Monthly Archives: March 2006

eFile this year, it’s so easy… not!

3/26/2006 – 8:07 pm

Where’s my teleFile? Seriously, filing my return online this year sucks. Hard. Having taken advantage of IRS’ teleFile in the past and finding the total time involved to be greatly less than an hour, I am greatly disappointed thus far in the various ‘free’ filing options available via third parties linked to via the IRS’ [...]

By jasonb | Posted in Rants | Comments (2)

HSBC Internet Banking’s Three Week Time to Live

3/20/2006 – 10:31 pm

If you thought you’d take advantage of HSBC‘s Internet Banking promotional APR of 4.80%, you’re in for a wild ride. Actually, your ride probably won’t even start. I initiated the application process more than three weeks ago and everything is not yet complete. To thwart the maximum amount of fraud possible, HSBC has left no [...]

By jasonb | Posted in Money | Comments (3)

The magic of syslog-ng and logcheck

3/18/2006 – 11:57 am

After experiencing a variety of hardware failures recently, I finally completed my migration to syslog-ng with a central loghost paired with hourly log reporting using a wrapper script around logcheck. Once properly tuned, an ongoing process, mails generated and often of some interest. To setup syslog-ng on machines on Debian Sarge, you need merely apt-get [...]

By jasonb | Posted in Quick Guides | Comments (0)

Linux QoS / TC and Accounting for ATM Overhead

3/13/2006 – 12:12 am

One of the most painful deployment issues for Linux Traffic Control on a commodity ADSL link is the variable overhead relative to IP for each packet you transmit, as the underlying transport is actually ATM. Each ATM cell is a 53 byte fixed length with a capacity for 48 bytes of actual data. Unfortunately, much [...]

By jasonb | Posted in Quick Guides | Comments (0)

Dirty Patch for Yaird and 2.6.16 ATA Block

3/10/2006 – 12:10 am

When trying to use Yaird 0.0.12-7 with a recent 2.6.16 release candidate kernel, I noticed that it fails for vanilla ATA devices as the logic for discovering the device node doesn’t work with changes to the sysfs tree. I opened a Debian BTS bug and included the patch below, which needs to be cleaned up [...]

By jasonb | Posted in Software | Comments (0)

polltc 1.04 pushed

3/7/2006 – 12:37 am

I updated polltc finally. I haven’t had much time to mess with traffic control, so I haven’t really been watching all the patches and bug reports streaming in. Write something for a tight niche and users will come, I guess. I fixed a pretty huge bug with a regex pattern that prevented stats from being [...]

By jasonb | Posted in Software | Comments (0)