Monday 19 December 2005

Spam + Cacti + Wildfire = Software Sammich

It turns out that I was more then a little confused on how SMTP AUTH/SASL worked. Now I have no idea how to get that going... Ugh!

On the other hand, I did get something actually working for Spam/virus filtering. Turns out AMaVIS is a handy scanner that includes spam filtering and will run external spam filtering and virus filtering. I was able to hook AMaVIS in to the mail system to scan spam and ClamAV into AMaVIS to combine the scanning on that front too. So far, it is already tossing out spam, yay! It is supposed to be assigning a score to all mail but I'm not too sure where that is at... Anyhow, it is throwing spam out so I probably just need to do some tuning.

In other messaging news, of the instant type, Jive Messenger released version 2.4.0 including a new name: Wildfire. I've upgraded the Jabber server from Messenger 2.3.1 to Wildfire 2.4.0. Always good to see great projects remaining active. Gaim 1.5 still doesn't work with it (TLS issue of some sort still) but Gaim just announced their 2.0 beta. I haven't tried that yet but I doubt I'll get to it until the stable release what with the holidays and such.

The last interesting tidbit is that I installed Cacti from package on Siona. I just added Siona and Friday in there and so far so good. Check it out and login as username "guest" password "password". I like this tool...

For upcoming plans, I'm still sorting out some of the domain and hosting issues leftover from Nikita's passing. Not too tricky, but we just have to get some stuff cleaned up. Mmm also syndicating news. Possibly giving up on my hand-written news doodad and switching to something with features, like WordPress. Who knows? Stranger things have happened.

Tuesday 6 December 2005

Goodbye, Nikita

Nikita has officially passed on. May she find peace in Computer Heaven where all good computers go if they have led a long and happy life which Nikita certainly had. She first started out as workstation ion 1997 with few aspirations other then to run a word processor, a browser, and a couple of games.

In her life, Nikita was able to overcome this humble life of low-speed network links and buggy office applications to become a webserver on a high speed connection, eventually as high as dual-OC3's with failovers. In her last days, she served as a primary DNS server and mail host for a lucky group of friends.

It was on a quiet Sunday in December when the power went out. Her health had been failing but this was the last power failure for her. She passed quietly idling and is in a better place now.

Nikita
Rest In Peace
~1997 - December 6, 2005

Monday 21 November 2005

Duplicating data one more time

Last week I was reading up a bit on SPF and briefly at the other proposals for verifying that email is legitimate rather then spam. So far as I can see, the basic premise of these types of solutions is that the recipient (e.g. you) can find out if the email message is from a legitimate source.

The basis of SPF if that the sender's domain (e.g. nibble.bz in my case) would include a TXT record that lists all valid sending email servers. I really find this astounding. DNS has been messed with for a lot of things and now this? The RFCs state that TXT records are not to be used for structured data. I don't know how those bird-brains could promote such trash as being a good idea. "But it's easy!" Well, find me a paper or a book on computer security and I'll show you at least two places that say computer security comes at the expense of ease of use. Sorry folks, I don't buy SPF.

Holistic dicussion aside, one of the underlying shortcomings of many existing mail setups, Nibble Net's included, is that the sender is never authenticated in the first place. I use my email from all over the lower mainland and when I send mail I just use whatever the nearest relay is. At work, I use the SFU mail servers, at home, I might use the Shaw mail servers. Why? Relaying mail is typically permitted on the basis of IP address alone and not any sort of login.

Now we get in to authenticated SMTP. Users within a domain can login and send mail from one of the various hosts within that domain isntead of using, say, the SFU mail server. Ah! See there's the rub. For a client (my workstation at SFU) to send an email, I use the same protocol for talking to the server and the server uses for talking to the recipient's mail server. To talk to the server here, it would make sense that I put in a username and password so the server can identify me. Fine, great, swell. Now for the server here at SFU to send a message to hotmail.com, for example, there's no password involved. There's no certificates, no nothing. See where I'm going with this? The Simple Mail Transport Protocol is geared for exchanges messages equally well between your mail program and a server as it is between a virus-infected PC and a mail server. "You don't know where it's been" couldn't be more true.

