Project Sextant
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does, what it means.
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How our stuff works,
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Civilution LLC
Tools for evolving civilizations
The first 90 percent of situational awareness is just knowing what the hell's going on.
-Col. Robert Pike, USAF
April 29 02000
Obtained a new IP address block from NWLink. Probably more than we really need what with the gateway/router and all, but the package that could accomodate best our 4GB+ per month data transfer turned out to have some extras. Oh how I long for the early days when I had my own class C at no extra charge. IPv6 anyone?
April 28 02000
Craig's back started complaining about the effect of long(er) hours and his 15Kg rolling trash heap chair. Solution.. New Aeron chair? Way too cheap (Craig, not the chair).
$99 Office Depot special? Vapid. (The chair, not Craig.) No, Craig spent
nearly 18 hours creating a hanging monitor stand to suspend his 40Kg 21" Sony from the joists overhead, thus enabling him to recline comfortably in his.. $99 Ikea special. Let's hope his monitor support straps don't snap.
Aaaa! Get it off me! Get it off me!!
April 27 02000
First physical, consistent full Oracle backup completed successfully. We think.. Of course it required the database to be offline for 30 minutes.. Now we just need to figure out a solution which will enable 24x7 service. Onward to the Export utility! (Whee[ze])
April 26 02000
Deane proves the wisdom of his server rebooting policy: wait until Erik gets back. The server crashes on the first try! Good old lilo 'linux emergency' mode enables us to remount the root partition as read-write and remove the offending extraneous /etc/mtab entries. Disaster (eventually) averted! Big time card hit though. emacs sucks.
April 24 02000
Erik and Anne Carolyn Rogneby return from their fantasy-like honeymoon. Erik is anxious to get
back into the fray, and happy to see that the server actually was robust enough for him to leave.
April 22 02000
Got some utilities in place for tracking bandwidth useage. Namely IPAC for historical data and XOSview for real-time.
April 21 02000
Hmm, it appears to be a good thing our development model includes time for testing. The fundamental technology behind the Sextant clickthrough service fails to miraculously work for a local Seattle blogger (hi Jessamyn) on the first try. Fortunately, the "work/not work" variable in Craig's code is a setable constant. Set work_p = T.
April 19 02000
Updated the security of our gateway/router, mostly by upgrading all the RPMs and disabling every service except ssh and packet forwarding. And not just any packet, mind you.
April 18 02000
Erik conducts some international Sextant testing from Italy. Honeymoon Erik, honeymoon! What do you think we pay you for?!
April 16 02000
HTTP access to our Sextant web service enabled through the firewall to mother. Oh crap, we're live! Well, at least live enough to begin testing..
April 15 02000
Installed ssh on the gateway and our web server, "mother". Tunneling X11 packets through the secure shell turned out to be non-trivial. *@#*&%#(&%!!
April 12 02000
Functionality restored to the firewall/gateway with a minimum of actual downtime. That wasn't so hard, now lets figure out why we can't access our ISP's domain.
April 9 02000
ipchains has got to be better than ipfwadm, right? Time to upgrade the firewall kernel..
April 7 0200
Deane temporarily assumes the role of the Civilution SysAdmin.
Hey guys, this is temporary, right guys? Hey, where you goin' guys?
Uh... guys?
April 5 02000
We conspire to implement a new time card system in Erik's absence. Suddenly our irresponsibility is public! There is no escape.
April 2 02000
Erik got married in Georgia (Deane was the Best/THE Man), and then jetted off to Italy with his new bride for three weeks.
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