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.

Hosting Provider Switcheroo

MT.Net may go dark briefly in the next day or so as it moves to its new home on a box at VPSFarm, a Xen hosting provider. This could normally be done with no service interruption to you, my dear readers, but a DNS change is being made simultaneously. Those tend to take a while to propagate so its possible you may not jump to the new site as quickly as you’d like.

Should you happen to lose your MT.Net goodness, please – do not panic! The new DNS changes should eventually propagate to you.

You’ll know you’re looking at the wrong site if you don’t see a post about Miss Teen South Carolina next up.

Going, Going, Gonzo!

There’s a Southern saying that applies to outgoing U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales: “if his mouth’s moving, he’s lying.” Gonzales finally got the point and tendered his resignation today, ending one of the most contentious terms as attorney general in recent memory.

What gets me is Mitch McConnell’s (R-KY) statement after Gonzales’s resignation:

“It is my hope that whomever President Bush selects as the next attorney general, he or she is not subjected to the same poisonous partisanship that we’ve sadly grown accustomed to over the past eight months.”

Uh, you been under a rock for the past seven years, Mitch?