Tollef Fog Heen's blog

qurzaw (0.0.0.0)                                                 Fri Nov 28 21:34:28 2008
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                             Last  60 pings
 1. 10.125.123.1             ............................................................
 2. 10.84.0.1                .??????.......??????.......??????......???????......??????..
 3. c9110002.virtua.com.br   .????????.....??????..?..?????????..??????????.?..?.??????.?
 4. embratel-G2-0-1-ngacc01. .??????.......??????.......??????......???????......??????..
 5. ebt-T0-5-5-0-21-tcore01. .??????.......??????.......??????......??????.......??????..
 6. 200.230.251.133          .??????.......??????.......??????......??????.......??????.?
 7. 200.230.251.154          .??????.......??????....?.???????......??????.......??????..
 8. ebt-G4-2-intl03.rjo.embr .??????.......??????......???????......??????.......??????..
 9. ebt-ge-5-2-0-intl02.mian .??????......???????......???????......??????.......??????..
10. p4-1-0-3.r01.miamfl02.us .??????......???????...?..???????......??????.?.....??????..
11. xe-1-3-0.r20.miamfl02.us .??????......???????......??????.......??????.....>.??????..
12. as-2.r21.asbnva01.us.bb. .??????......???????......??????.......??????.?...>.??????.
13. po-4.r05.asbnva01.us.bb. ???????.?.????????????...??????????..????????.???.?????????
14. 64.208.110.253           ???????......???????......??????.......??????..?...???????.
15. 208.178.61.66            ???????......???????......??????.......??????......???????.
16. vlan1455-10ge.c1.hmg.osl ???????......??????.......??????.......??????....>.???????.
17. c1.hmg.osl.no.webdealnet ???????......??????.......??????.......??????......???????.
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This is my current internet connectivity. Yay, or something.

I've been in Rio for a little more than a week now. While going here for vacation is what people usually do, I'm actually here to work. Installing Varnish for the people at Globo. The weather has been so-so, fairly wet with rain almost every day, but temperatures in the 20-25°C range. I am not complaining.

Armenio, who's the datacenter manager has been taking excellent care of me, from meeting me at the airport to taking me all around the city, even during the weekend when we went to the Sugar Loaf mountain.

We were supposed to go see the monument to Christ the Redeemer, but it was far, far too foggy for us to see anything, so we went to the Copacabana Fort instead. The picture below is from Saturday when the weather was slightly better.

We went on a tram too, hanging on the outside as I do in the picture (except that it was going at 20-30 km/h while we did that. Across an aquaduct I didn't get a picture of). It rained quite a lot, so when we arrived in Santa Teresa, we were both drenched and got a pair of fresh t-shirts in order not to catch a cold.

Brazil has coconut palms, which should not come as a surprise to anybody, but I have never seen one "in the wild" (I think it was planted).

Today, it rained a lot. We got stranded in the restaurant for about half an hour before the water finally went away.

Apparently, they have dragon shops here too. I don't actually remember what they sold, but I am fairly sure it wasn't dragons.

I tend to have a bunch of reference material stored in my home directory. Everything from RFCs, which is trivial to get at again using a quick rsync command (but immensely useful when I want to look up something and am not online) to requirements specifications for systems I made years and years ago.

If I didn't use a VCS, I would just store those in a directory off my home directory, to be perused whenever I felt the need. Now, with a VCS controlling my ~, it feels like I should be able to get rid of those, and just look them up again if I ever need them. However, this poses a few problems, such as "how do you keep track of not only what is in a VCS, but also what has ever been there". Tools like grep doesn't work so well across time, even though git has a grep command too, it still doesn't cut it for non-ASCII data formats.

Does anybody have a good solution to this problem? I can't think I'm the only one who have the need for good tools here.

What is it about all those people who think that just because I'm in Rio, I'm 20 hours off CET or something? It's -0200, if you wonder what time it is, using $ TZ=Brazil/East date will give you the current answer. Assuming your clock isn't wrong, of course.

Part of my job nowadays is regular Linux consulting for various clients. As part of this, I end up having to reconfigure my network quite a lot, and often by hand. Two examples:

I am setting up some services on a closed server network. I am connected to this using regular, wired Ethernet. This network does not have access to the internet, so I also have access to a WLAN which does. However, I need access to both internal and external DNS zones, so I need to use two different set of servers, depending on the domain name. I also currently set up some static routes to get to the internal DNS and have to chattr +i /etc/resolv.conf in order for the DHCP client not to overwrite my manually configured DNS.

Another example: I am troubleshooting Varnish, deep in a company's intranet. To get access to this, I first have to use a VPN client, then ssh with an RSA token as well as password. From there on, I use tsocks to connect to an intermediate host before using tsocks again to get to the actual Varnish boxes.

Currently, I set up all of this infrastructure by hand, which doesn't really work so well when I switch between clients and go home and use the same laptop there. Does any network configuration tools help me with complex setups such as the ones above? I realise they are not exactly run-of-the-mill setups used by most users, but for me they are two fairly common examples of setups I need.