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Saturday: sunny, 80 degrees

Sunday:

Well, it’s been one of those weeks.

On Monday, internet security researchers reported a flaw in the OpenSSL software that underlies almost every open-source security package in the world. Any web server or login account that relies on the software was vulnerable to an attack that would allow the bad guys to steal user credentials, decrypt financial data in browser sessions, impersonate secure sites, and so forth. It was generally agreed this was a Bad Thing– Bruce Schneier himself remarked, “On a scale of one to ten, this is an eleven”.

It was dubbed “Heartbleed”, and it’s such a big deal that it even has it’s own… logo?

So, starting on Tuesday, I went to work patching the software on all of my servers. I currently own 115 of them at my hosting facility, and I manage about 20 more for various clients. Although the patch itself wasn’t all that complicated, it required manually updating every server, rebooting it, and confirming that it came back online okay and all of the services were running normally. Yeesh.

Every night this week I went down to my basement office after dinner and camped out there until about 1:30 in the morning. After three days of that, I was pretty beat. Then, today, I updated the login keys my team and I use to access all of our servers. This was more a precautionary measure than a necessity, but we all agreed it was prudent. That took most of my afternoon. The next step– which will wait until next week– is to revoke and re-issue the security certificates we’re using on various web sites.

Of course I’m not alone: I suspect almost every system administrator in the world was putting in extra hours this week to mitigate Heartbleed. Since this was completely unexpected, all of the projects I’d planned to do were sidelined, and next week will be a game of catch-up. Hoo boy.

At the end of the day, though, I feel pretty good about updating over a hundred servers, communicating with my clients about it, answering their questions, and keeping everything running. This afternoon I commented to Laralee:

Her response (because she’s awesome) was “That doesn’t sound too hard.”

Today at lunch, five of us at Zing went out to play some disc golf. This was my first time ever playing, and I felt a little intimidated by Noah (who’d played in college), Brent (who’d played before someone’s wedding?), and Ben (who seemed to know a lot about the game). Nick hadn’t played before but brought his own collection of discs, as did the others. I was the only one without the specialized “drivers” and “mid-rangers” and “putters”. I brought one of my standard 175g ultimate discs, but was politely informed that it’s not kosher to use those in a game of disc golf.

There’s a little course in a local park, and about half a dozen other people were already there playing. It was a beautiful day. The game began, and we all laughed as various throws veered way off course or splashed into the nearby creek or hit trees.

I took a few pictures with my phone (ugh) but none of them quite captured the true thrill of the action.

Nick watches his drive soar, although if I didn’t know better it looks like he’s testing some hip new dance moves:

I almost got the shot of the disc leaving Ben’s hand, but instead it appears he’s casting a spell or something:

Noah demonstrates good technique shortly before clobbering a tree:

We played for about an hour and had a great time. Although it’s certainly not the same as ultimate, it was fun.

Today I was at BitRelay, upgrading a few servers. Every now and then I take pictures of my 100+ servers so I can remember where everything is, what’s plugged into what, etc.. So I took a few creative shots as well… ahh, blinkenlights…

Last week was spring break for the kids. A few days prior, we’d been talking about what to do. The leading plan was to head down to southern Colorado and do some hiking, then find a hotel with a pool and hot tub and enjoy an evening soak.

Our plans changed when Laralee’s sister Cil called to announce her engagement, and the wedding date of… a week later. Wow, talk about a quick engagement! Luckily the wedding was the week of spring break, so instead of Colorado Springs we found ourselves loading up the van for a trip out to St. George, Utah.

Despite the fact that it was April, the mountain passes were pretty snowy and I-70 was treacherous in spots. There was apparently a bad accident a little before the Eisenhower Tunnel, and it backed up traffic a long way. This was the view we had for nearly an hour:

We followed this Jeep at a snail’s pace, and in fact we were third from the end of the miles-long line of cars because the State Patrol had closed I-70 behind us and diverted traffic to side roads. Good times. However, when I get stuck in traffic due to an accident, I always remind myself that the guy in the accident is having a much worse day than I am.

Eventually we crawled through the Tunnel and made it to the western slopes, where we stopped at the awesome Hanging Lake rest area and walked along the river for a bit.

Continuing west, we drove through the San Rafael Swells in central Utah. I really like the geology of the area, and we stopped at all of the scenic views.

All told, the 700-mile trip took almost fifteen hours. To their credit, the kids endured that time in the van well and we had a lot of fun. Kyra’s best friend Hannah joined us because she didn’t really have anything else planned for spring break– it was fun to have her along for the ride.

In St. George the weather was really nice: mostly sunny with temperatures in the 60’s. We went walking around the neighborhood, played ultimate at a local park, and even did some service work at the church. Saturday was the big day, and the wedding was held in the backyard of a house a few blocks away. Here are Cil and Jim saying their vows as Cil’s kids and grandkids look on:

And of course in the end, the happy couple smooched:

Today we drove back and made much better time, arriving back in Longmont after only eleven hours. Although it wasn’t quite what we’d had in mind for spring break, it was a lot of fun to see the family and celebrate Cil’s marriage.