Well SPF, SenderID, DomainKeys all try to address the server-to-server side of the problem. The client-to-server is best solved by forcing users to provide authentication information which is what I took a stab at on the weekend. Now all the user information for our users is stored in a LDAP directory so it is best if users authenticate against that. Not so fast, sport. Aparently, we're going to have to use Simple Authenticate and Security Layer (SASL). "That's pretty cool," I think to myself, "I'll be able to use PLAIN, CRAM-MD5, DIGEST-MD5, or GSSAPI (if I had Kerberos installed)."

So I poke around and poke around and to the best of my searching, it turns out there's a couple things going on here. Firstly, SASL is a set of libraries so that clients and servers can perform the various SASL operations and secondly Postfix will do SASL authenticate against a seperate SASL password file. Suposedly, I would have to duplicate all the user data in another password file. Heck, even with system logins and Jive Messenger logins using LDAP, I still have a seperate Samba password file and a plethora of htpasswd type files and up until I retired NIS there was the yppasswd database as well! Common folks, let's duplicate the user info ONE MORE TIME! So far as I can tell, I will have to setup an additional daemon, sasld. So the users email program talks to Postfix, Postfix talks to the SASL daemon, the SASL daemon talks to the OpenLDAP server, and finally the user will be authenticated and allowed to send mail. Excitement! Well, if I'm even in the right ballpark, then the setup is actually pretty simple. A couple options in each of three servers to get strong authentication working. Nevertheless, a task for another day.

Speaking of other tasks, I did finally start trying to clean up the DNS names and SSL certificates. So the best convention for keeping the DNS stuff organized that I can figure is to give each machine a proper host name (siona.dl.nibble.bz, friday.dl.nibble.bz, etc) and then give each *service* a hostname to match the service like imaps.dl.nibble.bz. Then issue a certificate for each service such that there's no confusion as to what's going on (you're authenticating the service you're accessing) and if services do get moved to different machines, changes like that are transparent to the user.

Anyhow, enough excitement, it's time to go home.

Friday 4 November 2005

Tocaraul now with searching and stuff

After making some modifications Tocaraul now has fewer bugs, a search function, and functions to delete songs from the request queue (or flush the whole thing). So far, we're doing good. I think that's probably going to be about all the features that I can update without making significant changes to how the code is structured.

I would like to break-up everything into views (request queue is one, library is another, search is a sort of sub-view of library) so that more and more features can be builtin to each part of the program without adding confusion to the interface. That smacks of effort so Fabio and I will see what else we're going to work on. Probably the play history. That would be cool.

Monday 31 October 2005

Jivin' for Jabber

Turns out there are a few things to keep in mind when setting up an XMPP (Jabber) server. I had to change the domain name a couple times and add a couple service records but the system is now up and running in a standard open-federation configuration. Users on Siona can use their system login for user@dl.nibble.bz and then *poof* that's it. We can message eachother, message other users of different XMPP servers. Access for server-to-server in Jive can be configured eiher by white-list or black-list so I'm just running ours open for now.

And Google developers have said they will join the open federation as soon as possible. One of the sticking points they want to address is control over spammers and bots who could register on any server in the community that allows public registration and then spam the crap out of the Google Talk users. Which is a fair concern but we're all egerly awaiting Google's move to the open federation.

I've been spending more time working with Tocaraul as a front-end for the Icecast server I'm running from home. All the good Ogg encodings are in the library for a whopping total of 2377 songs. Tocaraul is a couple of Python scripts to handle song requests from a web interface. Basically, I'm learning Python :P It's pretty handy stuff. For info on Tocaraul progress, take a look at the WebSVN page there and there's both a change log and a TODO for upcoming features.

