Michael's musings

Thu, 27 Apr 2006

Cooperix plans

For some time I have run an open source friendly co-location facility in downtown Ottawa. We depended upon SDSL lines to connect us to local ISPs that also have facilities in the downtown area.

We have decided for a number of reasons not to continue as a group. There is a business case for continuing, but we are unable to commit the time required to make it work.

There are still some customers, including ourselves, that we need to deal with, and want space. We were about to move equipment into a 19" rack at Cooperix, and so I started investigating renting a cabinet somewhere.

I have decided that I will rent some cabinet space from Storm, in their Courtwood facility. http://ox.ca/eu

It's not far from my house, and we seem to have a good relationship with Storm. They have made it through some growing pains that they had two years ago, and seem far more stable than they were before. I will have 10Mb/s (likely burstable to 100Mb/s) service, and there will be a 30GB/month cap (at which point, we will have to discuss things).

I will have the following things in the cabinet:

router/firewall

primary and secondary DNS server

mailing list server/mail relay

serial console server

VPN/IPsec/OE gateway

Prices will be as follows:

$125/month for 1U server, including serial console.

$150/month for 2U server, including serial console.

$175/month for 3U server, including serial console.

Existing customers will be grandfathered at their current rate and server size for 1 year. For a very short period (until June 30), tower cases from existing customers will be transported to the new location, if you can not arrange to switch them to a rack-mount case in time.

The same IP address space will be used.

Customers who do not want to move will be credited on a pro-rated based upon April 1 termination.

As storm is also an ISP at Cooper Street, we will actually be able to transition easily, adding host routes as each system is moved. I expect the first date on which we can move things to be May 15, and the last date to be June 16.

Mon, 24 Apr 2006

network at 1 King Street

http://www.sandelman.ca/mcr/hotels/yyz-1kingwest.txt

In the end it turned out that Paul had a friend of a friend that actually did the network wiring for the hotel.

He came by after Paul sent some SMS and actually sorted out our inability to have an airport (with a second layer of NAT) or a switch attached to the hotel network.

Things worked better but the mtr was still broken.

Sun, 23 Apr 2006

more patent stupids

http://righttocreate.blogspot.com/2006/04/model-railroading-patents-update.htm

This was forwarded to me, and I found it interesting.

I gather, because I didn't read all the links, that there is some program that let's you control model trains with a computer.

I'll tell you what got me into computers: wanting to do exactly that. I was perhaps 8 or 9. I had a model railroad. I saw an issue of Model Railroader where they had a TRASH-80 as the block controller for a large model railroad. That was cool.

http://www.modelrailroader.com has back issue index. Hmm. Net is too slow to bother with their http://trains.com login, etc.

The pages are like: http://index.mrmag.com/tm.exe?opt=I&MAG=MR&MO=0&YR=1979

The site is frustratingly slow. What do you expect for "tm.exe", clearly this Windows 'server' box isn't optimized for "server" applications.

I looked through 1978,1979, and 1980. I didn't find what I was looking for. It was a big, perhaps Chicago based club that had this.

Sheesh, the MIT Tech-Model railroad club ought to have tons of prior art. Question is: did they actually publish something.

Sat, 22 Apr 2006

VIA rail

http://www.sandelman.ca/mcr/hotels/via-yowyyz.txt

This is on-train wifi service. Cost was $8.95 CDN for 24 hours, or $3.99 for 15 minutes, plus $0.30/minute. Or $49.95 for a month.

marajade-[~] mcr 1075 %iwconfig eth1 eth1 IEEE 802.11-DS ESSID:"opti-3464" Nickname:"HERMES I"

Mode:Managed Frequency:2.437 GHz Access Point: 00:04:E2:81:E8:0B Bit Rate:11 Mb/s Tx-Power=15 dBm Sensitivity:1/3 Retry limit:4 RTS thr:off Fragment thr:off Power Management:off Link Quality=64/92 Signal level=-32 dBm Noise level=-97 dBm Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:59 Rx invalid frag:69 Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:0 Missed beacon:0

marajade-[~] mcr 1076 %ifconfig eth1 eth1 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:E0:63:81:F7:D7

inet addr:192.168.133.101 Bcast:192.168.133.255 Mask:255.255.255.0

inet6 addr: fe80::2e0:63ff:fe81:f7d7/64 Scope:Link UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1 RX packets:5785 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:9433 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 RX bytes:1311202 (1.2 MiB) TX bytes:1425900 (1.3 MiB) Interrupt:3 Base address:0x100

marajade-[~] mcr 1057 %mtr -r lox HOST: marajade.sandelman.ca Loss% Snt Last Avg Best Wrst StDev