If only more of our society felt this way…

Today I was building a new computer for a client. As I installed the RAM sticks and the SSD drive, and applied thermal grease to the CPU before gently seating it on the motherboard, I reflected on how cool the guts of computers are.

Ever since I can remember, I’ve been fascinated by what makes these machines tick. Our trusty old Apple IIe, circa 1984, was a great learning tool. I installed what was then called an “80-column card” because it doubled the horizontal resolution of the computer from 40 columns of green-screen text to an astounding 80 columns. Wow, word processing became a whole different game. More to the point, the 80-column card 64kB of expansion RAM, which brought the total onboard memory to a whopping 128kB. Although these days a single email message wouldn’t fit in that space, back then it was a luxury.

From there I bought an Apple IIgs and outfitted it with some extra memory. I think that one came stock with 128kB, so of course I needed to double it to an amazing 256kB. Then it was my first IBM clone– all desktop computers were called “IBM clones” because they were based on the 8086 instruction set (I think). My first upgrade to that machine was trading the 386-33MHz processor for a shiny new 486-66MHz, which I bought from my friend Chad for $400 because he wanted to upgrade his computer to something like 100MHz. Wow.

Over the years, I bought parts and built computers. I knew what plugged into what, and I knew where to get the best stuff for the lowest price. I remember math co-processors and the “turbo” button. I remember modems that sat on your desk with a half-dozen blinking status lights and a reassuring mix of screaming and static as they negotiated the 14kbps phone connection. I remember 40MB hard drives that were huge (both in bytes and physically). Downloading software from a BBS? Check. WordPerfect– in text mode– yep. 4MB of RAM for hundreds of dollars, a confusing array of memory types, parallel ports, serial ports, IDE… all of that is ingrained in my geeky memory.

A few years ago I was talking to some friends of mine who are really good software developers. They had no clue how the inside of a computer worked. They’d never plugged in a hard drive or replaced the RAM or upgraded a CPU. They just bought their computers as a unit, never balancing speed and cost by picking out just the right components. I was astounded. I guess I thought everyone who programmed computers would know how to build computers. But then again, I drive a car every day and don’t know the difference between transmission fluid and brake fluid. I suppose it’s just happenstance that I know both the hardware and the software side of computing.

Anyway, I’ve always enjoyed mucking around in the guts of the computers I use, and I find the intricate little components to be amazing examples of engineering and design. So, without further ado, I give you some pictures of the guts of my latest computer.

Just for fun, I dug out some old parts from my closet. Some of these shocked even me.

Server memory:

An old 56k modem, complete with jumpers used to set the COM ports. Man, those were some good times.

Then, way in the back, covered in a fine layer of dust, sat an old manila envelope that contained the oldest piece of my computer history. It was the original 386-33 motherboard I mentioned above. This thing is truly a relic– it dates back to 1991 or so, and looking at the components reminded me of the stuff we used back then.

Forget PCI– this thing only had ISA slots (eight of them):

There are also eight banks for RAM, and I believe each bank could only support 1MB:

And finally, the amazing centerpiece of this motherboard: the original Intel 386-33 CPU:

What a fun trip down memory lane. We’ve sure come a long way.

I’d guess it was twelve years ago when I ordered a set of fifty cardboard CD carriers, suitable for shipping CD’s or DVD’s in the mail. I did it because every now and then a client wanted a bunch of backup data sent to them. Over the years, I used about half of the boxes, and eventually bandwidth and storage caught up and it became easier to ship huge files and backups via the web.

The company I ordered them from is called Uline. They have a massive paper catalog that weighs in with over 600 pages, showing all of their packaging materials (cardboard CD carriers are somewhere in there). For some reason I can’t fathom, they send me the catalog roughly four times a year. Today I found the latest one in the mailbox.

As with all the others, it went straight into the recycling bin. I really don’t understand why (1) they use a paper catalog at all, since it’s far easier to search for things like this on a web site, and (2) they continue to send me an arguably expensive mailing every three months for twelve years. Sure, if I’d ordered from them every few months, or even more than once, I could understand they’d like to keep in touch. But I placed one order twelve years ago, and that’s it.

One wonders how they justify the cost of these mailings, comparing the price to send me almost fifty of them over the course of more than a decade against the $16 or whatever I spent on my original order…

I’ve been buying computer parts from Newegg since the late 1990’s, when they were an obscure (but amazing) company. Now they’re not so obscure, and they continue to be amazing. I placed an order for a couple of computers for a client this morning, and I just received a notification that the parts have shipped. In truth, this means they’re boxed and scanned and ready to go on the truck, but still… a turnaround time of five hours to have it out the door is quite impressive.

Thanks, Newegg, for 16 years of good geeky stuff.

One of my clients just sent a payment… on a Spongebob Squarepants check. Nice!