Friday 21 October 2005

Things are Looking up in the Directory

Siona is now running a live LDAP directory and so far it is going pretty well. System authentication is all directory based. Logins and sessions and all that good fun. I configured a Jabber server (Jive Messenger) to auth users against the directory and it works swell! Any system users can login with their system account on the Jabber server and IM and that fun stuff.

I plan to migrate Samba next which is not a very big impact but would be good to get in the central user directory. Dovecot for IMAP and POP authentication after that. Postfix eventually as well which will be interesting. With Postfix, that will afect how mail is routed possibly making it easier to setup virtual domains or whatever. I think that about covers the auth stuff that's offered.

That Jabber server is a little special. I'll have to get some of the peeps using it so we can try to test some of the features. Just basic stuff like authorizing users and setting up or joining chat rooms. So far it seems a little sketchy. There are also some other handy features of the server like a searchable directory. I don't know how that will work out. I just know that I don't know how to get my IM client to even use that feature :P

At any rate, the LDAP works really great and after a bit of a rough start out of the gate, it is really going to be useful as heck. This Jabber we will have to see but it seems promising.

Sunday 16 October 2005

Auth This...

Well, I'm finally going to try to get a working LDAP server up and running on Siona finally. There are so many services that would just work better with a working directory, I gots to put one in. I'm still struggling with bootstrapping the whole operation. I've read some stuff, looked for some tools, but basically unless it's part of a big enterprise package, it's a little, uh, heavy for most operation.

But basically I would be able to run everything through it. Users could save their contact lists online. Login info could come from the directory for any number of services inluding system logins, Samba, Jabber, email, the works! It's all patched together right now with a crude mix of pam, maintenance scripts, and just plain not working. The only common service that I have been able to find is LDAP. PAM is really promising but a bunch of services, like Samba, do a challenge type auth so the passwords have to be decryptable rather then a straight hash.

And all-in-all, setting LDAP as a n00b is really confusing. I just hope this all works out in the end and we'll have world peace and a fair distribution of wealth.

Wednesday 7 September 2005

Computers are glorified paperweights.

A handful of changes at skyhook. I finally dumped Ubuntu off Friday in favour of Debian. Basically, to be able to run a functional 64b environment was really cool. All the FOSS stuff ran great. Just really amazing. The one hang-up I had was that you can load 32b plugins from 64b applications. So generally, most things worked but a couple things I usually like to use didn't. So push came to shove and it turns out I'm not a good early-adopter so I went back to 32b land. Still, I was really happy with the system for the 3/4 months I ran in 64b GNU/Linux. But now it's back to 32b for me.

During all the excitement, the Windows XP took a dump. That piece of crap was a pain in the ass from the moment I tried to install it until the moment of its demise about a month later. Our best guess is that one of our guests used IE or some other MS program and got a virus. The virus just sat there eating system resources quietly for a while until I installed Debian. During that time, I swapped network cards. When the card was pulled, the virus crashed and took the system with it. In summary: fuck Windows.

Now Debian, on the other hand, is a real treat.

apt-get install gnome fluxbox xserver-xfree86

Need I say more?

There are a couple cool tricks that I tought the box, specifically GDM. So it turns out that "fast user switching" is the name for allowing multiple users to login and swap use of the workstation without closing their programs. With GDM, you just run gdmflexiserv (or click "New Login" under gnome) and it will prompt you. The trick there is that all this spawning and quitting of xservers makes GDM a little flaky so I added to inittab from which it can respawn if ever it tries to crash. Works like a charm.

The other fun thing to was that I added a user called "kiosk" which will login automatically if nobody else does after 60 seconds. Handy for letting house guests use the computer and not get the computer infected with a virus (I'm talking about you, Windows).

