April 2012 - Roundtable

Winnipeg Harvest donations from December meeting - thank you!
by athompso＠muug.mb.ca 04 Apr '12

04 Apr '12

Thanks to the generosity of our members, we were able to donate three large boxes’ worth of non-perishable food items to Winnipeg Harvest in December 2010. The text of the thank-you letter we just received (see attached) is as follows: January 5, 2011 Manitoba UNIX User Group Attn: Adam Thompson Dear Friends of Harvest, We here at Winnipeg Harvest want to thank the Manitoba UNIX User Group for your support of helping those less fortunate in our community. Over the last few months 743 pounds of food was donated to the food bank. Your donations will go into hampers that will help Winnipeg Harvest feed more than 58,000 people each month, half of those being children. On behalf of the entire team at Winnipeg Harvest, thank you for helping us fight hunger and feed hope in Manitoba. We look forward to working with you again in the future. If I can ever be of assistance, please don’t hesitate to contact me by phone at 982-3670 or by email at tori(a)winnipegharvest.org. Yours truly, Tori Webber Development Associate Winnipeg Harvest Inc. So, thanks again. See you all in another six (6) days, at our next meeting on January 11th, 2011. -Adam Thompson athompso(a)muug.mb.ca

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MUUG Meeting, Apr 10, 7:30pm -- pfSense Firewall
by gedetil＠cs.umanitoba.ca 03 Apr '12

03 Apr '12

The Manitoba UNIX User Group (MUUG) will be holding its next monthly meeting on Tuesday, April 10. The meeting topic for this month is as follows: pfSense Firewall Adam Thompson will talk about (and demonstrate, if all goes well) pfSense, a wholly UNIX-based network firewall and network services appliance that can run on anything from embedded devices up to the latest super-servers. pfSense is based on FreeBSD, and thus uses the pf(4) packet filtering framework from OpenBSD to do most of the heavy lifting. Supporting multi-WAN, HTTP acceleration, DNS, DHCP, authentication, and wireless NIC's among other features, it's an ideal system for someone who wants a free, open-source firewall that's still incredibly easy to manage. April's RTFM will feature the date(1) command, presented by Michael Doob. The group holds its general meetings at 7:30pm on the second Tuesday of every month from September to June. (There are no meetings in July and August.) Meetings are open to the general public; you don't have to be a MUUG member to attend. ********************************************************************** Please note our meeting location: The IBM offices, at 400 Ellice Ave. (between Edmonton and Kennedy). When you arrive, you will have to sign in at the reception desk, and then wait for someone to take you (in groups) to the meeting room. Please try to arrive by about 7:15pm, so the meeting can start promptly at 7:30pm. Don't be late, or you may not get in. (But don't come too early either, since security may not be there to let you in before 7:15 or so.) Non-members may be required to show photo ID at the security desk. Limited parking is available for free on the street, either on Ellice Ave. or on some of the intersecting streets. Indoor parking is also available nearby, at Portage Place, for $5.00 for the evening. Bicycle parking is available in a bike rack under video surveillance located behind the building on Webb Place. ********************************************************************** For more information about MUUG, and its monthly meetings, check out their Web server: http://www.muug.mb.ca/ Help us promote this month's meeting, by putting this poster up on your workplace bulletin board or other suitable public message board: http://www.muug.mb.ca/meetings/MUUGmeeting.pdf -- Gilbert E. Detillieux E-mail: <gedetil(a)muug.mb.ca> Manitoba UNIX User Group Web: http://www.muug.mb.ca/ PO Box 130 St-Boniface Phone: (204)474-8161 Winnipeg MB CANADA R2H 3B4 Fax: (204)474-7609

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UG News - Free, Live Webcasts: Best of Velocity, Mobile Dev, jQuery In-Depth, Kinect, Netduino, and More
by Gilbert E. Detillieux 02 Apr '12

02 Apr '12

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CIRA caching ancient glue records.
by Sean Cody 02 Apr '12

02 Apr '12

I'm having a strange issue (for a couple years) in that when my NS server change IPs (once every 2-3 years as I change ISPs) CIRA doesn't change it's glue records accordingly. For instance... I move my NS servers ns1 and ns2 and of course their IPs change.. ns1.domain.ca 172.16.101.1 ns2.domain.ca 172.16.101.2 I will log into my registrar and try and have them update the zone (the two registrars I use have different behaviour). After a day or so I can see the whois info changes yet the OLD IPs for ns1 and ns2 persist. To get around this I have to come up with 'new' names for the DNS servers... I've so far used up: ns1,ns2.$domain a.ns,b.ns.$domain dnsa,dnsb.$domain nsa,nsb.$domain Does anyone have any suggestion on how I can ask cira to just flush all glue records so I can go back to my preferred NS names? Taking out this root domain nerfs about a dozen other domains. I'm about to just start chosing random strings for the NS server names but it is a bit much to ask folks to update their NS to joiafjsdpfoij.$domain.com. :P This behaviour persists across multiple .ca registrars which leads me to believe something at CIRA is not being reset properly (ie. when registrar does a zone update they are not requesting a flush or something...). I suppose I _could_ try moving my root domain to another registrar but again that will take me offline yet again and induce another bout of DNS rage. -- Sean P.S. Support at either canreg or domainsatcost has not been _any_ help so far.

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ZFS I/O strangeness
by Adam Thompson 02 Apr '12

02 Apr '12

I have a ZFS RAIDZ3 filesystem under OpenSolaris (actually a Nexenta build so a GNU userland on top of OpenSolaris kernel). "dd if=filename of=/dev/null bs=8k" gives me ~66Mbytes/sec. "cat filename | dd of=/dev/null bs=8k" gives me ~142Mbytes/sec. WTF? Why would using cat *increase* the overall speed? The only thing I can think of is readahead, but why would cat cause that to happen while dd doesn't? -Adam Thompson athompso(a)athompso.net

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