1. 192.168.133.1 0.0% 10 2.5 3.6 2.2 9.3 2.3
2. 10.0.15.1 0.0% 10 457.0 506.1 297.0 724.6 137.4
3. link1.parsons.com 0.0% 10 446.8 583.1 279.5 943.2 210.6
4. ??? 100.0 10 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0
5. 500.Serial5-10.GW11.DFW9.ALT 0.0% 10 671.9 620.0 388.8 926.8 166.2
6. 0.so-3-0-0.XT1.DFW9.ALTER.NE 10.0% 10 610.2 765.5 377.3 1575. 367.3
7. 0.so-7-0-0.XL1.TOR3.ALTER.NE 10.0% 10 426.5 681.1 420.5 1024. 228.3
8. POS1-0.XR1.TOR3.ALTER.NET 10.0% 10 549.5 739.0 397.0 1423. 307.4
9. 195.ATM7-0.GW2.OTT1.ALTER.NE 10.0% 10 720.0 679.8 439.5 901.3 163.1 10. albarrie-gw.customer.alter.n 10.0% 10 615.8 700.1 488.7 841.7 133.6 11. core1.travel-net.com 11.1% 9 706.9 780.2 446.4 1197. 224.0 12. travelnet.sandelman.ottawa.o 11.1% 9 981.1 859.3 669.5 981.1 107.0 13. lox.sandelman.ca 11.1% 9 911.0 885.8 638.0 1082. 164.8 marajade-[~] mcr 1058 %

marajade-[~] mcr 1077 %whatsmyip 206.219.197.100 48643 22

marajade-[~] mcr 1078 %host localhost.com localhost.com has address 10.11.12.13

POPUP window is named:

http://www.localhost.com/signout.cgi

blosxom mode has one bug

I had to change the defun muse-blosxom-new-entry, to remove the precision from the time format, getting:

(insert "#date " (format-time-string "%Y-%m-%d-%H-%M")

My bet is that this is a Xemacs v21 bug/limitation.

I installed by blosxom with ScriptAlias, pointing it directly at the CGI that I wanted run with:

ScriptAlias /mcr/blog/ "/home/mcr/cgi-bin/blosxom.cgi"

but, this fails if you append additional information to the URL, i.e. you do:

http://www.sandelman.ca/mcr/blog/index.rss

this is obviously a bug in my Apache configuration. I know that this is possible. I don't want to expose the cgi/etc. part of the path to google and archives, because that would prevent me from changing to another blog method.

VIA-rail now has wifi

To: Customer_Relations.VIA@viarail.ca

I used wifi for the first time via your parsons.com and opti-fi.ca service on my trip from Ottawa to Toronto.

I never did get why you trialed things on the Toronto/Montreal trains, as Ottawa is where high tech is. I also want to let you know that I would have taken the overnight service from Ottawa to Toronto on this trip had you ever bothered to make the stop in Ottawa as you promised to. (I DO want to get to Ottawa 6am. It means that I don't lose a day to travel, and I don't have to leave Toronto at 5:30pm, and I don't arrive home tired)

I very much hope you consider equipping ALL of your trains with wifi, including the Montreal/Halifax run. That would be a big incentive for me to take that train, although a better connection to Fredericton is probably the major limiting factor.

Your provider needs to offer WEP/WPA service. Not for privacy --- WEP and WPA is trivially cracked, but for authentication. The web portal mess is just that --- a mess. It won't work from my wifi phone, or my wifi instant messaging appliance (it's PDA sized).

Your price is okay, but not great. I had to think about $8.95. Is it worth it. At $5.99, it's a no-brainer. Particularly since the network connection is slow.

The network connection also emerges from whatever radio/satellite system you have in Dallas Fort-Worth. This concerns me as the United States has very much different laws as to copyright than Canada. Keep my data in Canada if it is in Canada. Perhaps Ontario Hydro can help with transit across Ontario. This is important to me, and I'm willing to pay $1 more for this.

I do not in general like the web portal mess. I would prefer that my laptop just noticed that it was WPA, picked the right password and authenticated when it booted. My 802.11 phone can also do this, but it doesn't have a browser.

I am willing to use it for the initial sign on, at which point I would prefer to buy blocks of hours. I.e. $50 for 50 hours, valid for up at least 1 year.

(At 5 hours per Ottawa/Toronto trip, that's 5 round trips/year). You might just want to make this a perk at the Prestige or Premier VIA-preference level. I would also be very happy to redeem VIA-preference points for this.

Again, you need more bandwidth.

this is my first try

I finally found a reasonable blogging system that I am willing to use. This uses Xemacs with "MuseMode" to either publish my entries as .HTML, or .RDF files, or it seems that I can export in blosxom format.

http://www.blosxom.com is a neat little perl CGI that seems to have all the properties I want: stores blog entries in flat files, and doesn't screw around much. I would already be running it if it was in NetBSD pkgsrc.

As it is, I guess I have to download it and install it on lox, which is hard to do from the train, as the wifi on the train is slow.

Well, maybe I should stop using an xterm to lox, and just stick to ssh.

The muse-blosxom-new-entry initialized the buffer, but it left the #date entry set to: 4Y-2m-2d-2H-2M. I think it was supposed to expand it?