.pQd's log – Page 2 – Just another WordPress weblog

A wall of text on bad and good choices

In this line of work, you don’t just get to play with shiny toys having plenty of blinking lights. There’s plenty of choices to be done nearly every day. Choices or rather bets: some of the technologies, software stacks, products or services provided internally will eventually be a flop. Decisions made over the years are ... Read More

bridge on vlans on active-backup bonding under debian stretch

techlinux networkingLeave a Comment

i use this setup for few lxc servers. bonding provides me layer2 failover based on arp probes [ so it’ll work even if switch link stays up yet forwarding fails the mechanism will kick in ]. this is continuation of an earlier post, this time under debian stretch

bridging two physical interfaces of esxi server

techLeave a Comment

my colleagues got into an unpleasant situation where one of two dedicated servers, running vmware esxi 6.0, rented from a datacenter lost its network connectivity. the datacenter/internet-facing interface is down, hours later, during regular working day, the hosting provider did not react and resolve the problem. maybe the network card died, maybe switch port misbehaves ... Read More

ghettoVCB failing randomly on larger VMs

UncategorizedbackupsLeave a Comment

at work we’re using happily ghettoVCB.sh to back up and restore VMWare ESXi VMs. since a few weeks we’ve started to experience occasional failures of backups, only for one – larger VMs. in the logs produced in /tmp/ghettoVCB-2017-04-xxx.log we got: or after some head scratching, watching at iostat -x 1 and ifstat -b 1 -i ... Read More

simplistic gatekeeper limiting access to apache2-based proxy

Uncategorizedpoor man's securityLeave a Comment

i had to expose some web-based application hosted on a windows server to the internet. i don’t put too much trust in the developers of that particular application so i did not want to make it reachable from the public internet. while i could not use ip address based whitelist i could count on the ... Read More

2 hikes in Hong Kong

travelhong kongLeave a Comment

i was in HK again; just for a week, but there was enough time during the weekend to hike again in the wildness. High Junk Peak at first i did not enjoy this route at all – just after living the last buildings behind: there was ~25 min of walking up the narrow concrete stairs ... Read More

tuning spmassasin to treat more harshly mails with forged sender’s address claiming to come from us

techspamLeave a Comment

once in a while we get e-mails with spoofed sender’s address claiming to come from @ourorg.com. this can fool some of our users; outlook displaying an image of sender solely based on the From: field does not help here. some of those messages have different Return-Path pointing to @someotherscammy.site, other have it also pointing to ... Read More

Tenerifa

travelLeave a Comment

i’ve spent two weeks traveling around Tenerifa with my parents. we’ve seen a bit of the commercial-heavy south near Los Cristianos, rocky west coast in Los Gigantes, semi-rural areas of Icod de Vinos, a bit of Puerto de la Cruz and post-volcanic Teide and Puerto de Guimar. our hiking routes – below.

audible / drm

rantaudible, drm2 Comments

i’ve made a mistake of buying an audiobook from audible.com. before doing it i’ve briefly checked if the file will be provided in mp3; according to audible.com/sh yes. in reality – no.

mounting partitions from within of the vmware’s .vmdk file or kvm’s qcow2

techesxi, ghettovcbLeave a Comment

i’m taking backups of vmware esxi vms weekly using ghettovcb. it has been working greatly for many years. once in a while i need to recover a particular file from particular backup. there’s quicker way than just restoring the whole vm!

10 days in Albania

travelLeave a Comment

i’ve spent nearly two weeks traveling around Albania. i’ve started and ended the journey on a Greek island – Corfu [ i could not find any reasonably-priced flight from Berlin to Tirana ] and from there travelled with a ferry to Sarandë.

audit/access logs in samba

techsambaLeave a Comment

i’ve ‘convinced’ my samba running under debian wheezy/jessie to provide me access audit logs without being too verbose. here’s how.

Taling Chan floating market, Bangkok hike

travelLeave a Comment

i stayed in Bangkok for 3 nights. i took one-day trip to Ayutthaya and have spent rest of the time hiking around. the longest hike i took was to Taling Chan floating market. as in many other cases it was more about the way there and back than the destination itself.

Ayutthaya

travelLeave a Comment

as in 2012 i’ve done a one-day trip to Ayutthaya. it was very much worth repeating and getting away from noisy Bangkok.

Chumphon, Hua Hin

travelLeave a Comment

on my way from Koh Tao to Bangkok i’ve stayed for one night at Chumphon and then Hua Hin. the first one was totally not-touristy, second – quite opposite; i’m glad that i decided not to rush towards Thailand’s capital and visited both.

hiking on Koh Tao

travelLeave a Comment

i took a ferry from Koh Samui to Koh Tao and stayed there for 2 nights. the island was quite touristy but still worth visiting. i looked at the map and thought to myself.. if there’s a route coming from the west and another one from the east – there surely must be some path ... Read More

hiking on Koh Samui

travelLeave a Comment

during my recent trip to Thailand i’ve spent 4 days at the Koh Samui island. i’ve stayed in the southern part – near Baan Hua Thanon – fisherman village with quite obvious Muslim influence. the choice was great – area was not very touristy and a great starting point for hikes.

Golden Hill Country Park

travelhong kongLeave a Comment

while visiting Hong Kong this winter my colleague and ex-flatmate from Goteborg times took me to the Kowloon Byewash Reservoir / Golden Hill Country Park.

bridge on vlans on active-backup bonding under debian

techlinux networking4 Comments

the idea: i’d like to run kvm/lxc on debian, have guests bridged to couple of vlans and handle the network failover on the host level. network failure should be detected using arp probes not just the link [ mii ] status. after few attempts i got it working in the test environment.

debian on dell poweredge 13th gen – r630

tech4 Comments

i’ve received for testing a new dell r630. before buying few of those i wanted to make sure that debian wheezy has kernel including all the needed drivers. it seems that it has.