Last Third of PhotoadayMay

I am taking a picture each day in May, for an online photo challenge. Here are the final eleven days of May's contest. For each, I am digging up an old photo for each day's inspiration as well. My first ten days and second ten are available for viewing as well. Finally, a slide show of the entire month's photos.

photoadayMay Another Ten Days

I am taking a picture each day in May, for an online photo challenge. Here is the second group of ten days from the month. Click here for the first ten days. I wanted to share the photos taken so far, and to share a photo from my past for each day's inspiration. Beneath, I shall explain how the photos fit the theme for the day.

photoadayMay First Ten Days

I am taking a picture each day in May, for an online photo challenge. Now, I am ten days through the thirty-one. I wanted to share the photos taken so far, and to share a photo from my past for each day's inspiration. Beneath, I shall explain how the photos fit the theme for the day.

January #lspe Meeting

I decided to give public speaking a go by presenting at the January meeting for Large Scale Production Engineering (#lspe). The evening's topics were on Load Balancers, and my presentation was on using anycast as a load balancing solution, without the need for load balancers.

Determining Public IP Address

Sometimes, it is just the simplest of things. An admin asked the other day what our Internet egress address was. I told him that he could use his browser to find out. However, he was dealing with a remote host, which had a different public address. A couple sites you can use to easily grab your public address from the command line are ifconfig.me and icanhazip.com.

  [bandarji ~]$ curl http://ifconfig.me/ ; curl http://icanhazip.com/
  200.99.99.200
  200.99.99.200
  [bandarji ~]$

These can also be used within bash quite easily.

  [bandarji ~]$ egress="`curl http://ifconfig.me/ 2> /dev/null`" ; echo $egress
  200.99.99.200
  [bandarji ~]$

SVCCG Workshop in San Jose

Attended this weekend's Silicon Valley Cloud Computing Group meeting. PayPal hosted the event at their town hall, which had ample space for the eight hundred attendees. The schedule called for some tough decisions: I really wanted to hear about cloud work being done at both eBay and Netflix, however those discussions happened simultaneously. So, after weighing the options with Nisheed, who told me about this event in the first place, I decided on what to listen in on.

Happy Programmers' Day

There are 10 types of people in the world: those who understand binary, and those who do not.

Programmers, evidently, do not. Today is Programmers' Day, the 256th day of the year. The slogan for the date celebration is 1111 1111, binary for 255. Therefore, I believe yesterday should have been the date for celebration, not today. 256 is 100000000 in binary, two to the eighth power. Allow me to illustrate the problem.

# today (September 13, 2011)
#
bandarji > echo "obase=2;`/bin/date +%j`" | bc
100000000

# Yesterday
#
bandarji > echo "obase=2;`/bin/date +%j --date 'September 12, 2011'`" | bc
11111111

It could be this is a bug feature. That makes more sense to me than the claim, "Programmers count starting with zero." Regardless, happy Programmers' Day.

Load Balancing Without a Load Balancer

Application delivery controllers perform a great service to direct traffic to servers which should handle client requests. Decisions on where to send information can be based on a variety of factors. Like their kid brother, the server load balancer, they present a virtual service address, linked to more than one backend system. By monitoring services on individual servers, the ADC or SLB drops unreliable services from pools to ensure high availability. Further, they divvy requests between servers which can answer them, balancing a load which might be higher than one system could accept.

There are times when you don't need the delivery options an ADC can provide, and even an SLB solution might not make sense. A tandem set of appliances for each local area network where servers reside is expensive to purchase and maintain vendor support. They also require power and use precious rack space. If a server load balancer is all you need to ensure service availability while dividing load, perhaps a different solution could do the job.

Hindi Support For Linux

Ever visited a web site, like the one pictured above, and saw a bunch of (Unicode) blocks instead of the text you expected? Install support for the language you want on your Linux host, just like I did for the above-pictured Punjabi.

Linux Host-to-Host IPSEC

Sometimes, you want to encrypt all IP traffic between two Linux hosts. An easy way to do this with Red Hat Linux is to use IPSEC. While there are many applications which are encrypted, such as secure shell or even transport layer security and secure sockets layer over usually-unencrypted applications, IPSEC works at a lower level. IPSEC therefore can work regardless of the application and encrypts all IP communication.

I Shaved a Wall

I recently took a photo of a wall on a music store in Glendale, which was a mural in remembrance of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. The side wall of the building had signs hung up which I wanted to erase, and I thought I could do this image retouch using Gimp, the GNU Image Manipulation Program.

Contra on Your iPhone

This is extremely geeky, but phone to do a time or two. Using Safari on your iPhone, browse to www.konamicodesites.com and then enter the "code" by swiping Up Up Down Down Left Right Left Right. If performed correctly, two buttons appear on the screen. Press B then A and the site will return a character from Contra.

Jira is Evil

I am now convinced that Jira is pure evil. Check out how many unread messages I have in my "Jira" folder!

CTRL-A,DEL

Rubberband Support Ticket

So, today I get a note from Robin asking me to take a look at a support ticket and help him out. I drop the important load balancer SNMP work I am doing, push some firewall work out even later, and take a look at the ticket:

Support ticket for rubberbands

This was pretty funny. The ticket was not meant for the systems team, but it is always fun to see requests like these come through. And, here is another:

Catch your running fridge?

The Power Went Out Again

Power outages occur quite often in Bangalore. Many places have generators; you see them in all sizes: personal use to huge diesel ones. Possibly because of the generators, no one seems concerned with fixing the power problems, instead people just deal with the power going out. Just about the time when I would ask why the problem exists in the first place, I get a glimpse into the problem:

Not Enough Outlets

At my office, workers were constructing a video conferencing room. For this work, many power tools where needed: circular saws, drills, etc. Every tool's power cable had the plug cut off. Why? Well, if you have three items needing power, but only one outlet, you simply stuff the bare wire ends of your cable into the same outlet. Why purchase a power strip with multiple outlets?

Exposed Wiring

Free Access to Boxes

No one seems concerned with keeping wiring secured from people, nor the elements. So, electrical boxes are unlocked and most of the time left wide open and utility poles have wiring exposed. I have yet to see a single transformer site which is in decent shape.

Having said all this, the power at home has been up all week that I can tell and for that I need to now find some wood to knock on. Consistent power means stable Internet conne
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