This class had been like no other.  We had people from totally different majors with totally different personalities. Most of us spent 5 days a week with each other. The first couple weeks seemed almost dreadful as everyone was learning each other names (in German of course), yet no one could remember my name.  I was feeling isolated from the rest of the class, but that didn’t last long. There was one day when someone started sitting next to me, and I started to feel that I had made a friend. Shortly everyone began coming together. It was almost a strange kind of family and closeness that I had never seen in any other classes. If somebody missed a class, it was most certainly noticed.

In the beginning I think everyone was a little bit shy about speaking out loud as we were fearful that we’d be judged by our peers.  But we realized that we were all in this together and there was no reason to be afraid.

We were very lucky to have the instructors that we did. They new that it was difficult to learn a new language and although they did challenge us, they were easy on us as well.  They cared about whether we understood the material, and made every effort to make sure we understood.

One of the instructors, was a TA from Russia, who taught us twice a week during our practice course.  I still remember the first day he was in front of the class, you could tell he was a little nervous, but he quickly got over it.  Sometimes I feel he learned as much about English as we got to learn about German from him.

When second semester started this fall we had quickly noticed that we had gained a few new classmates while losing a few from the previous semester.  We had even gained a new TA from Georgia (the country, not the state, and no we still had our Russian friend).

At first it seemed almost awkward to have this minor change of classmates and instructors, but they joined our “family” very quickly.

When I woke up Monday morning, I felt a certain sadness. I had been seeing most of these people for 5 days a week for 2 semesters and I wouldn’t be seeing them anymore.

As a final message to my German classmates and instructors: You are a fantastic group of people, and I have felt truly honored to have been able to take this journey with all of you. Although I probably won’t have classes with any of you next semester, I hope to see you all very soon.

You can find the app here.

I haven’t had any issues with Bluehost. In fact having unlimited bandwidth and space for around the same cost as my GoDaddy account and not having to wait 15+ minutes for a settings change was great. But now, I decided that I wanted to do more. I wanted to be able to have full control of a virtual machine that I could do more than just web hosting. A system where I could run test scripts, host dns, host email, and do anything else that I can think of. The best part, it is actually cheaper than than shared hosting through BlueHost.

I had tried another VPS (Virtual Private Server) host in the past, but suffered terrible lag and the worst customer support I had ever encountered. An example of that can be seen here.

I was lucky enough to find a new company out of Chicago that is serving awesome VPS’s at affordable prices. At $4.95/month I am getting 512MB of RAM, 50GB of storage, and 2TB of Dedicated Bandwidth per month. These VPSs all currently run linux, and I have Debian 6 on mine. So what is this company you ask? Binary Computer Solutions. If you are interested in getting a VPSs, help me out and order via this link. https://customer.binarycpu.com/?affid=8.

Ok, so what do you have running on your VPS so far?

• Apache2 Web Server
• BIND9 DNS Server
• Postfix Smtp

My server is acting as the nameserver for Rychannel.com and a couple other sites that I host. It was quite interesting to figure out how to set BIND’s Primary Zones. My Postfix setup acts as a forwarder to another email account not hosted on the server. My Apache2 setup is currently hosting websites for 3 different domains.

Any questions or comments? Leave them in the comment section and I will be sure to respond.

syntax on
set autoindent
set smartindent
set tabstop=4
set shiftwidth=4

Update: After settings these, I found that copying text in to vim turned out to be a nightmare. So here is how you get around that.
Type:
:set paste
before pasting, and then type
:set nopaste
when you’re done to restore the vimrc settings.

Documentation is a very important step in any IT project and this particular project was no different. Our first step in the documentation process involved writing down what jack was connected to what port as they were being connected to the switches.  An easy enough process but definitely not a perfect one, so we added a second step to verify the documentation in the first step. To do this I wrote a script and web application that would utilize the Cisco Discovery Protocol that Enterasys so kindly includes in their switches.

The Cisco Discovery Protocol (CDP) is a Data Link Layer protocol developed by, you guessed it, Cisco. If enabled, the CDP packets can be transmitted on every port of the switch. These packets contain useful information including, but not limited to, Device ID, Port ID, IP address, and even Location. By default, the K-Series will transmit those packets once every minute.  For our project we set them to transmit every five seconds, so that the student employees that would be going room to room, would have to spend as little time as possible in each room.

I tried to find a decent Python module to capture the CDP packet but it proved to a major pain to find a module that would work with the version of Python I was using, so I decided to use Tshark, which is the command-line version of Wireshark.  It can be installed when you install Wireshark. I have the Python program open a tshark process with the display filters set to display only CDP packets and dies after 7 seconds.. The script captures the output of that process once it dies and parses it.  From the output, the script pulls out the Device ID, which is the base mac-address of the devices, and the port number. Once the script has collected that data, it opens a web browser and passes the data to the web application.

The web application is a simple set of php scripts with a MySQL back end. When the first page receives the data, it searches the MySQL database for the room where the jack is located for that particular port and chassis. If the room number is in correct, they can hit submit, if its wrong, they simply can change the room number in that field and click submit.  Any ports with incorrect locations were loaded in to a separate database table.

So far the other students have made it through two of the residence halls with no errors in the documentation, except for that of ports that were added after we had visited those closets.  Hopefully this verification process continues to go smoothly.

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After dealing with this for about 4 -5 months, I decided that it was time to investigate the issue again.  So for starters, I decided that I would blame the WordPress application first and work my way from there.  So for starters, I disabled all of the plugins that I had installed.  Amazingly, that showed some results.  RyChannel.com was loading instantly again!!!  NICE!  Now, the question became, which plugin was causing it?  I went through and activated the plugins that I absolutely “had” to have.  Ok, WP didn’t slowdown again. I started activating the other plugins one by one until the problem started again.

Okay, so which plugin was it?  WP-Ban.  WP-Ban is a WordPress plugin that allows you to block visitors by IP address, IP range, etc.  I’m not quite sure why I had it installed, but now that it is gone, RyChannel.com’s WordPress application works fantastic.

I am writing this from an airplane! Yes! How cool is this? Answer: VERY COOL! I am on an AIRPLANE and writing an email to all of YOU ON THE GROUND! Hoooo Haaa! Do you know what is holding me up right now? Answer: AIR! If YOU tried to climb on some air right now, you would fall, so do not try to duplicate my feat of amazingness. Similarly, if you yelled as loud as you could, I would not be able to hear you, yet I can communicate with YOU, all of you at once, while I am ON A FREAKING PLANE!

Here is a combinatorics question:

How many ways are there to arrange the members of our class who are ON A FREAKING PLANE?

Answer: Only one, for it is I.

I hope you do well in all your ground-based finals next week, and that you study hard, given that you have more than a tray-table to work on, and don’t have a little screen above your head displaying “Eat Pray Love” without sound.

Dr. <censored> , Ph.D.

P.S. I AM SENDING YOU THIS EMAIL FROM AN AIRPLANE!