never touch Production boxes on a Friday. 2. Never ever do anything in the production environment on Friday the 13th. I knew I had to reboot the server so I could work on some new software that I installed the day before so I got up early, logged in remotely and restarted the server. While it was “rebooting” I jumped in the shower and figured I would do the tweaking of the new software when I got out and head to work a little later. Got out of the shower and tried to log back into the server…..no go. Tried pining it still no response….so I got ready nice and fast and headed to work….did I mention it was 5 am…..got to work and found the server in a continual reboot cycle. It would get to the screen to logging and then reboot. I just stood there for about 3 cycles saying every swear word I could think of…

I decided to first do a parallel install of the OS and see if I could get to the registry of the bad install and get the new software uninstalled…After I got the new install done I jumped into the registry of the bad install and found it totally messed up. So that idea had gone nowhere and cost me about 40 min. Now this server is the server that has all the work data for the company..every drawing, memo and documentation of all our current and past jobs so I had to get this server back up and running so I didn’t have managers yelling at me that their people weren’t working and the projects weren’t getting done.

I checked the RAID container that holds all the data and saw it was okay. So I sat down figured that the only data needed from the OS RAID container was the databases for the NetBackup software. So I copied the whole backup software folder to the data RAID. I then started a fresh install of the OS. While that was going on I jumped on to the phone with Veritas to find out what files/directories to put back once I got the server back up and the backup software installed. I ended up talking to Simon in London who was a great help. I found that I was unable to call England from my phone system. So when I hadn’t called Simon back when I told him I would he called me directly and I told him my calling problems and let him know that I wasn’t done with the OS install so he said he would call me back in an hour. Once I got all the drivers and software installed and files copied back Simon called right in time to walk me through a test and to see if all my metadata for all my back up…yea it was….and the backups went through last night.

So after many reboots and share setups the server was back up and running with a fresh OS install and all the data was safe and sound and I didn’t lose all my backup information.

The lesson learned – never touch anything on a Friday especially Friday the 13th 😉

Christmas party and new monitor

Saturday was my companies Holiday party. A good time is had by all that go, the down side being I have to wear a suit and tie, it confuses the users though so it makes it worth it. This year I was celebrating being with the company for 5 years. At this company you get $500 for 5 years of service, $1000 for 10 years and so on. So this year I got my money which I just spent on a DELL UltraSharp 2005FPW 20.1-inch Wide Aspect Flat Panel LCD Monitor for my office at home. I have been using a 19″ monitor that is slowly going bad and it has a big scratch in the middle of the glass. I have been looking at these monitors for a while but the price has been to high. But they dropped to bellow $500 dollars with a 25% special and free shipping so I couldn’t resist….Now if I could only get my company to buy me one of these.

Comment posting problems 1

I seem to be having problems when people using Linux as their OS are trying to leave comments. They get the following errors when they hit post.

Odd number of elements in hash assignment at lib/MT/App/Comments.pm line 68.
Use of uninitialized value in list assignment at lib/MT/App/Comments.pm line 68.
Odd number of elements in hash assignment at lib/MT/App/Comments.pm line 68.
Use of uninitialized value in list assignment at lib/MT/App/Comments.pm line 68.

If you are using windows you don’t have a problem. It’s a cookies problem I think. I will try to get this worked out in the next few days.

UPDATE: I sat down and did a reinstall of MovableType and relized I had forgotten to remove the previouse version of MT and that was what was causing the problem. So a clean up and a reinstall and all is fixed.

Proposed Replacement Mail/FTP/WEB Server for work 2

Next year I am going to move everyone off of POP3 to IMAP for incoming mail. I want to keep everyone’s mail up on the server instead of on there desktop machine. This will give me a better back up plan for employee mail. It would also be one less thing I would have to move off there machine when I upgrade them and one less thing for them to lose if there hard drive goes south on there desktops.