And for the last trick, I kick the UW pop and imap servers off Siona in favour of Dovecot. Dovecot, I must admit, is pretty cool. The migration itself was a little tricky. Various file permission issues plus pop clients might have all gotten duplicate messages. All-in-all, the dovecot stuff is more manageable and more extensible then the basic UW packages. The other nice thing too was that it was trivial to tell Dovecot to run IMAPS and POP3S alone and so now we only run encrypted services for mail on Siona. Pretty neat!

Thursday 21 July 2005

Needs RAM!

Well, it's been 5 weeks since putting in the new video card in Friday and nothing is blown. I declare this system finally fucking fixed! Goddammit, it had better stay fixed for a long time.

Now it's time to give Chevette some upgrades. Working display is a must. Probably just a messed-up latch so that should be fine. If that works out, then I'll get that fixed and dump some more RAM in her. As much as she can take. Well, I'll aim for a half gig but even 256MB would be a passable upgrade. We shall see.

Saturday 9 July 2005

Tweaks and Filters

Been poking at Friday this week. I was getting a USB extension cord for work so I picked up one that glows red and hooked that up to Friday. It's sweet! And then the old plain one went to work. I also poked at GDM until I figured out how to change the login screen for Friday. My login screen now proudly displays the MDM flag! Heh, it's nice.

The other thing I dug up was firewall rules to block those stupid SSH dictionary attacks that keep flying around. Basically, a compromised host on the Internet attempts to login via SSH using a large number of common user names and presumably either no password or some guessable password (like "password"). If you check your logs you'll find that the attacks come in a big burst and generally all within 5-10 seconds.

So it turns out that the simple way to deal with this in a fairly effective manner is to rate-limit the number of new SSH connections accepted by the host with iptables. The rate-limiting allows a minimal number of malicious login attempts and also has a minimal likelyhood that it can be used for a DoS attack. The rules I use allow a burst of 5 (the default) and then a maximum rate of 10 logins per minute. The effect is that the attacker gets 5 login attempts then the rest get dropped until 6 seconds have elapsed and then the attacker gets 1 more login attempt every 6 seconds. During this time, a legitimate user may get rejected but they just have to wait a minute and things will be back to normal.

-A INPUT -p tcp -m tcp --dport 22 --tcp-flags SYN,RST,ACK SYN -m limit --limit 10/min -j ACCEPT
-A INPUT -p tcp -m tcp --dport 22 --tcp-flags SYN,RST,ACK SYN -j REJECT --reject-with icmp-port-unreachable


I've been using the above rules on both Siona and Nikita for a week or so now and it's been very effective and mitigating those attacks. It's NICE!

Sunday 3 July 2005

Mmm Mac!

Heh I gots to twiddle with some peeps Macs on the weekend. An iBook and iMac (14" w/ G4 and 17" w/ G5 respectively). They were cool. From the iBook, we played around with the neighbour's wireless router settings. The thing didn't have a password so we were just trying different channels and stuff to see if we could get a better signal. Not a lot of luck though. Seems that channel 6 was no less noisy then the others. Oh well, them's the breaks. Now I just need a wireless doodad for Friday...

Friday 24 June 2005

Hate Windows so much...

So windows has managed to screw me even in GNU/Linux. I got one of those generic Linksys Wireless G PCI cards from a co-worker. So I slap that badboy in the machine and start looking around online. Turns out, Linksys doesn't vend anything for GNU/Linux (jerks) but there's a utility the Linux community uses called "ndiswrapper" which lets a person install the windows driver.

Great! Linksys is lame, but we can make do. Ah! Not so fast, sparky. See the catch is that I'm running a 64bit environment. Any modules I load in to the Linux kernel have to also be 64bit. Since there's no 64bit Windows for consumers, Linksys certainly doesn't make such a driver. Well WTF?!?!? Just compile it with freaking -arch x86_64 and away we go already! No such luck. Windows, the pathetic and decrepid OS that it is has ensured not only its own stagnation but also stagnation in certain hardware vendors as well. And I'm looking at you, Linksys. You can eat my ass.

