The Area 0

Okay, so everyone and their mothers know about w00t. And I’ve been watching the site for nearly two years, yet to buy something. But today… I opened up the the wallet and made my first purchase. Worthy of a blog post? Not really… but hey, it’s my site and I can fill it as I wish!

So today I purchased the “XtremeMac Portable Battery for iPods“. It claims to add 80 hours of audio or 8 hours of video playback time. I’ll believe it when I see it. Though, if nothing else, it will allow me to not have to hold my iPod in my hand while watching movies on flights.

The one part that cracks me up is a comment left:

“seriously, the ipod battery is plenty fine… this is just something else to make apple money. “

To which my reply was simply:

“Funny, I only got a couple hours of video out of my ipod on my 8 hour flight. I guess that’s plenty fine for you?

I’m buying one, if nothing else, so I dont have to hold my ipod in my hand while watching movies on flights!”

Which is of course not true, but it makes my point. It also amazes me how many people bitch about the iPod on that site… and praise the Zune. I’m not sure I understand…

Today we ran into an issue with our BGP advertisements. To give you a little history, we were allocated 198.49.81.0/24 and 198.49.82.0/24 back in 1993, which was pre-CIDR. (I bet you can see where this is going, already.)

We have been using 198.49.81.0/24 for a number of years, obviously longer then I’ve been at PSU. I was told that we’d never used the “other half” of our assigned IP space. So basically, I knew:

• we had 198.49.81.0/24
• that it was only half of the address space

I made an assumption about what address the other half was, and earlier this summer I had asked our ISP:

“Should we not be using 198.49.80.0/23?” I did the math a couple times. I checked ipcalc, I knew it was correct. So not realizing that the assumption I had made was a poor one, we went ahead and advertised 198.49.80.0/23 via BGP. The ISP didn’t catch it, either. A simple oversight. I suppose they figured we knew what address space we owned….

In the days of CIDR, of course we would be given the /23! It would be just silly not to. In fact, 198.49.80.0/24 is unallocated. It was a simple case of not realizing that the addresses were pre-CIDR, and therefore not contained by a contiguous bit boundary. OOPS.

It wasn’t a big deal to fix it, we simply added the two correct prefixes to our BGP advertisements, and our ISP simply filtered the /23 we were also advertising. There is some more work to be done upstream, I am told, but everything is working as it should at this point.

Props to Cort at KanREN for spotting the issue, and helping us get it resolved.

The MPAA’s Ubuntu-based university network monitoring toolkit software is no longer available for download. An Ubuntu technical board member sent a takedown notice to the group’s ISP noting that the software was being distributed without source code, which is a violation of the GPL.

read more | digg story

Need a reason to replace that old hunk of junk 2500 series router? Or maybe some old thinnet devices? Well here’s your solution: simply apply 120VAC to said device - oh, and not where you’d normally apply it, either.

Click here to read more »

This week I received my new fountain pen, a Lamy 2000. I’d been wanting to buy this pen for a few months. Until now I’d been using a relatively cheap Picasso pen, which had only a steel nib. It was a cheap pen, only about $20 and it certainly did the job and kept me happy, but I was ready to move on to something nicer, with a gold nib. All I can say is, I got my Lamy 2000, and I love it! Thanks to RyanL27 on the Fountain Pen Network, I have the pen I’ve wanted for ages, and I got it for a pretty decent price too - only $75 shipped!

Buying a pen for $75 might seem absurd for most people, but it’s certainly a worthwhile investment. All the years of highschool and college where I had problems with hand cramps while writing - no longer an issue. The lack of pressure required to write with a fountain pen alleviates all pains associated with cheap pens. Having a gold nib makes writing much more smooth. Not to mention having a nice pen is just a nice feeling. I actually enjoy writing now, and my handwriting skills have improved dramatically. I highly suggest buying a fountain pen, if you’ve never tried them!

If there was ever a network tool that I feel every Cisco engineer should have at their disposal, it would be Dynamips. Dynamips is a piece of software that runs as a server on your Unix, Mac or Windows machine. You write text-based configuration files using Dynagen, and it loads up those configurations using an actual IOS image. That’s right - it runs an actual IOS binary on emulated hardware, unlike most simulators out there that only emulate IOS software.

I highly recommend visiting their website, as well as this forum which is an excellent place to get support. You can also read a tutorial for getting started with Dynamips and Dynagen here. Oh, and we’re always around on IRC. Visit #cisco on irc.freenode.net, where you will find me (IPv6Freely) as well as the creator of Dynamips, cfilliot.