So here are the specs for the new server:
OS: Linux CentOS.
Services: Qmail, Courier-imap, Apache, MySQL, ProFTP
Case: Chenbro 3U RM31212T-C-650R 650W Redundant (2+1) 12 HDD Tray SATA
Mother Board: Tyan Thunder K8SE
CPU : AMD Opteron Dual-Core 270 2 GHz – Socket 940 – L2 2 MB x 2
Memory: 512 MB – DIMM 184-pin – DDR – 266 MHz / PC2100 – CL2.5 – 2.5 V – registered – ECC x 4
Raid Controller: 3ware Escalade 9500S-8MI
HD Drives: Seagate Barracuda 7200.8 – ST3250823AS 250 GB – internal – 3.5″ – SATA-150 – 22-position plug – 7200 rpm – buffer: 8 MB x 7

I will be doing hardware Raid 5 off the 3ware card using 5 of the drives for data, that will give me 1TB of space and the other 2 drives I will do Raid 1 for the Os off the raid card on the mother board. With 2 Gigs of Memory this machine should scream.

Let me know what you think…..

New Blog Client and NY office temp server

I have been trying to find a a good client to use for my blogging. What the client needed to do was be compatible with Movable Type and have a good spell checker because I can’t spell worth a darn. It also need to be able to do good imaging importing to the web log. I have used Zempt for a while but it wasn’t updated enough and the cool feature of importing what I was listening to in winamp didn’t work for the newest version of winamp. So I have tried a few others but they either were to simple or they didn’t work well with Movable Type. I just down loaded w.bloggar v4.00 and it seems pretty good and was easy to set up.

Spent most of yesterday at work trying to get a temp server set up for the NY office so I can upgrade there main server to Windows 2003, but when I upgraded the temp server to primary PDC for the NY domain it didn’t reboot I was unable to reconnect to it to keep working. I have to wait till someone shows up on Monday at the office to hit the rest button. One of the many problems of working on remote servers…the motherboard in the temp server doesn’t seem to like Windows NT 4.0. But it seems to like Linux and Server 2003 fine never seem to have a problem with either of those Os at all. I need to get this office finished so I can get the temp server back so I can get it set up to be the temp firewall at the corp office so I can up grade that to CentOS 3 and the new version of Checkpoint firewall software.

Since the server didn’t come back I was able to take some time to get the printing issues I was having with samba and cups on the Linux server that I have on the Active Directory network. It ended up being the samba spool was nonexistent. That is what happens when I don’t pay attention when I compile form source and not install from RPM.

Windows XP and IP Telephony

Spent most of the day yesterday fixing a Windows XP machine. The symptoms were:
Boots up and trys to go into windows and then reboots again. This would happen even when trying to go into safe mode. At one point I noticed that a blue screen would pop up right before the reboot. What had happened was I must have turned on reboot when there is a problem so it was in a vicious circle. Solution to the rebooting problem was: I had to do a parallel install of windows in a a different windows directory. I then booted into the new install and got into the registry of the old install and set the machine not to reboot when there was a problem. The Knowledge Base article at Microsoft is 314466.

So the problem that was causing the blue screen was a corrupted ntdll.dll. This is the DLL that is called by everything so when it is corrupted the windows doesn’t work. So again I booted into the new install of Windows and copied the file from there to the old version of Windows. I then rebooted into the old version and it worked.

Carmen and I were also able to test the IP phones yesterday. Carmen had to go to our Woodbury office to make some changed to there phone system. So he took one of the new IP phones we will be using in this office and we were able to get it working over the VPN. Good sound and no echo or loss of sound. Now I will have to figure out how I am going to set up the system to work from the owners house….

Monday Monday

Opened the front door of work this morning to hear a screaming alarm emanating from the server closet. One of the drives on the RAID chain died in the Web/FTP/Mail server over the weekend. Luckily I had a spare from the summer when Harrisburg lost a drive. Took me about 15 min to swap out the drive and then 2 hours to have it rebuild the drive. Now I remember why I preach RAID 5 to my other tech buddies. Even though the drive died the server was able to keep working without lose of performance. And the drive was still under warranty so I was able to send it in and will be getting a new one to replace it….