So screw Linksys. I'm off to find a hacked driver or else a vendor that actually, you know, supports what is rapidly becoming the next major generation of processors. Those linksys bastards...

Wednesday 22 June 2005

A network without wires is great...

Because you don't have to worry about it, you know, working. Okay not quite true but at any rate, with Wendigo coming back home tomorrow, I really have to get the LAN here sorted out. There's no such thing as a wireless bridge (for consumer use anyways) and many of the access-points (probably same thing as a bridge) are discontinued. Sucks! Now *supposedly* a person can bridge routers. I have yet to find any supporting documentation. It would be nice if I thought it was going to be any good but the home-wireless stuff out right now just sucks so it's a matter of mitigating the problem.

Tentatively, I'm going to just put a wireless card in my PC. That's possibly one of the more effective solutions. The other part of that is I need to be sure that if I get, say, a wireless G card, I'm not going to have any problems connecting on 802.11b instead. The other trick will be to load linux onto the router. The handful of my coworkers that have gone that route have had great improvements in reliability over the standard firmware. That's on the WRT54G. I have a BEFWS114, or whatever it's called. That will be a matter of seeing if I can get a mini-linux to work on that model of router.

Basically, wireless sucks. Computers suck too. I hate everything. But I'm a sucker for pain, so bring it!

Sunday 12 June 2005

TLS

Looks like the latest postfix package for Sarge includes TLS support. Powerfully sweet. Now if only I could get the LDAP directory up then I could start working on the Kerberos server and all that good rot, wot?

Saturday 11 June 2005

Friday is Back Like a Bad Sequel

Woo! Friday now has a working video card. Hopefully, this is the last hardware failure that fucks me around for a while. That would be nice...

In sortof related news, I wandered into a couple stores with a friend who was looking at a laptop and holy smokes are those things ever cheap. You could get a Sony Vaio for 1300$ that would have a mobile processor, ATI mobile video, half-gig RAM, wireless networking. The Mac iBooks were 1650 for the 14" display iBook with the usual fixin's. Pretty cool. The other thing we looked at was printers. They were pretty neat in the 100-200$ range. There are a variety of combo devices (scan, print, fax) that were cool enough that I would have bought one... Except for the fact that the idea of printed material gives me the shivers.

Others, it's all good. Or something. Did I mention there's a 64b Debian Sarge distro now? Apparently 64b package support isn't complete yet but that's still pretty cool.

I'm still tired so I'm going to put some shitty posts up for my shitty course, get some food, watch some teevee, and go back to bed.

Wednesday 8 June 2005

More Damage

Shortly before moving, Friday took a crap again. So then we moved. Move went fine, bbb, whatever. After moving, I poked at Friday and it was bizarre. Press "on" and she, well, you know, didn't turn on. The LEDs on the various components would flicker on briefly and then nothing would come up.

Naturally at this point I assumed my PSU was the source of all my problems. This is the third batch of core components that have gone to shit. In this case, the mainboard manufacturer did recommend a bigger PSU then I was using anyhow (I was at 350W and DFI said to use at least a 400W). So pop out the old and in with a new one (485W). Same problem.

Well, during all this, pulling the video card would let the system power on so I figure, maybe it's the video card that got cooked off. I don't have any extra PCI-E video cards (do you?) and the board doesn't have an AGP slot but I do have PCI video cards. In goes an old ATI 64b MAXXX (or whatever that thing is called) and she works fine. Woo! What this doesn't tell me is whether it's the PCI-E bus or just the card.

Check my papers and I had bought the video card less the 30 days ago so into the shop we go. I give it to The Guy who comes hither when I shout "RMA!" and he checks it out. Sure enough, video card is fuxxored. Vendor will replace it. Woo! Now I just have to wait for the replacement card. Theoretically it is possible the mobo is damaged as well. We shall see, we shall see...

In other news, since I haven't really been updating anything interesting lately, I've been playing with a lot of fun packages. Specifically clamav, TLS support in postgres, and snort.

