Jason Antman’s Blog

I’ve posted an update about serious DHCP problems with this unit.

Last week my mother’s printer died, and she asked me to find a new one for her. After a quick look on NewEgg (sort by ratings is a wonderful thing) I found the Brother HL-2170W. Aside from having a wireless interface (only a security hole, as far as I’m concerned) it seemed pretty cool – tiny B&W laser, Ethernet, PCL6, 23ppm, 32 MB RAM, 250 sheet capacity and 2400×600 dpi. So, for a mere $99 USD, I bought it for her.

When the printer showed up, I was a bit let down to find no sticker bearing the MAC address on either the box or the printer itself – and given the one-button hard control, there wasn’t a way to manually print a config sheet. So, after plugging it into the network and using the DHCP logs to give it a static assignment, a quick reboot of the printer had everything working. As usual, I skipped to the last few pages in the installation manual, and found the ½ page section on the web interface. Configuration was pretty simple – change the admin password, disable a bunch of unneeded services, etc. And then, when playing around with the admin interface, I found a bit of a holy grail – there in the enable/disable services screen were two options that I found unusual for a “personal” printer; Telnet and SNMP. I immediately tried both. An snmpwalk revealed the usual (RFC1213, HOST-RESOURCES, and Printer-MIB) including information on status and consumables. Though the Telnet login process wasn’t terribly intuitive, “help” revealed familiar set/show/clear functionality as well as an option to zero out counters. While I was a bit let down to see that there wasn’t a way to view consumable status or printer status, it did allow access to every conceivable configuration parameter, including a few that weren’t mentioned on the web interface.

All in all, while I can’t comment about reliability or quality yet, this cute little printer seems to have quite a feature set, especially when it comes to manageability and remote troubleshooting (a good thing for any printer that’s used by a family member who you support). And best of all, it supports IPP and LPR.

Reviews printer, review

This is by no means rare, but I happened to be checking through my spam folder before deleting the contents (I used to just do this once a week or so, but apparently since jasonantman.com is up and running correctly and listening on port 25, the volume has increased a bit) and came by this email:

Subject:
Dear $TO_EMAIL 17.3.2009 84% 0FF
From: Best Price <$TO_EMAIL>
Date: Tue, 17 Mar 2009 16:45:54 -0400 (EDT)
To: <$TO_EMAIL>

Wow. I know that spammers aren’t exactly world-class programmers, but this seems like something that anyone who’s been in CS101 would realize is wrong….

On the positive side, maybe I should just add a SpamAssassin rule to trigger for anything with “$TO_EMAIL” in the headers. Not that I’d need it in this case, as the message had a score of 21.7 and my threshold is 5.0….

Miscellaneous Geek Stuff lazy, spam

Well, I don’t have time to go into a lot of detail, but I thought I’d give a recap of what’s going on. I went down to Mount Holly, NJ yestserday morning – about a 2-/12 hour drive each way, and picked up a 41U rack for the basement. Pretty damn heavy, took me two hours to disassemble it, wrangle it down the stairs, and get it back together. It’s an old round-hole rack, which didn’t seem to matter much until I found that the tabs of the Dell Rapid Rails are just a bit too big to fit in it, so neither my rack KMM nor the rails for my mail server will fit. A bigger problem, though, is that the guy told me it was the standard HP 29″ deep, and I found it to be 28-1/4″ deep when I started racking things up. So, though I just spent $200 on rails for old Proliants, they’re all about 1/2″ too long to fit.

Yesterday, I also had Cablevision show up to install the new Optimum Business with 5 static IPs.

So, last night around 9:00, I started the arduous task of (for the first time ever) powering down ALL of my machines, moving them to the new rack, and re-cabling. That took about 2-1/2 hours, after which my intent was to bring up the new Optimum connection, configure the Vyatta router, and roll over mail and web. From what I’d read of the Vyatta docs it seemed a relatively straightforward task, and being the stubborn jackass that I am, I decied, “hey, it’s my personal site, it’s low traffic, and I want it up before I go to sleep. I’ll roll over DNS before I bring everything up.”

That was a very bad idea. Vyatta isn’t nearly as simple as it seems – especially for someone who isn’t really a network (or at least router/firewall) guy. When they say Enterprise, they mean robust. They also mean that week-long bootcamps aren’t for naught. It took me about half an hour to figure out that even if no “firewall” ruleset is associated with an interface, it still has an implicit drop all. And if you only want to firewall what’s coming in from the outside world, and let everything out, you need to add explicit allow all rules to the in and out sides of the LAN inteface and the out side of the WAN interface.

To top all this off, I had some serious still-unexplained DHCP problems on the LAN, a serious issue since I just set all my hosts to DHCP (which I’ll probably undo soon). So, Yesterday was network work from 7:30 AM to 3 AM today (including driving to pickup the rack). By the time 3 AM rolled around, I was quite unhappy that I decided to roll over DNS in order to force myself to get things working, as I ended up going back to FiOS for client access only. Today started around 10 AM, and here I am – 6:30 PM, and I just got things working partially right. I have mail working – arguably the most important – for jasonantman.com only, though I have yet to setup any aliases.

