Category: Technology

Yesterday I had a nice experience of building the HP rack. I used to build custom racks with different hardware inside before and I would say it is not a very easy task. This is not to said about HP racks, especially when all the hardware to be in the rack is from HP as well. Actually, I didn\’t need to use a screw driver a lot, only in certain places (like removing the cover from the server to convert it from tower to rack mountable). Everything is fixed with locks, but not screws, everything matches the place perfectly. I really enjoyed the experience.

The only problem was faced is that I didn\’t have a conversion kits for old ML350 servers (G2 and T01) so I had to drill the wholes in the part of the rails of the conversion kit for G4 to be able to attach them to the old machines. I am glad that HP guys haven\’t seen me when I was drilling the rails (they would cry). I had no other choice, sorry guys :)

Doing a nice project for vessels communication. I was looking into different problems, solutions, equipment sets and so on and finally I have finished with one installation with Thrane & Thrane Fleet 33 for satellite and Ericsson GSM modem along side.

The idea is that the vessel spends most of the time near the shore in the coverage of GSM and from time to time crosses the Mediterranean see. So when vessel is nearby, it uses usual dialup (speed 9.6 at a cost of CYP ~0.04) and when it is out, it is using Fleet (speed 9.6 at a cost of CYP ~0.60).
Everyone seems to be happy now. I really enjoyed doing this project since I learned a lot of stuff about communication on vessels as well as about vessels as a whole.

I was avoiding using LVM for the past time without even understanding why. I was thinking that without LVM things are more simple, just plain partitions. Few days ago I understood why – systems which use LVM for the root partition are kinda harder to recover with different rescue cds. Instead of just plainly mounting the /dev/hd?? to somewhere on /mnt/??? one have to do lots of tricky operations.

I think I will continue sticking to non-LVM installations for the time being since now I even now at least one exact reason why – easier recovery if needed :)

Today I got fed up with SSH attacks on my server and I decided to set up DenyHosts app to deal with all those attacks. The idea is simple enough, the app scans the /var/log/secure (or any other log file if not in default location) to find the unsuccessful login attempts to ssh. Then it decides if the failed attempts from the same ip repeats too much and if yes – puts that IP in the /etc/hosts.deny file to prevent a connection for the future.

In addition there are some other features like checking the ip against the database on the web to see it this ip is known for the attacks and so on, but I decided to make only basic processing now. We\’ll see how it will go.