I need more power, Scotty!

The days of the turbo slug were numbered.

I often asked myself how long I would be able to endure running (and using) a slow server to serve up my web site. I’m a patient guy; sometimes too patient.

“Six months?”

“How about one year?”

OK, maybe closer to six months.

Well, that day has come. I chucked the Linksys NSLU2 out the window. It’s laying outside on the pavement, should you want to pick it up. After all the frustration it’s put me through, I think that would suit it well.

Don’t bother running outside. No, seriously. You won’t find much.

If you know me, you know I take good care of my toys. Rather, I auctioned the Linksys NSLU2 off to some adventurous soul on Ebay. May he (or she) have as much fun with it as I did (for whatever length of time that may be ;)).

My web site is now running off a state-of-the-art Pentium III 1 GHz box! 😉 Still energy-efficient, but faster! Time to pimp it out 😉

Teaching at UCFV

Not just yet 😉

After a five year hiatus, one of my contacts at UCFV informed me that there may be another opportunity for me to teach at UCFV in the coming months. UCFV is keeping their lips sealed on the upcoming course’s content, but hopefully it’s something that interests me.

When I last taught at UCFV, I was given a week’s notice to prepare a third-year Computer Science course; however, this time around I was promised more advance notice. I recall being up until 5 or 6 AM several nights in a row preparing course outlines and the first week’s lecture material, only to start work at 9 AM. Believe me, it was a very stressful experience. It turned me into a hardcore workaholic 😉

For those of who you have taught while working full-time, you know the stress I’m referring to. I had never tasted coffee until then. Maybe a couple of Starbuck’s espresso beans during University, but that was it 😉 That said, the prospect of teaching at UCFV again is exciting, provided that I am given adequate notice :)

Car electrical efficiency

For those of you that followed my previous posts last year (before I became a power consumption reduction freak and trashed my old server ;)), you know that I added seven grounding wires to my car through trial-and-error (and the use of a multimeter) to yield some noticeable improvements.

A month ago, I decided to add a set of six grounding wires to Sukh’s Civic to see if I could witness any similar improvements. Sukh immediately noticed that the car’s low beams were brighter and that the stereo sounded better — the same improvements I witnessed with my car. I took several test drives and noticed increased low-end to mid-range torque, which was yet another improvement I witnessed with my car. So, there you have it. Adding several strategically placed grounding wires in the engine bay increases the overall effectiveness of a vehicle’s electrical system.

Hardware Advisory

That title caught your attention, didn’t it? (Well, it should have ;)).

I’m going to start writing little snippets such as this one to share some knowledge with the public, specifically on hardware price cuts.

If you’re like me, you hate purchasing computer hardware only to see the price drop significantly within a couple of months (or weeks, or even days). Then, you kick yourself for not waiting (or not knowing).

For those of you contemplating on purchasing new hardware in the next two months, it’s probably best to wait if you are deciding on a Core Duo notebook. On May 28, Intel will be issuing price cuts on their Core Duo chips. On a side note, I bought a Toshiba Satellite M100 last week to test it out and was impressed with the performance of the Core Duo chip — the Intel T2300 CPU performed on par with an AMD X2 3800+ CPU. It outperformed my P4 3.2 GHz HT system by more than 50% in some of my tests.

With Windows Vista around the corner (read: distant), it’s best to stick with the Intel Core Duo or AMD X2 (or AM2) processor for your next system. You might get a good deal on an AMD Turion or Pentium M 740 (single core) notebook today, but what’s the use if it runs Windows Vista like a slug after a service pack (read: Windows XP SP2)? Spend the extra couple hundred and save yourself some frustration in the future. Windows Vista will require some beefy hardware to run optimally — dual cores or processors and 128 MB dedicated video memory to name a couple.

On to the second advisory. AMD should be releasing their new AM2 processor in June (tentative), which supersedes the current Socket 939 CPUs. That means more price cuts on their current Socket 754 and Socket 939 desktop processors. That said, the AM2 processor is not pin compatible with the Socket 939 CPUs out there, so that means that your Socket 754 and Socket 939 motherboards will soon be obsolete.

Advisory three. Now is a good time to purchase flash memory (yes, those USB memory sticks and what not). Flash memory yields are doing very well at the present time, so expect to pay less than $40 CDN for a 1 GB USB thumb drive.

That’s all for now :)

Update:

NCIX is was selling the 1 GB OCZ flash drive for only $40 between April 28 and May 2.

Qualys + QMail TLS = ?

This post is meant to save others time in finding a solution for the above.  Since the solution isn’t documented anywhere on the Internet, it was a matter of trial and error before QualysGuard passed a server scan (for a friend) with no level 3 vulnerabilities (port 25 over SSL).

First of all, some background information.  By default, QMail configured with TLS support uses a default set of OpenSSL ciphers:ALL:!ADH:RC4+RSA:+SSLv2:@STRENGTH

The @STRENGTH keyword sorts the ciphers by strength.

Qualys does not consider SSLv2 ciphers to be fairly strong, due to various vulnerabilities, nor does it permit anonymous authentication ciphers.

The solution is to create two files containing a modified set of ciphers:
ALL:!aNULL:!ADH:!eNULL:!LOW:!EXP:!SSLv2:RC4+RSA:+HIGH:+MEDIUM

The files that must be created are ‘/var/qmail/control/tlsserverciphers’ and ‘/var/qmail/control/tlsclientciphers’.

Restart QMail and voila, your QMail server is now configured to use strong ciphers that Qualys will approve of :)

And there was one…

I took my second turbo slug offline last night after migrating the MySQL database to the main turbo slug.

After much trial and error, I managed to figure out a way to run Apache 2.0.54 + PHP 5.0.4 + eAccelerator 0.9.2 + MySQL 4.1 on one of my turbo slugs efficiently.

Running on a 32 MB embedded device at 266 MHz, with next to no disk swapping and consuming a little over 10 watts of electricity.

Very efficient. Enough to make BC Hydro proud — “Power Smart” lol :)

If you wander over to Ebay quickly, you’ll probably see my second turbo slug up for auction, alongside the 40 GB USB 2.0 drive that once housed the MySQL server :)

Now, go bid and win!

Firmware upgrade woes…

I have a LG combo DVD-ROM and CD writer at work, along with a LG DVD-RAM drive.

I happened to find newer firmwares for both, so I proceeded to download and install them.

After the reboot, I saw an unexpected message to the tune of ‘Windows has detected significant changes to your hardware configuration since you first installed Windows XP. You have 3 days to re-activate Windows.’

Microsoft: Does a simple firmware upgrade constitute a significant hardware upgrade?? I think not.