Merdeka day celebration

Cherating -- 2 days before National Day.

31st August every year, Malaysian celebrates "Merdeka Day" or National Day. On National Day eve, I was still at my office doing my work. repairing..downloading.. configuring..installing and testing. What a day for me. Never knew to rest at home or joining my friends celebrating the Merdeka Day. Not that I hadn't had a clue or had experience to celebrate it but I just didn't give a damn. Why? because I prefered to celebrate it in cyber world. Wired and sometimes wireless.

I had experienced it before. During my study years at Penang. Those days were unforgettable. We gathered at a field near Padang Kota Lama and waiting for the countdown. 10..9..8....3..2..1 and firework started. What did we get from a celebration like this? Is this the best way to celebrate? Many people complaining about the raising of oil price and many suffers from it. How can we waste money for the firework? Whose money is that? Can you tell me?

Ethernet bonding revisited

Ethernet bonding

2 days ago I was able to do ethernet bonding for my Linux box which acts as a proxy server and firewall. What I did was to bond two private network interfaces to act as one. What I need to do was installing 2 NICs and setting the driver (autodetect on modern distros). Then I need to create the bonding interface like this :

~#modprobe bonding mode=0 miimon=100

~#ifconfig bond0 192.168.0.2 netmask 255.255.255.0 up

~#ifenslave bond0 eth0

~#ifenslave bond0 eth1

Note:

bond0 is the "bond" interface. eth0 and eth1 are the interfaces to be bonded so called slave devices (or interfaces).They are connected to my private network (LAN). The bond interface will have MAC address of the first slave device to be its MAC address. Please take note that the mode=0 means that we want load-balancing capability. You can use this bond interface in iptables command or tcpdump. In my network environment, I use this command to the bond0 interface:

~#iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -s 192.168.0.0/24 -d 0/0 -i bond0 -p tcp --dport 80 -j REDIRECT --to-port 3128

where squid is running on port 3128. If not, change it accordingly. For tcpdump :

~#tcpdump -i bond0

I wish you all good luck and happy bonding! :-)

Monday sickness, chatting, Xandross

If today is not Monday, I would have been in Pangkor ... swimming..

Today is Monday 15 August 2005. At 8.30 AM this morning I was still at my home preparing for work. Last night, I was happily playing with my student's laptop by installing Linux, did some modification to KDE theme and testing Codeweaver's CrossOver. My life was not connected for the whole Sunday. Why? My hand phone was broken (again?) and I have to send it to my friend's shop (again?). He laughed at me and offered me a better handphone as a replacement but for RM50. I said "Thanks but no thanks".

My life has changed since I knew how to chat. I have always thought that chatting is a waste of time. Actually I just forgot that I have to think the good side of it and get rid of the bad. I never liked chatting as i did now. My life was complete i guess since communication over internet primarily by exchanging emails and via forums. Now I feel incomplete without double-clicking on the Yahoo! Messenger when I first start working early in the morning. I have known a few friends via YM and this real time conversation can be so fun and exciting by exchanging ideas and knowledge.

Now Monday comes again and life must go on. I was using Xandros Linux on my student's laptop and typing in this blog. Searching for knowledge and doing practical work is my passion. In computer world, you'll never understand something completely until you do it. As my job as a system administrator, i have gained so much knowledge and experience that I can't describe here. All I can say is it is "fantastic"and sometimes plastic. :-)