August 2007

There were 80 posts published in August 2007 (this is page 1 of 8).

A Short History Of Nearly Everything

I just finished the Bill Bryson book, A Short History Of Nearly Everything: a fun, fascinating review of all the science you never paid attention to in school. Bryson has a lot of ground to cover, bringing to life discoveries in the atomic world, genetics, geology, physics, astrophysics, and many, many others. He whittles these complicated subjects down to their human stories, while keeping the science real. I found it very entertaining, as I mentioned here before.
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MT.Net DNS Changes

MT.Net may disappear from the Internets momentarily over the holiday weekend. Have no fear, I’m migrating DNS servers.

If you lose us, check back in a day or two and all should be well again.

More Phishiness

I had a call come in from “Tuscany Industries” this morning, number 702-520-1117. I answered and decided to play their little game. A recorded female voice warned about my car’s warranty expiring. If I was not interested in renewing it, she said, press 2, otherwise press 1.

I pressed 1 and their phone switch said “transferring to the operator.”
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Brief MT.Net Outage

There was a brief MT.Net outage yesterday when my Xen VM ran out of virtual memory. It seems the pre-built CentOS image I began using did not mount a swap partition, nor did I think to check it for one. Thirty seconds of sysadmin work later and the problem was solved.

So far I’m digging the service. Like I said previously, the days of the absolute need to run on bare hardware are now over. Funny how the early days of computing revolved around time-sharing and the promise of the PC was to free you from such sharing. We’ve almost come full circle, eh?

Virtualization and the death of KVM

I just got back from a client visit which lead to an interesting revelation. I went there to support the network management software that my company makes. Upon arriving at the client’s desk, I happened to notice a familiar KVM appliance sitting on his desk.
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Another Phishy Call: “Upgrade Now”

Just got another phishy call, this time from number 702-520-1214. This time the CallerID read “Upgrade Now” and a message about satellite TV service began right after I said “hello.” When I asked to be taken off the list, a gentleman transferred me to an AUDIX voicemailbox, where a female voice said “this number will be removed. Sorry for the inconvenience,” or somesuch. Interestingly enough, this gentlemen sounded like the same guy on their system’s voicemail menu. Is this a one-person operation, perhaps?

I kept waiting for AUDIX to hang up but it apparently never does. Thus, I’m going on 12 minutes now tying up this bozo’s trunk, wasting his money.

At least now I know these clowns are using Lucent equipment to run their scam and not Asterisk.