A few days ago, I had an interesting call. Someone was in need of their computer being fixed. The DCOM service was corrupt. When I got there I noticed the S.M.A.R.T. hard drive was complaining… time to back up your data. I brought the box home with me, disabled the rogue service, and screwed around trying to clone the drive with Gparted. It would instantly error on me because of bad drive blocks. I did a chkdsk on the old drive.. same result. The OS would boot fine so I knew the bad blocks were in unimportant locations on the disk. The drive would flake out occasionally however. I went to Acronis and picked up their 15-day, full functional trial of Easy Migrate. I stuck in the replacement drive, booted windows, installed the app, and with a few clicks, the drive was cloning. 30 minutes later, the system powered down, I removed the drive, and presto!
Nice free way to do some emergency rescue. The customer was lucky this time.
Griminal Grim's Ramblings
We’ve been having an odd issue every now and again with our Comcast connection at work just dropping out. When the Internet goes down, the phone and pagers go off. Sure. We could have a T1 that’s 15 times slower than the cable…Not. We have a redundant 7 meg DSL connection that we hardly use. I figured I could buy a dual WAN router to take care of the problem but that costs a few hundred dollars. Instead, after talking with a friend of mine about the problem, I decided to build an OpenBSD box to act as a dual WAN router. I threw three NICs in an old PC to do some testing. With my buddies help I was able to get something going in a few days. If I had to rebuild the box now, I could do it in under an hour. The time it took me to figure things out in the OS took me the most time. There is quite a difference between Linux and OpenBSD.
I won’t post the specifics but I will give an overview:
The LAN NIC does NAT, DNS, and DHCP. Enabling all three of these services simply required a flag set for each in the /etc/rc.conf file… I used /etc/rc.conf.local to make my modifications. The hardest part of setting this up was editing the dhcpd.conf file with the appropriate interface, IP ranges, DNS, etc. It took a hole two minutes to do that… so it wasn’t hard. 
After that, I enabled another service… ifstated. This daemon monitors changes in network interfaces. You write the /etc/ifstated.conf file to do your bidding…. like some condition checking. If a ping to a Comcast router fails, run a script to set the DSL gateway as default. If a ping to a Comcast router responds, run a different script to set the Comcast gateway back to default. I could do this for even more WAN links if need be. The whole thing was remarkably simple. I’m sure there are a few issues with certain connections that require the requests/responses to come from the same IP. That may be a problem, but at least the Internet is still up! ….and my phone and pager are quiet!
Griminal Grim's Ramblings
Been pretty busy at work. It’s amazing how I don’t mind being at work. I’m constantly doing cool shit that never bores me…. other than extracting bullshit data out of databases for bullshit reports…. but that’s going to happen at every IT job. I’ve been messing with OpenBSD to build a Load balancing, dual or tri WAN router. It’s a bit different than Linux but the great thing is that I have an expert in my IM buddy list. Instead of searching for 2 hours on how to do something, I IM him. He’s happy to help because its so easy for him. I also got another VPN connection going with yet another clinic using a Cisco 501 PIX and a Cisco ASA5510. They’re opening next Monday.
For the last few days I’ve been cutting down trees to clear an area for our new barn. I got the financing a few weeks ago and I’ll be contacting lumber companies this week to quote a package out. My dad is going to help me. He used to build pole barns as a side job for years. I also have a contractor friend that has offered his services.
I bought myself a new chair for fathers day. Harrington Leather Chair. Its originally $199 but with a little SlickDeals.net, I was able to get it for $101 out the door. My wife even likes it.
Griminal Grim's Ramblings
It’s been a long time since I posted. I don’t know why. Nothing exciting is happening as of late. We did all the upgrading we needed to to at work last year. I’m currently working on getting smart phones integrated into the organization.
On the home front, I should have my new loan for the 40×60x14 pole barn I’m going to put up this summer.
Griminal Grim's Ramblings