Today, I went to Amsterdam to fix an “old” server. After driving around in circles for a while, I finally found the datacenter (yay for roadblocks!) and the guy I had an appointment with. Unfortunately, the security-department wasn’t notified of me being there. “The person you requested access from is not well and at home”. [...]

After experimenting with a new amr(4) driver I found somewhere, my testbox didn’t came back after a reboot. Nothing special, you’d say, probably something went wrong. So, the next day, I went to fix it myself. Just escape to the loader prompt, unload kernel, load kernel.old, and we’re done.
Well, not quite. The same problem [...]

A few days ago, I finished the general idea of the new-style webhosting platform. Turned out to be easy, once I got the hang of it. (And of course, after some useful hints from a friend. Said friend has built a custom apache module, for handling PHP / CGI as a ‘normal’ user, accompanied with [...]

After some severe bashing and waiting, ‘our’ new mirror-server is finally ready. It’s times like these you notice that 800GB is a shitload of data, especially if you have (relatively) slow mirrors to pull it from. Luckily, after a few tries, I found some mirrors both close AND fast, so the initial sync could finish [...]

A while ago, we decided to replace some existing ipsec-gateways with new ones. While we were at it, we thought it’d be nice to make the new ones run FreeBSD, and use PF for filtering, instead of Linux and iptables. All seemed to go well, until we did some real-life tests: large filetransfers randomly broke [...]