Centroid.EU Blog

(this blog is mostly encrypted - adults only)

Slowly getting ready for move

February 09th, 2013

On the 12th my provider M-Net will activate the DSL link. I've taken the 12th and 13th off work so that I can hook everything up at home. I'm worried of not getting back my static IP, which I had for 4 years. I let M-Net know this but haven't had a reply from them yet. Not getting the static IP will not be the end of the world, but the end of e-mail, www, shell server and other stuff at home. I truely hope I get my static IP back though, and will fight for it.

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This is actually cool!

February 2nd, 2013

Let's start with my computer for cooling. :-) The fact that this was developed in China is cool too because most computer parts come from there...

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If I do upgrade Jupiter(computer)...

February 1st, 2013

Then here is a series of chips to consider. Jupiter is currently an i7-930, but an i7-980 would be nice but is still pricy, with 3 years warranty however it would give 6 year lifespan of the 3 year old machine perhaps. I'm watching for the price for the 970/980 to come down.

I'm also considering what tasks I want running on Jupiter. Right now there isn't too much CPU intensive stuff. Also Jupiter never ran over nights. I turn it off at night and plan on continuing to do so.

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Wire-tapping of the Cloud...

January 31st, 2013

My blog and other data stored on my VPS's can be examined by the NSA through the american hoster I use. This is cautioned by the BBC. Particularily falls the VPS in Hong Kong then under jurisdiction of the NSA because I use an American provider based in Los Angeles. The VPS in Panama is operated by a canadian company and they probably have similar laws. So my data is wide open to the american contintent. I do not know what sort of information they would like to gather though other than web and dns logs. In terms of juicyness my blog doesn't have very much worth spying over. But I thought the article in the BBC was intriguing nontheless. I'm not going to pull back my blog over this though.

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NAP of the Americas in Miami

January 31st, 2013

The BBC has an article about the NAP of the Americas in Miami, USA. Here it is. The NAP is what most routes from Germany go through when I traceroute my Panamanian VPS. Interesting building, it reminds me a little of 151 Front albeit much larger.

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IRC

January 30th, 2013

I joined IRC in 1994 or earlier. The very first time I used efnet chat network was when my BBS provider had a door to ircII client or something. There I first hung out in #linux or #linuxhelp and someone helped me upgrading/compiling from Linux 1.2.3 to 1.2.13. I left IRC at that and was MUD'ing on ncmud for a long while but when I noticed a slight addiction I left MUDing. IRC was the addiction to heal my addiction.

I spent time in the channels #unixhelp, #unix, #toronto, #germany, #bork, #freebsd, where some more and some less. I was very taken with the #unix crowd and liked being there but admittedly I was always a bit careful because of the chance that I get hacked by someone there (it was a large channel of 100 or so clients). Eventually I left #unix and went totally offline (from the Internet) when I had a new toy. An iBook with built in wireless lan. I spent the Summer of 2000 mostly outdoors riding around wardriving with it.

The wardriving did me no good and I eventually came back online and this time not to #unix but #unixhelp. There was people from #unix there so I knew some people. To this day I IRC on efnet and IRCnet on the channels #unixhelp, #bluenight and #dns. More on this all later.

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DECENTRALIZED

January 29th, 2013

In Germany the electric grid is becoming more and more decentralized. Solar and Wind powerplants are being created in every region. Wouldn't it then also make sense to also decentralize the computers in germany? I read of all these supercomputer centers, datacenters around regions that serve as Internet hubs that they are having problems getting guaranteed energy, mostly to cool their arrays of server racks. What we need is a distribution of high speed Internet access and put large computers to use at home on a distributed computing effort in my opinion. These computers don't need as much cooling as centralized computers in data centers, saving energy.

PS: I'd like to get away from moving fans to cool computers but rather use LASERS to do that.

So who serves your mail? Perhaps we all need static IP's too, face it privacy is gone anyhow, with static IP's we can receive our own mail and not need large datacenters (and the complexity involved).

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Time Machine backup really slow

January 28th, 2013

My time machine backup is really slow. It's been backing up 1.5 days now across two nights and only did 38 GB from 282GB to back up. The drive that it's backing up to I timed with dd command to be writing 121 MB/s (roughly twice of what USB2 is capable of) so it doesn't seem to be a speed issue. iostat is bored:

gaia:~ pjp$ iostat -w 1 disk0 disk2
          disk0           disk2       cpu     load average
    KB/t tps  MB/s     KB/t tps  MB/s  us sy id   1m   5m   15m
   36.46   2  0.09    64.24   0  0.01   1  3 96  1.66 1.82 1.94
   53.00   8  0.41     0.00   0  0.00   2  2 96  1.66 1.82 1.94
   26.46  13  0.34     0.00   0  0.00   1  2 96  1.66 1.82 1.94
   80.00   5  0.39     0.00   0  0.00   1  2 96  1.66 1.82 1.94
   38.00   8  0.30     0.00   0  0.00   2  3 95  1.66 1.82 1.94
   44.00  10  0.43   128.00  16  2.00   2  3 96  1.66 1.82 1.94
   17.65  49  0.84     7.33   6  0.04   1  3 95  1.77 1.84 1.94
   38.00   8  0.30     0.00   0  0.00   2  2 96  1.77 1.84 1.94
   29.82  11  0.32     0.00   0  0.00   1  2 96  1.77 1.84 1.94
   53.00   8  0.41     0.00   0  0.00   2  3 96  1.77 1.84 1.94

Let's see 2MB/s at peak for one second out of ten and on the computer is 96% cpu idle. Something is surely wrong.. I suspect it's doing a lot of small files but even then..

I'm at a loss and googling for solutions isn't working either.

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Bought a backup drive

January 26th, 2013

Usually I always buy a backup drive right away. However planning to buy a new wireless timecapsule didn't work out because I'm still expecting apple to release an 802.11ac access point. The current models are 802.11n and less. But since the capsule is only 100 or so euros more than the airport extreme, I'm gonna go with an extreme instead and plug this new harddrive into it. I bought a 2TB external harddrive btw. This will be enough to back up my mac mini with timemachine.

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Neat little vmware fusion trick

January 24th, 2013

I noticed that typing control-left arrow and conrol-right arrow can switch between main screen and vmware guest. This is fancy and quick. I personally go from OpenBSD to Mac OS X between work and personal time.

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