For all you newbies out there, BBS’s were the precursor to today’s Internet.   People ran computers out of their homes hooked up to their telephone lines, and people would call each other using slow telephone modems to post on message boards, download and upload files, and play games.   Many of the good friendships I still have today were made on BBSes in the 1990′s.   That was the key difference versus the Internet today:  Because you had to use your phone and could easily rack up a huge phone bill, generally you called other boards that were local.   Naturally meet ups would often occur and friends were made.

But I’m getting off-topic.   One of the bright spots of calling and running boards were things called “door games“.   These were simple, text-based (modems, remember!) games that often involved interactions with other people on the same board, playing the same game.

Remember, in the early-to-mid 1990s MMO games like World of Warcraft and Eve were not even possible.   Yet, on a BBS people could play against each other on-line  before any of us even knew what TCP/IP or a web browser was.  Back then, this was pretty mind-blowing stuff.

One of the bright spots of the era was a game called TradeWars 2002.    In every conceivable way, this is the great-grandfather to today’s Eve Online.    Trading for profit, corporations, alien encounters and building up ships:  Tradewars had it all years before Eve was even an idea.    Better yet, it was free and you could play it as much as you wanted (unless you ran out of turns for the day!)

A casual discussion came up in the office regarding old BBS stuff, and I was pleasantly surprised to find out that Tradewars 2002 is still around.    Not only is it still around, it’s undergoing active development and has a dedicated following!    Of course I had to set it up and start playing it with a couple of my co-workers.    It’s every bit as fun as I remember, too.

Give it a shot!   Telnet to tradewars.thelinuxfix.com and start playing.  We won’t blow you up… too much.    You’ll need a terminal (like PuTTY) that can do proper ANSI emulation.  I bet “ANSI” is another term you probably haven’t heard in a good 10 years, either!

The TW2002 splash screen

I also attempted flashing the unit back to the FortiOS level that we use, which sort of succeeded except for the very handy message the console threw back claiming it “Couldn’t write to the CF device”.

CF you say?  Could that possibly mean Compact Flash?

This particular 200A was out of contract anyway, so instead of calling in for a service replacement I decided to crack the cover and see what was inside…

Inside the Fortigate 200A

Not a whole lot for your few thousand dollars of investment!  But sure enough… see that little card with the orange sticker on it?   Peel that off and you’ll find a standard Apacer 64MB Compact Flash.   Now the next question–would putting a larger (and readily available) Compact Flash work?

I can definitely say:  Yes, yes it does.   A quick run to MicroCenter to pick up a $15 2GB CF card worked in the 200A without a single complaint.   Lots of room for onboard logging now!  Additionally, that mounting pad to the rear of the mainboard matches the screw layout for a hard disk perfectly–and there’s an IDE cable attachment to the board sitting right there too–just in case you want to upgrade your onboard storage while you’re at it.

If you have an older Fortigate and do a lot of onboard logging, you might want to remember that CF cards have a limited write-cycle life, just like any magnetic media.  At least now you know you can replace it without much fuss!

It’s especially a bummer when there isn’t anything you can do about the downtime than wait.

Last year in May I finally upgraded my dying first-gen iPhone to a shiny new iPhone 3GS.   I owned the original iPhone for nearly four years and it had never failed me; overall a very satisfying experience.   It was really a no-brainer to upgrade to the 3GS, though my timing was a bit terrible (a few weeks later the iPhone 4 was released).   Regardless it worked out well and I’m not exactly a bleeding-edge type of guy anyway.

The 3GS worked quite good for about six months.   Around the beginning of November it began to act strangely.   I’d miss calls and was convinced the phone had never rang.   Voicemails and text messages would arrive 24 hours–if not more–after they’d been sent.   Initially I chalked this up to congestion on AT&T’s network, yet after driving most of the way across the country and experiencing the same problem I began to suspect the iPhone itself as the culprit.

