SolarScale Blog

Merry Christmas

Today is Christmas eve and in the tradition of german people we open our presents tonight. Followed by dinner, I think we're having duck or something. Anyhow, thanks for being with me for the year and have a safe and happy holiday.

2009, a look back

I saw a lot of people already writing about this year so I'm going to sum up a few things that I did technically this year.

Jan 3rd, became user of sixxs.net, PJP4-SIXXS handle.

Jan 16th, first article of this blog, with a more technical side than before.

Feb 1st, first sixxs IPv6 tunnel to my static IP which I also obtained then.

May 21st, OpenBSD patch sent to OpenBSD, system/6149

Jun 8th, first initial commit of natally, natally.sourceforge.net.

Jun 9th, transfer of centroid.eu from intergenia to joker.com, who doesn't yet
support v6 glue to .eu domains.

Jun 14th, 30 day trial of QNX, nice that they have pf(4).

Nov 17th, purchase of vmware workstation 7.

Nov 17+  change from redhat linux to ubuntu on uranus.centroid.eu

Nov 17+  purchase of windows 7 HE.

And that was some of the highlights this year. Natally works for me somewhat today and there was a few bugfixes to wildcarddnsd as well. I also purchased 2 GB of RAM, 1 250 GB harddrive and 1 DVD drive, all not exceeding 180 euros. My grandmother also died this year leaving me with an inheritance of a bit of money, but not much. I may purchase a new computer in 2010.

Fibre Optics, the Olympic upgrade

I've been collecting stories about the telecommunications upgrades done because of the Olympic games. Here is what I've found.

• 2010 Vancouver Olympics, Bell Canadas new fibre network.
• 2012 London Olympics, BT's upgrades to fibre optic network
• 2014 Sochi Olympics, Fibre optic backbones, (search for Telecommunications)

The Olympics aren't about just sports anymore, telecommications benefit.

Random Hackepedia

This weeks RH is MAC.

Solstice approaching fast

The Solstice is here in nine days (on the 21st). What is this? It's when the sun is at it's lowest point (at high noon) in the northern hemisphere, also called the winter solstice. Because our earth is tilted and the tilt in winter favours the southern hemisphere it is the summer solstice there.

Random Hackepedia

For this week RH is Kernel .

New RFC: RFC 5694

I updated my personal collection of RFC's yesterday. I did this with getting the rfc-index.txt file from ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes, then I compared this file with what I had and the script looks something like this:

awk '/^[1-5]/ { print $1 }' rfc-index.txt |\
while read i; do FILE=rfc${i}.txt ; if [ ! -f $FILE ]; \
then ftp ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/$FILE ; fi; done

   In this document, we provide a survey of P2P (Peer-to-Peer) systems.
   The survey includes a definition and several taxonomies of P2P
   systems.  This survey also includes a description of which types of
   applications can be built with P2P technologies and examples of P2P
   applications that are currently in use on the Internet.  Finally, we
   discuss architectural trade-offs and provide guidelines for deciding
   whether or not a P2P architecture would be suitable to meet the
   requirements of a given application.

Monitoring program

I've written a small program that monitors google's nameservice. It is chrooted so that I can keep my nameservers on the server that runs it. Basically what it does is it looks up the address for pop3.solarscale.de and then compares what answer google gives. This will log if they give any different answer than what I know they should be given.

• googlewatch.c

This may be a little like spy vs. spy. But we gotta keep track of goodness somehow. When I co-administrated cvsup.ca.freebsd.org there was someone who checked us as well, as the logs could tell.