Adam and I launched The Frontier Group's blog today. You'll find that most of my technical or computer-related posts will be published there from now on, and lambie.org will take a more personal direction.

Drop past and say hello.

I get my share of email each day, all of which gets filtered by our IronPort anti-spam and anti-virus server (and yours can too).

I was looking around the IronPort support site when I read some information about their online e-learning offerings. I signed up for a 17 minute course on Sawmill and the confirmation email came through. My email client marked the email as suspected junk, which I thought was highly, highly ironic.

IronPort, the makers of arguably the world's finest email gateway appliances, were suspected of sending junk email? I don't think so.

The results have been posted online. I competed in the 4km run, along with Adam and Emma. In true TFG-fashion, Adam and I came across the line pretty much together, with only two seconds between us.

We finished place 120 and 121 for our category: mens 19-29 with times of 24:25 and 24:27. Emma came across in 25:40 which put her in 93rd place for her category.

From what I could tell, none of us had trained for the run and even though it was only 4km, the times indicate how much traffic there was in our way. Adam took the off-road approach and was pushing uphill through sand on the embankment for most of the race whilst I plowed through the crowd, ducking and weaving. It's hard to run fast under those conditions, but that wasn't the main goal after all. I lost Emma in the crowd after the first few hundred metres, but her time shows that she wasn't too far behind us.

The run has partly re-motivated me to start running again, though I'm only going to focus on the 4-6km circuits as I don't really get much out of the long haul (10km+) distances. I find that I don't often get "into the zone" that a lot of runners talk about and it's just hard work. In fact... I'm going out for a run now.

Yesterday afternoon we moved our primary and secondary nameservers from hotrod and wheeljack to rumble and laserbeak. The move went flawlessly, with no loss of services.

To check that the new nameservers were receiving the requests we added query logging, following the instructions found in the comprehensive Ubuntu Server Guide. The logs began to fill with queries, which brought about the next problem: rotating the logs.

I believe that bind9 has the ability to rotate its own logs, however because we're using app-armor, I thought it would be best to do the rotation outside of bind. The rotation of logs is commonly handled with logrotate, so I created the following file:
 

mlambie@rumble:/var/log$ cat /etc/logrotate.d/query
/var/log/query.log {
    daily
    rotate 14
    compress
    delaycompress
    missingok
    notifempty
    create 0664 bind root
    postrotate
      /etc/init.d/bind9 reload > /dev/null
    endscript
}

I'm telling logrotate that I want the logs rotated daily, to keep the last two weeks (14 days), to compress the old logs (but not the most recently rotated log), it's OK if they're empty, don't rotate if they're empty (which will never be the case), to create new logs with the 664 permissions, owned by bind:root, and finally to reload bind9 after rotation. This last part is necessary otherwise bind will continue to use the rotated log, I think because it has an open file descriptor at rotation time.

I tested the rotation with:

mlambie@rumble:~$ sudo logrotate /etc/logrotate.d/query -f

The logs rotated as expected.

Apparently other people have experienced similar issues with the network locking up on some virtual machines after a period of time. I find the issue sometimes occurs when we kick off backups on soundwave and the network is placed under significant load.

Disabilng IPv6 is meant to solve the problem in some cases and I have high expectations that it'll help in our situation.

To disable IPv6 on Ubuntu 8.04.01 you need to add an entry to /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist containing the following:

# blacklist IPv6
blacklist ipv6

You'll then need to reboot the machine, and confirm that the module has not been loaded.

mlambie@soundwave:~$ sudo lsmod | grep ipv6
mlambie@soundwave:~$ sudo ip a | grep inet6

Both tests should return nothing, confirming that the module is not active.