Posted on

24-Feb-2011

Repaired
Daphne has been repaired, floowing Hoff’s suggestions on ITRC. But it took some time:
$ SET BOOTBLOCK ddcuu:
The command applies to Integrity only; on Alpha is does start but when specifying “DKA0:” as the device it compians “Wrong arguments” . The HELP on the command states it’s Integrity only; It would be nicer if the program wasn’t available at all on Alpha, or would just output that it doen’t do anything on Alpha….Well, I have to signal the problem anyway, so this would be an addition.
RUN SYS$SYSTEM:SYS$SETBOOT
That’s allright, it asks for the architecture – Alpha in my case, and for the boot file – what would it be? APB.EXE – obviously, it’s in the ITRC thread as well. But the full spec is to be given..
RUN SYS$SYSTEM:WRITEBOOT looks like a wrapper – asking for the architecture (N on the first – that’s VAX and this isn’t) and, again, for the full spec of the boot file. Now I mounted DKA0 and searched the disk for APB.EXE and found it on DKA0:[SYS0.SYSCOMMON.SYSEXE] and so I specified that. Probably not the best answer, if not incorrrect, but this was accepted.
Now the system boots fine.
The first next thing after that was running SYS$SETBOOT again, using the defaults. Now it should be right 🙂

Next is putting a call at HP.

Posted on

20-feb-2011

font color=”red”>kernel stack not valid
This weekend, in preparation of all upcoming updates, I did a number of things:
* Downloaded the AXP 8.4 CD’s (ISO’s) as a zip file from the AllianceOne site – I’ve been warned that this one is not the best one and contains a number of BAD THINGS – but with the patches, these should be addressed.
* Unzipped the file and burnt the installation ISO onto CD.
* Downloaded the latest UPDATEs and all patches that overrule what’s in it (according the master ECO list)
* Also dowloaded all latest 8.3 patches from the HP site – to update Diana.
* Downloaded the latest WASD files (and PHPWASD en PHP 5.3 by Mark Berryman)
* Copied the new WASD environment from Daphne (where I tested the whole lot) to Diana

First things first: Overwrite the current 8.4 fieldtest environment on Daphne to the real thing – using the (possibly not-to-best) downloaded file.
That caused no problem.
Next I installed Update 1 – rebooted – PCSI – rebooted – UPDATE 4 – reboot – and the rest in one go – reboot – But No. It did not and broke even before SYSINIT was loaded. So there’s something pretty basic going wrong. No matter wat -flags I added: still the same error:

halt 2
kernel stack not valid
CPU=0

There was one thing to do to get on: Post a message on ITRC, and during the next days there were answers that gave me the information to get on: What to do ‘(log a call with HP), how to get around it, and that I might have been able to prevent it by reading an advisory – if only that would have been shown where you would it to be exposed: as a warning on the download spot! Hoff’s explanation at the end is worth a read, because it tells you what may be going on.
So: “To be done” – next weekend. Log a call with HP as well (though it’s said that engineering does monitor the ITRC site – they would become aware of the issue anyway).
In the mean time, I can set up my new WASD environment – not yet enabling it, but getting it ready to go. Diana isn’t effected in this matter.
Fiber status
Planning was start digging in week 7 – but when starting at the opposite side of the quarter, it takes some more time to get near our place. Hopefully it will be this week, or next; soon after that, I may be get connected – but even than it will take some time before I have the speed I want. So please be patient – I’ll try to have all updates done before that 🙂

Posted on

14-Feb-2011

A slight change
It’s getting exceedingly problamatic to login as administartor on the blogs. It all boils down to the PHP installation and mapping, so I’ll upgrade both Wasd, PHP and WordPress as soon as possible – probably next weekend. That also means that the view of these blogs will change…Hopefully it will solve these (and other) issues; I’ve tried so using Daphne – that runs WASD 10.0.2, the lastest PHP port by Mark Berryman and WordPress 3.0.1. And since the latest vesrion seems to be 3.0.5 (shown on the banner on the admin pages) that would be a major upgrade. But the greatest chnage will be in the WASD envrionment. Luckily, it has been set up on Dahpne so it’s merely a matter op copying the files.
I hope…
To get around a few issues, I changed the design of the Trips, Tracks and Travels blog – using another theme, which loads faster – and allows login from it. The Dust Theme always required by restart of the browser, and somethimes this helped….
DDoS attempts
It has been quiet on the (D)Dos front fro some time, but this weekend there has been another attempt, from different addresse; it might have been a distributed atgtack, or ifrom one route over different anonymizers – but the addresses have been noted; action is planned.\
Fiber coming
According the plans, laying the galss fiber in our street will start this week – and within a few weeks I’ll have my FAST access. Originally I opted for a 10Mb connection, but since 50Mb (symmetrical) is not that much extra, I’ll make my move.