CalmAV is an anti-virus for the mail server. I haven't seen it bounce any virus infected emails. Then again, I don't get that many. At any rate, installation was easy in Debian. apt-get install clamav. I think that was it. I was prompted for mail domain and such, or maybe not. Whatever, it wasn't a big deal to install but it doesn't seem to do anything. Hard to say.

TLS support in postgres is totaly sweet! The trick was making proper self-signed certificates. Well, google was a big help there. With a couple pokes at the config file, I now have TLS supported but not required. In my email client, Thunderbird, I just went to the Outgoing mail section and selected "use StartTLS" and that was it. I can use a secure channel to deliver mail. Hella sweet. The setup was easy but I wouldn't say trivial. Definately cool though.

Snort, ah, you gotta love the pig. I have to admit, the debian package gives you a tight setup. Just apt-get that bad-boy and away you go. I started getting daily snort reports and naturally there were some alarms that weren't useful (someone accessed a PHP page!) but it was easy to tune snort. Under /etc/snort there's a rules directory with one file per group. There were about three alerts coming from the web-php section that I didn't need flagged so I commented those out, HUP'd snort and that was it. Now I get reports on attempted hacks, directory traversals and such, in nice tidy daily reports. Installing snort is definately hella sweet.

Friday 27 May 2005

Moving

Well, this weekend is the last weekend before we shuffle all our crap over to the other apartment. Moving in the same building does make things easier, it's true. Hopefully moving all the computers and the Internet connection goes well.

I'm finally going to start throwing out old hardware. I have a P90 that doesn't boot, a couple of bad mainboards, a floppy drive that never seemed to do much... All garbage, woo!

Laundry and nap for now though.

Thursday 12 May 2005

64b is Sweet

Been re-ripping my entire CD collection now that I have my baby Friday all dressed up. She runs at about 10 minutes to rip and encode a disc no matter what else I'm doing. Actually, I haven't tried playing UT while ripping, but I'm sure she wouldn't mind.

So far only a couple squirrely things with 64b. I'm running Ubuntu for AMD64 and any of the open-source stuff is super awesome. Installing the browser plugin for Java was a pain in the ass though. Mixing 64b and 32b applications isn't cool. E.g. 32b java plugin in 64b Firefox was a no-go. After some poking around, it turns out Sun doesn't provide a 64b browser plugin so I had no choice but to go with Blackdown. Sun Java's platform independant bullshit only matters if they have a build for your platform.

Otherwise, 64b rulez, yo! UT is smokin (though that may be more due to the BFG 6600 GT OC PCI-E card I have then the change from 32b to 64b), everything is powerfully sweet.

Friday 6 May 2005

Jumped the Gun

Okay, so I got a little over-optimistic on that last post there. Fortunately, fate was standing by to put me in my place...

Friday was totaly fucked come morning. Press power and all I could get was two short beeps and five long beeps. WTF?>!?!?!

So I haul it back to the shop that afternoon and tell my man there "WTF LOL!" and he's all like "OMG BBQ!" and so we plug it in there and guess what? She works! Fucking great.

So I slink back home humbled by life at large. I go through the routine of trying Friday in different places around the flat since obviously it's not just a hardware issue, it's something agravated by environment. But sure enough, nothing works. I pull the plug on CSN's computer and hook Friday up there and sure enough, no dice.

So I ended up taking her up to Hakkakenland to see if the 4-yr old could fix the computer. Nope, no luck there either. Ah-ha! It's not just my place! The hardware is fucked!

So I replaced all the core components and now she's up and faster then ever. Then again, this is her first night up so she may be down again tomorrow. But check this out... I put a 1GB OCZ dual-channel RAM kit on a DFI nF4 Ultra-D mobo with an AMD64 Winchester core and a spanky new BFG 6600 GT PCI-Express video card. Woo! Set me back a couple bones for sure but this hardware is totaly bitchin! I'm so down, you know what I'm sayin? Dag!

