Social Networking

As of today I rounded out my social networking portfolio.

A year ago I didn't belong to any of these "web 2.0"/"social networking" sites. First it was Orkut. I was in Brazil and it kept coming up. Why not? So I joined.

A couple months ago my friends in Sarasota, FL kept started really bothering me about MySpace. Why not? So I joined.

A couple of days ago I got enough LinkedIn invitations for me to break down and create an account.

Today I signed up for Facebook, much to my chagrin. I was already on three other sites, so why not?

I'll tell you why not. Now I am going to have people complaining about my outdated profiles, lack of interest, etc. Why create an account if you can't keep it up to date?

How am I supposed to maintain accounts on my personal/professional life spread across FOUR different social networking sites?!? This is madness. I can't wait to see what everything looks like in a few months...

So anyways if you are on any of these sites you should try to track me down to see how it all unfolds. I am sure it will be interesting!

Update!

I am still alive - barely.

I haven't been able to post over the last couple of weeks because Star2Star was busy getting another release out. We put out another release every six months (depending on schedule and delays) and you guessed it - it's that time of the year again.

Our latest release is 2.1. It includes a lot of fixes and feature improvements to the overall system, everything from Polycom firmware to OpenSER enhancements (lots of them).

Speaking of OpenSER, it looks like I will be working with it quite a bit over the next few weeks and months for the 2.2 release. I'll also have some interesting Cisco experiences, I'm sure...

So between getting this release out, a car accident, and regular life I have not had much time for this blog. Things should be getting back to normal pretty soon. I like it that way.

Getting Multihomed - Part 3/3

Following up to one of my first posts. We FINALLY brought up BGP with all of our providers. A call from our CEO to some people at Verizon got some things moving again. I had the circuit up with BGP the same day. Pretty amazing, huh?

Anyways, now my problem was dealing with the limited memory and tcam allocation for unicast routes. If you recall, I ordered three full BGP feeds from three different providers. With the internet pushing 226,000 routes my 3750G wasn't going to cut it:

sh platform tcam utilization

CAM Utilization for ASIC# 0 Max Used
Masks/Values Masks/values

Unicast mac addresses: 400/3200 13/44
IPv4 IGMP groups + multicast routes: 144/1152 6/26
IPv4 unicast directly-connected routes: 400/3200 13/44
IPv4 unicast indirectly-connected routes: 1040/8320 1023/8134
IPv4 policy based routing aces: 512/512 2/2
IPv4 qos aces: 512/512 8/8
IPv4 security aces: 1024/1024 23/23

Note: Allocation of TCAM entries per feature uses
a complex algorithm. The above information is meant
to provide an abstract view of the current TCAM utilization

So now I've got full feeds from three providers coming in. Luckily I read up on IOS route-map statements before I brought these BGP sessions up. Otherwise things could've gotten ugly. Here's what I started with:

ip as-path access-list 50 permit ^174$
ip as-path access-list 50 permit ^4323$
ip as-path access-list 50 permit ^701$

I started with just getting the ASNs we were directly connected to. And my tcam started to fill, but it wasn't close. I thought, hey, why not get some more routes while I can? I started to read up a bit more on route-maps and I figured out how to get other ASNs into my route table. I only want the networks of providers connected to my providers. Does that make sense?

Without being able to see the full table I would have no idea of what I was doing. What if I wanted Level(3)'s routes, for instance? I needed to see what was going on. Luckily an old client of mine runs FixedOrbit - the coolest site to look at BPG information. All I had to do was query my directly connected ASNs and start picking other routes I wanted. BGP would take care of the rest.

Here is a shortened version of what I ended up with:

ip as-path access-list 50 permit ^174$
ip as-path access-list 50 permit ^174_3356$
ip as-path access-list 50 permit ^174_33363$
ip as-path access-list 50 permit ^4323$
ip as-path access-list 50 permit ^4323_1668$
ip as-path access-list 50 permit ^4323_6983$
ip as-path access-list 50 permit ^4323_11456$
ip as-path access-list 50 permit ^701$
ip as-path access-list 50 permit ^701_19262$
ip as-path access-list 50 permit ^701_3356$

Now I have entries in my route table for my directly connected ASNs (174, 701, 4323) and some ASNs they are peered with - 3356, 33363, 1668, 6983, 11456, 19262. I don't have much room in my tcam but hey, that's what VXRs are for! Wow, I really want one of those (with an NPE-G2, of course) ;).

The Ultimate Geek Watch

I used to think watches were completely unnecessary and stupid. After all, my cellphone is always with me and is always synced to the right time. Why do I need a watch?

Then I found a white G-Shock. This watch has it all:

• It's white
• Atomic synced
• Shock resistant (tough)
• Vibration alarm
  
• Thermometer
• Solar Power
• World Time
• Movement sensor

I bought it a few months ago from amazon.com. Evidently it's imported by Mister Watch from Japan. Sure enough it came in the mail, complete with price tag (in yen) and a Japanese-only user's manual (G-Shock is made by Casio, a Japanese company).

Because I don't read Japanese it has been difficult to discover all of the features of this watch. The "movement sensor" that I described above is a good example. I was out with my friends one night in a dark bar and I lifted my wrist to look at the time. The back light automatically came on once I twisted my wrist a certain way. At first I thought it was a fluke. My friends were convinced I was somehow controlling it with my wrist, mind, etc. Oh no, it was the movement sensor.

I think it works in combination with the solar panel because it only activates when it is dark (beyond a certain point). In a dark enough room, with just the right wrist snap, I never have to manually push the light button to see what time (or temperature) it is. That's a good thing too, because like any good American, I don't want to have to do ANYTHING that I shouldn't have to do and pushing watch buttons is no exception.

