When technologists chill...

Ye olde datacenter 2 - this time it's enterprise-class gear

Ye olde datacenter

view of my old office datacenter, from the entrance. trying out go.blogger.com. Looks like the photo worked, but the comment didn't. Oh well.

bah, roadrunner

I have a feeling TWC/RoadRunner botched a major upgrade to their network yesterday. My cable modem was offline for close to 12 hours. Two things were learned from this:

1) on OpenWrt, make sure "cache-file=/tmp/ez-ipup" is set in your /etc/ez-ipupdate.conf. A few days before the outage, my DHCP lease time dropped to 1 hour. Without ez-ipupdate caching my DynDNS account, I was temporarily banned. Also, my IP is now on a totally different subnet. Low lease time before outage + New ip after outage + High lease time after outage = they changed some serious shit. With a 12 hr downtime, they obviously thought it was going to go much better, but flubbed it.

2) The MS Update for KB911280 is incompatible with the current Road Runner dialer. I had to bang my head against a half-dozen TWC phone turds before one *finally* handed me off to tech support so I could get dialed in. The real dial-up tech support had this fixed in the time it took to reboot WindowsXP. Of course, it was too-little-too-late to be online for the early-morning maintenance work that I needed to do.

Anyway, I'm back online. It does make me think twice about using "crappy mega-corp" as my upstream, but it's the least of the evils available to me right now.

what time is it?

No time for home tech projects lately... been too busy at work. The only thing of note was a minor perl script that went through my digital picture archives looking for images that accidentally had a timestamp of 01/01/2000 00:00:00. That's the timestamp my Olympus C-3030Zoom gives a pic after battery ran out and it's forgotten the date/time. I didn't actually change the JPEG timestamp that's builtin to the image, just the filesystem mtime. That's a whole other perl script and some fancy perl modules. Here's the meat-n-potatoes of the script:

my ($fmonth,$fday,$num,$ext) = $dirent =~ /P(.)(..)(....)(\.jpg)/i;
if ( ( $fmonth eq "1" && $fday eq "01") && ($month != 1 && $day != 1) ) {
      my $newdirent = sprintf("P%1X%02d%04d%s",$month,$day,$num,$ext);
      print "should rename $dir/$dirent to $dir/$newdirent\n";
      `mv $dir/$dirent $dir/$newdirent`;
      $dirent=$newdirent;
}     
$num += 0;
my $hour = 12 + int($num / 60);
my $min = $num % 60;
my $sec = 0;
my $time = Mktime($year,$month,$day, $hour,$min,$sec);
my $dstring = localtime($time);
my $f = "$dir/$dirent";
print "timestamp '$f' as $dstring\n";
utime $time, $time, $f