Hopefully she'll boot again tomorrow. That would be swell. Did I mention I hate life?

Thursday 28 April 2005

Friday's Back!

Woo! It's sort of been a while but I finally had to suck it up and realize I don't have the resources/ability to diagnose my own computer hardware. So I bundled up all of Friday's guts and took her over to Frontier. I made them promise to be nice and they were awesome.

Turns out it was only the PS/2 controller that was hooped. Basically, everything I did with a keyboard was fucked. Otherwise, she's fine! Well, this is a little bit odd because I don't have a USB keyboard. I need a usb keyboard to play around before the OS loads (e.g. if I want to load windows instead of linux, for example). Not a big deal really.

They did, however, tie up all of Friday's cords and also installed a rehostat (sp?) for the power supply fan. Hella sweet.

So now I'm just putting her through a "nice emerge sync ; nice emerge -u world" to see how she behaves. So far, so good :D

Wednesday 20 April 2005

Now it's April

How time flies when you're busy as a mad mother and don't give a crap about much other the a couple of shits and giggles here and there.

*anyhow*

I've started using this Cacti tool for showing pretty colours. It's cool. It shows different colours depending on stuff like network traffic, CPU load, etc. I like colours. So far only Dante has a login to check it out but I'd probably hand out an account to anyone interested in looking at it here. Pretty colours...

Okay, back to school for me. Later, chums.

Monday 28 March 2005

It's, Uh, March?

It's March. Almost April. Haven't posted. I hate everything. Almost have school done. Cisco CCNA coming up. Haven't got anything working on the side (what side?). Just tooting my horn for a minute before I go to class.

Monday 14 February 2005

No Noose is Good Noose

Whee! Flibble drool *splech* Rar!

Heh I've been looking at the sys admin docs on the Gentoo site and there's a ton of absolutely awesome HOWTO type docs published there. There's stuff on setting up Kerberos, LDAP, on hardening, and all sorts of good stuff.

I gots to get some of that shiznat going. I just haven't had time to push ahead on side-side-side projects (e.g. anything on top of work, school, and CCNA). Well, maybe not the time, but my brain is definately too mushy for anything more. I've been spending my free time drooling in front of the Playstation... *splonk* Or drinking most of a bottle of scotch when I thought I had "only" drank half of it :P

Wednesday 26 January 2005

Dead Again

Well, I've been without Friday the last week or two. Stupid suck. When she boots she complains that she can't find the keyboard. This is just fucking lame. I'm going to end up sending both mainboards back to ASUS in the hopes then when then come back, one or both of them will be working. This is just total bullshit.

That and the stupid unionists were on strike Monday which puts me out a class. It's a part-time course so that's never going to be made up. Since the content is largely online, we don't really miss too much thankfully. Stupid administration. Stupid union. I hate them so many!

Saturday 8 January 2005

Friday's Back and Better Then Ever

Finally got that CPU fan sorted out today. Got everything mounted and slapped back in the case. Fired 'er up and Friday's smokin' hot now. All the good things from before plus the RAM is now dual channel and she has a nice DVD writer.

I've really missed having a wicked box at home. Everything runs fast, runs smooth, and it's tight as a rock. And now the case does rattle from the CPU fan. So good, ah!

Thursday 6 January 2005

It's Not a 939!

I lied. I got a Asus k7v880pro. I didn't step up the CPU. Sadly, I got the wrong stupid CPU fan so the one I got doesn't have the correct mounting bracket for the socket 462. I will work on a 754, 939 or 474 (or whatever the one for the P4 systems is called). See, I ordered the Zalman CNPS 7000 AlCu but I should have ordered the Zalman CNPS 7000B AlCu. See? Not really? Yeah, well, that was the problem. I paid close attention right up until I placed my order and ended up with the wrong heatsink/fan. Netlink did exchange it for me, but I have to wait a couple days for the 7000B to come in from the warehouse. Until then, still no computer. Bastards!

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