Interesting day so far. I received my bags from Campmor today, and am very impressed with the High Sierra Wheeled Carry-On Backpack, though I haven't decided on the Columbia Smoke Courier Bag.

A client asked me about complaints they've been getting from dial-up users of their site. Looking into it, I found that their "home page" was nearly 4 MB! And at over 210 KB their most commonly loaded page takes 43 seconds at 56K, right on the edge of usability IMO. I got quite a bit from from this Web Page Analyzer. And then google lead me to Alertbox, Eleganthack and Gizmodo. (OK, Gizmodo might have been a bit of a detour. <Grin>)

But now I need to get cracking. Time to get the servers built and the architecture document written!  ¶ 1:24 PM 0 Comments

  Well, my room's booked for next weeks training. A trip to LA should be fun, especially since I get to go with a buddy... And there's always Fry's...  ¶ 4:26 PM 0 Comments

  Getting back into the swing of things today. I've been investigating economical load-balancing/failover solutions, and learned a few things:

• Refurbished BigIP boxes can be had at crazy cheap prices. Pretty cool...


• RedHat offers their own cluster/load-balancing solution (based on their Piranha project) that looks interesting, but adding the cost of clustering software plus RHEL and it isn't cheap...


• Ultra Monkey! Cool name, looks like it was originally a project by VA Linux and is now it's own open source project. I just need to figure out if anyone actually uses it. One option that looks interesting is the Streamline High Availability and Load Balancing topology.  This allows one to run the Linux Directors and Web Servers into the same hosts. It's not scalable beyond two nodes, but would be enough to cover for Application Server hiccups.

Stuff to look into, anyways...  ¶ 4:02 PM 0 Comments

  Well, I took the exam today. I probably should have spent more time studying:

Section 4: Configure Solaris IP Filter
4.1 Configure the behavior of Solaris IP Filter using packet direction (in keywords and out keywords), and using rule processing (block keywords, pass keywords, quick keywords, and group keywords)
4.2 Configure and modify filtering on an IP address, network interface, protocol type, and port.
4.3 Configure logging in Solaris IP Filter, passed packets, blocked packets, and rule match and analyze logged information and statistics.

I spent my most of my time reviewing the Solaris 9 Network Admin guides and materials. D'oh!

  ¶ 3:19 PM 0 Comments

  Study for the exam is going well. I even found some bonus study time on the drive in. After almost a year of commuting from Woodbury to downtown Minneapolis, I've found the express route. $2.50 is the one-way fare, but given how much gas costs this is still probably a win. Especially since I can buy $45 worth of fares for $40...  ¶ 2:05 PM 0 Comments

  Well, it's been a while... My plan is to be updating this blog every day, or at least several times a week.

Today I'm working on study for the Sun Solaris 10 Network Administrator certification exam. Since I hold a couple of their certs already, I applied and received a voucher for a free beta exam run.

Of course, I haven't even installed Solaris 10 yet. <grin> I've had the CDs burned for a while now, so it's time to play with VMware again. I built a Solaris 9 VMware image last summer, so wasn't too worried. And the installation went well: the only thing I didn't think of was to disable USB before the installation to reduce error message noise.  ¶ 11:48 AM 0 Comments