On the web side, I’m working to setup name-based vhosts for all of the subdomains, but for some reason, blog is showing up for everything. Luckily it works right. So we’ll see….

Projects firewall, optimum, rack, router, wan

Well, I finally broke down and ordered Optimum Business. Come tomorrow, I’ll be moving from Verizon FiOS residential with a dynamic IP, much blocked (hence jantman.dyndns.org:10011) and 10Mbps down/2Mbps up to Optimum Business with 30 down/5 up, a block of 5 static IPs, and no blocked ports.

It’s going to be a crazy weekend. Probably not the best thing the week before midterms, but oh well. Tomorrow morning I’m picking up a 42U rack for home to replace the Sears shelving unit my boxes are currently on. Cablevision is supposed to be here between 2-5 PM to do the install (yes, they insist that for Business they do the install, even though it’s only a 4-foot coax run from the first splitter to the demarc). I’ve got Vyatta CE5 Beta installed on a Proliant DL360G2 as the new router, ready to go (after some configuration). I’ll probably keep FiOS up until I know the new router is working correctly (I’ll do a test on my management VLAN).

Once Optimum and the new router is up, the fun starts:

1. Forward the appropriate ports on the new router, including 80 (in addition to 10011).
2. Bring the old router down and make sure the new one is up, operational, and forwarding all the right ports.
3. Update DynDNS to point to the first IP, used as a catch-all for old DynDNS links.
4. Begin assignment of the 5 IPs (everything will be behind NAT) based on a list of what hosts need valid reverse DNS, and then adding other ports (NATed) as needed.
5. Update DNS for JasonAntman.com and the other domains.
6. Update Optimum reverse DNS.
7. Ensure that everything works as planned, DNS is up, ports are forwarded, and everything is as before (at least in terms of HTTP).
8. Once DNS is up, reconfigure Apache to have a vhost handling any legacy requests to port 10011 and rewrite them to www.jasonantman.com.
9. Setup a vhost for ‘www’ that takes URLs that used to be subdirectories (i.e. www.jasonantman.com/blog) and rewrites them to requests for the appropriate subdomain. Simultaneously move everything from the default vhost to name-based vhosts.
10. Ensure that old jantman.dyndns.org:10011 requests are being redirected properly, and requests for subdirectories under the web root are going to the right subdomain.
11. Check that this all works acceptably with the existing blogger-to-wordpress rewrite script.
12. Finally start rolling out some of the new services that I had waiting for the new connection.
13. Start the arduous process of reconfiguring my mail server, moving from Fetchmail from Verizon to an actual mail server, make everything work, and make sure my IPs aren’t blacklisted.
14. Ugh. Find anywhere in the entire ‘net where my old @verizon.net address appeared (especially GoDaddy, DynDNS, other important stuff) and change it to the new jasonantman.com address.
15. Since this is all in my mother’s basement (there’s nothing like a mother’s love, especially when it comes to a constant hum emanating from the ground level of a house), figure out what to do for her when the verizon.net email goes away.

So I might have some downtime this weekend, but when things come back up, I’ll be done with this DynDNS and Port 10011 crap.

Projects fios, optimum, vyatta

To keep it short, I’m sure anyone who winds up here has already heard about the recent Microsoft lawsuit against TomTom, alleging patent infringement. Coverage has been extensive, including GrokLaw and Linux Magazine. While the mentioned patents include car navigation technology (at least the names of the patents seem amazingly vague) and FAT . Most of the news stories I’ve read say that it’s “good for Linux” and will never see the inside of a courtroom.

Maybe I’m just a pessimist, but I see the idea behind this as much worse than “good for Linux”. MS chose one company to sue. TomTom just happens to be not only a household name, but also posted a $1.2 Billion loss last year. It seems to me this is more of a FUD campaign than anything else… the best case for Microsoft is that they could strangle TomTom in a legal battle, perhaps force them to go under, and then ensure a media spin along the lines of “Know that company that made the GPS in every car? They used Linux in it, they got sued by Microsoft, and they’re no more.”

While I haven’t always been a fan of TomTom – and am still bothered by the fact that my (stolen, no longer in my possession) TomTom One ran Linux but wouldn’t give me a console or even let me see the filesystem – I’ll be watching this closely, and hoping that the powers that be will not let the angry dinosaur crush a company over a series of patents that are either horribly obvious (anyone other than Garmin having a claim to any GPS-related idea is beyond me) or just horrible (FAT?!?!?!).

On a final note – isn’t it about time that the US finally dealt with this damn software patent thing? Not only does it horribly stifle innovation (not good to do in a bad economy), and I have a hard time grasping the claim that Microsoft’s developers are so all-powerful that they’re the only people that thought of technology X, but it’s about time that the US government got the balls to look Microsoft in the eyes and say, “you’re not the only game in town anymore. Get used to it.”

Ideas and Rants lawsuit, microsoft, patents, tomtom