When the radio stations first moved into our current facility, I made liberal use of the kgon.com domain to name machines that lived on the “public” side of the network. Now that we’re moving to a Sprint T1 on that side, I’m taking the opportunity to rename the internet-accessible servers. What few machines are making the transition from the old network to the new are also getting a new domain: entercomradio.com.

Okay, so I didn’t have much choice. In order to migrate the old names we’d need to spend $45 a shot. Thanks, but no thanks. I’d rather make a clean sweep of things anyway, when you get right down to it.

Anyway. Washuu is now TheLab, Mihoshi is now GXP, and Lancelot has been replaced by Mass. Also, Duckpond and Nestegg will instead be known as Souja and Shunga. (Hey, nobody’s going to be typing in those URLs but me, so who cares what they’re called?)

Why yes, I am still working that Tenchi Muyo naming scheme. If you don’t like it, go build your own damned network. So there. Nyah.

IN OTHER NEWS, Mass has a working Apache/PHP/MySQL rig, a cron system, and the beginnings of a traffic graphing system. The proxies seem to be working, email relaying remains to be tested, and I still haven’t started on that pesky firewall. (I should probably get on that, since I can’t migrate Ryoko, Zero, and the other machines off of the public side of the network until I have port-forwarding working.)

I’m only going to spend a couple more hours on that graphing nonsense tomorrow. Cacti is giving me trouble with SNMP, and that’s the part I really need. If I can’t suss out the problem in short order I’ll scrap that project and move on to the firewall. I can always put the traffic graphing system onto GXP if push comes to shove.

IN CLOSING, I’m aware that this has become a bit of a geekblog. Sorry ’bout that. Hey, it’s this or suffer more long stretches with almost no content. Work has completely absorbed my life lately, minus the occasional anime convention or visit with my cool friends. If all goes well, I’ll be back to my usual random nonsense by month’s end.

What do you mean, that wouldn’t be much of a change? Feh. Some people’s kids.

After spending a few hours trying to convince LPRng that HP LaserJet 5N printers aren’t the spawn of Satan and that Netware print queues are a Good Thing, several things came to light:

1) Intel print servers support LPD-style printing, thereby obviating the need for the Netware queue when printing from any Linux-like environment.

2) HP LaserJet 5N printers are, in fact, the spawn of Satan. At least if you’re going to use print filters through an LPD to get PostScript material into PCL format, they are. I have no idea how it worked before, except possibly a pact between RedHat and the aforementioned Satan.

3) HP JetDirect print servers like, say, those inside of our trio of HP 8×00 printers support LPD-style printing even better than the Intel print servers do. Not only that, but the 8×00 series printers do PostScript natively.

4) I no longer need to run an LPD interface between the Enco network and Netware, since Beast (the gateway box between Enco-land and the office network) can now print directly to the nearby HP 8000.

Frighteningly enough, the old scheme looked a bit like this:

Enco workstation –> Beast’s LPD –> Lancelot’s LPD (because try as I might, I couldn’t get Beast to talk to the Netware queue itself) –> Netware print queue –> Intel print server (because the 5N’s print server sucks elephant ass) –> HP 5N printer.

New scheme:

Enco workstation –> Beast’s LPD –> HP 8000 printer.

I’m a frelling genius. At least, until the next time I’m a frelling idiot…

(Oh, by the way. This is entry #500. Commence fanfare.)

This morning, shortly after 9:00, Duckpond (the server that hosts this site, among others) decided to start sending assloads of spam. I spent a frantic hour looking over logs, checking for security breaches and the like, and generally panicking like a headless chicken. Or duck, if you prefer.

And then I found the culprit. (I’d have found it sooner if I’d read the headers on the spam messages more closely to begin with, of course.) For some reason I can’t even remember anymore, I had a PHP “formmail” script laying around on the server. Someone found it and abused the living shit out of it, mostly to spam AOL addresses. How nice.

I’m going to go turn in my Geek Membership Card now, as I have clearly forfeited any credibility I might once have had.

Stupid. Stupid stupid stupid. Stupid. Ladies and gentlemen, I am the April Fool.