Posted on

10-Feb-2011

Beyond recovery
The company that would try to recover the data from my crashed disk has done the utmost possible – even getting a specific part from the US, to recover any data, but without result. It proved it wasn’t just the chip that was broken, the heads were effected as well – and have damaged the platters in such a way that ‘imaging’ – reading the disk sector by sector proved impossible. If the heads weren’t that good, I think there must have been a problem from the beginning. Well, that explains why I had access problems at some time, and why I couldn’t install a new Windows environment….
So the archives on that disk – all since June 2010 – are gone – as far as I don’t had a backup.
Well, I should have made backups…
One luck, though.
All images from our trips this year – two weeks in the UK and a week in Germany – are stored on another system as well – just checked. And: I remembered I carried that laptop with our UK trip, and the tracks could well be on that machine. So I checked today – Behold: the file indeed exists. But the German tracks were not stored on that machine. But they could be on one of the USB drives or sticks, so I’ll dig somewhat deeper.
If no more available: well, it’s a pity.

Posted on

02-Feb-2011

Maintenance
On Tuesdays I’m always short of time, but luckiliy, the automated cleanup procedure works fine – though removing the oprator logs could well be postponed for a few days…
But despite the still troubling issues with sending a message on the mail statistics, it works fine; the mail stats are in the logfile, so after some processing, I get the data:

PMAS statistics for January
Total messages    :   3142 = 100.0 o/o
DNS Blacklisted   :    426 =  13.5 o/o (Files: 31)
Relay attempts    :   1894 =  60.2 o/o (Files: 31)
Accepted by PMAS  :    822 =  26.1 o/o (Files: 31)
 Handled by explicit rule
        Rejected :    133 =  16.1 o/o (processed),   4.2 o/o (all)
        Accepted :    285 =  34.6 o/o (processed),   9.0 o/o (all)
 Handled by content
       Discarded :     98 =  11.9 o/o (processed),   3.1 o/o (all)
    Quarantained :    282 =  34.3 o/o (processed),   8.9 o/o (all)
       Delivered :     24 =   2.9 o/o (processed),    .7 o/o (all)

Relay attempts have been massive for one day (06-jan-2011), leaving a logfile over 150 blocks, lowered to half the amount on 11, 12, 14 and 24, the rest is far lower. But nevertheless, it has occurred all over the month.
There has been a drop in spam messages since last year, but it looks the bots are gradually picking up again. The number of quarantained messages increases – the number of discarded messages is still a lotlower – but that may find the reason in more specific rules, these should be shown in the number of messages rejected – but I will have to dig the logfiles to get the right perspective. Perhaps these aren’t even logged, or counted?
It’s also possible that blocking particular subnets in the router – completely – contributes to lower levels of spam and other abuse. Of course, there are still thought of Diana being a poorly secured Windows box; as is shown in the latest FTP log:
%TCPIP-E-FTP_LOGFAL, remote interactive login failure Administrator
-TCPIP-I-FTP_NODE, client host name: 59-120-34-162.HINET-IP.hinet.net
-LOGIN-F-NOSUCHUSER, no such user
These do occur occasionally.
Same on the weblogs – again: trying to break into well-known holes: /post contact.php, though far less than before; unsecured packages (attempting tu use SETUP of CONFIG – hazardous if not deleted – as suggested in the manuals…
No more DoS?
After I have explicty disabled ALL access from a few networks, there has been just a single alert of DoS services by trace_rt floodsm, but I still have to check the router logs to see if these attempts continue. In the last one – created yesterday – there was no mention of blocked requests, so it may have stopped – for now.
And since my son has stopped downloading on a large scale (it took him too long, probabbly, or he got what he wanted) the growth rate is more normal.
Developments
Development of the blog program has stalled because of a backlog in processing content – imaages, that is, and a lot of work aside the data center; I have to put my thoughts elsewhere for emprloyability sake. Doing Java – or similar. Not exactly my kind of environment, but one has to adapt the bad things in life, at times…
Well, It openes new thoughts as well: What a joy it would be to use Java as a programming environment, but translate the final product into object files and link them together into a VMS executable? If well done, it could “green” a virualized environemnt even more: Less memory and less CPU power needed….