Sure enough, after arriving in Kentucky around Christmas time the phone finally quit.   Attempts to restore it back to factory stock and backups from iTunes failed to work consistently.   Either it wouldn’t restore at all or would work for a day or two and go back to being bricked.   Many thousands of miles away from home and needing a phone for both work and communication on the road trip back, I traveled a few hours up to Nashville to the closest Apple store.   Much to my satisfaction it was replaced no questions asked, though I did have to drive a distance in order to do so.

Fast forward to a few weeks ago.   The replacement 3GS began to act eerily similar: I started missing calls and voicemails.     I use this phone for business and it is my only phone number, so unreliability for me is completely intolerable.   A few days after the initial flakiness it began the “bricked” behavior again, so I visited the local AT&T store in Redding since the Apple store is 2 hours distant.   I was fully expecting an apology and another replacement which would have left me satisfied, but a little frustrated.

But oh no, that isn’t how this worked out.   What transpired is a textbook example of how not to treat a customer, especially a 10-year one.

The representatives in the store were kind enough, and after doing a few simple troubleshooting steps got on the phone with Apple on my behalf.    After a few minutes of “Ok’s, and uh-huh’s” the phone call was handed off to me personally and the Apple representative provided several options, all of which involved some type of expense to me:

1. Send the phone via courier at my expense to Apple and be without any phone for a week, perhaps a little more while it was fixed.
2. Drive down to Sacramento to switch it out again, if they found it defective.
3. Pay them $599 and have a new 3GS, sending the original back and getting a refund only if Apple determined the phone was indeed faulty.

Already a bit frustrated with the degraded quality control at Apple, as well as seeing a stack of new 3GS boxes (and thus a working phone number) behind the counter, I simply asked the Apple rep why I couldn’t replace the phone there at the AT&T store versus driving two hours to Sacramento’s Apple store.   The rep on the phone provided some long convoluted answer with arbitrary excuses of how AT&T and Apple’s relationship worked, and I simply told him none of those options were acceptable.   I then asked the AT&T rep if I could simply swap the iPhone for something much cheaper, reliable and at least functional one, so I could have a working number.    Apple’s and AT&T’s only option to resolved the issue in that manner without incurring early termination fees would be to wait until the end of my contract on May 16th.

At this point I’m nearly livid:  I had just paid my monthly wireless bill of over $100,  and certainly many thousands of dollars over the span of my patronage with AT&T.    I’m in the store being told that my account, which is completely paid up, is useless unless I fork out even more money, or wait literally 19 more days for my contract to expire.  No budging from either AT&T’s or Apple’s position.

Well, that’s all it took.   I refuse to be subservient to a company I’m sending money to.  That’s not how it works in my book.   I do not run my business that way, and I expect the same courtesy out of the businesses I use.  I thanked the representatives on both the phone and behind the counter for their time, and explained that both Apple and AT&T had lost a long-time customer over some silly arbitrary agreements between the two of them that really only existed to inconvenience their customer.

Verizon, here I come.

Using Solaris’ Dtrace functionality a systems engineer determines that noise is responsible for his intermittent disk latency problems.   Just wait for the last part of the video, it’s worth it.

http://blogs.sun.com/brendan/entry/unusual_disk_latency

Thanks to Greg for pointing that one out to me.

One of the things that annoyed me out of the gate is the lack of SSH support.   It’s there in the underlying operating system, just not enabled.   Here’s how to turn it on:

1. Get on the console of the ESXi server.
2. Press ALT-F1 to get to the OS system console
3. Type “unsupported”
4. Enter the root password at the password prompt.
5. Edit /etc/inetd.conf with vi, and uncomment the SSH line
6. Run:  kill -1 $(cat /var/run/inetd.pid)

And viola!  SSH to your ESX box.   Enjoy!

Not only is the mechanical execution of the clock spectacular, but the thought behind it is equally awesome/creepy:

Your life is being eaten away by time, second by second, and represented by the Chronophage eating away, bit by bit.   Oh yea, when it strikes the hour it sounds like chains falling into a coffin.

I want one.

Behold, the lego-robot that solves the Rubik’s Cube.