It's too bad that you can't get them anymore because many, many people have asked about the white G-Shock. If anyone knows where you can get them in the US please let me know!

UPDATE: Shinya Amano has translated AstLinux documentation for voip-info.jp and he has done some research on this watch for me. He found the English manual. Thanks Amano!

GoDaddy Sucks

As I write this GoDaddy has managed to completely screw up authoritative DNS for krisk.org. They have been my registrar for quite some time. Yesterday I decided to switch my authoritative dns over to them from DynDns. Why would I do this?

I needed e-mail forwarding. KrisK.org used to be hosted on a FreeBSD server that I ran. I started to get more and more busy with AstLinux and other misc. stuff so I moved as many of my services to free or managed solutions.

I couldn't do e-mail forwarding because GoDaddy's recommended MX records were CNAMEs. DynDns does not approve of this (every MX should be an A record). So I needed to move everything to GoDaddy just so I could use their stupid free e-mail forwarding (krisk.org -> gmail).

I tried to get to this blog today and blog.krisk.org wasn't resolving. What gives? I tried digging a few DNS servers that I knew of. All of them returned NXDOMAIN. That's not good. I ran whois and krisk.org to find the authoritative name servers. I was (and still am) on ns5.secureserver.net and ns6.secureserver.net. I tried to do directly against them:

kris@krislap:~$ dig @ns5.secureserver.net

; <<>> DiG 9.3.4 <<>> @ns5.secureserver.net
; (1 server found)
;; global options: printcmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NXDOMAIN, id: 11126
;; flags: qr rd; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 0, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;. IN NS

;; Query time: 70 msec
;; SERVER: 208.109.78.180#53(208.109.78.180)
;; WHEN: Wed Jul 25 15:22:43 2007
;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 17

Same deal with ns6. That's not good. Some of my other domains on GoDaddy have ns1 and ns2. I tried to dig against those and they worked. The funny thing was ns5 and ns6 were not found as NS records.

I shuddered at the thought of calling GoDaddy support. I certainly don't want to talk to any of "those people". By "those people" I mean script reading drones that would ask me which version of Internet Explorer I was using...

I logged into the extremely horrible GoDaddy portal and clicked "Use default hosting name servers". They were listed as ns5 and ns6. I wasn't hopeful. A few minutes later it appears to be working again:

kris@krislap:~$ dig @ns5.secureserver.net www.krisk.org

; <<>> DiG 9.3.4 <<>> @ns5.secureserver.net www.krisk.org
; (1 server found)
;; global options: printcmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 11574
;; flags: qr aa rd; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 2, AUTHORITY: 4, ADDITIONAL: 0

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;www.krisk.org. IN A

;; ANSWER SECTION:
www.krisk.org. 3600 IN CNAME godaddy.krisk.org.
godaddy.krisk.org. 3600 IN A 68.178.211.88

;; AUTHORITY SECTION:
krisk.org. 3600 IN NS NS1.SECURESERVER.NET.
krisk.org. 3600 IN NS NS2.SECURESERVER.NET.
krisk.org. 3600 IN NS ns5.SECURESERVER.NET.
krisk.org. 3600 IN NS ns6.SECURESERVER.NET.

;; Query time: 76 msec
;; SERVER: 208.109.78.180#53(208.109.78.180)
;; WHEN: Wed Jul 25 15:32:13 2007
;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 157


Woah! Look at that! ns1, ns2, ns5, and ns6 are listed as authority. Hmmm...

P.S. - If you are still reading this I need to tell you that DynDns is AWESOME!

AstLinux 0.4.7

AstLinux 0.4.7, with Asterisk 1.2.22 and Zaptel 1.2.19 has been released.

Finding Asterisk

I've run my own Asterisk system for quite some time. My mom lives in Minneapolis, my dad lives in Chicago and my sister lives in Montreal (stinkin' French Canadians - the worst kind). Just kidding, I love my sister and all of my Quebec friends! At this point in time I lived in Wisconsin. Cell phone plans weren't that cheap yet (especially in Canada) and my family was spread out far enough for every call to be long distance.

I started playing with Asterisk in July of 2004. It turns out that I was flying to Montreal to visit my sister during the US Independence Day Holiday (yeah, that makes sense - go to Canada for the 4th). I bought a cheap X100P clone, installed it in a Linux machine, and connected it to the analog line (SBC) at my house in Wisconsin.

I configured a basic (dangerous) Asterisk install over the course of a few days and packed my things for Montreal. Of course I also brought my laptop. I had also managed to install a softphone on it before I left. I got to my sister's apartment, connected my laptop to her VideoTron cable modem and registered with my softphone. Would it actually work? Could I make a call from this softphone to that Linux server (over the internet) and out the PSTN in Wisconsin to one of my friends - for free?

If you are reading this blog you probably know what happened next. It worked perfectly. I was amazed and my friends were impressed. This was awesome.

Over the next couple of weeks I added what I needed to my (lame) Asterisk configuration. Then disaster struck... My air conditioning broke and with it went the hard drive of the Asterisk play server. It was a play server - no backups.

I hate doing things twice. That's exactly how I felt about this. I wasn't going to work through all of that again - compiling, configuration file mess again. I swore I wasn't going to resurrect Asterisk or that machine again.

Then I heard it. Asterisk was calling. I couldn't get the idea of Asterisk out of my mind. I hit the books (voip-info.org, internet mostly) and I learned more about Asterisk - more than enough to simply rebuild my play server. A couple of days later I had it back up and better than before. In the process I also knew what I was going to do with it. I could ship an ATA to each member of my family and we could all call each other, for free. I could also get an account with an ITSP and provide cheap calling to my family members.

Today some instance of that server is still running and my family members can still call each other with a four digit dial, for free.