Tonight on Chicago Code: BOT House & Hinky Dink

The Chicago Code airs on FOX on Monday, May 2, 2011 at 8PM Central Time.

Once this dog goes off the air I can get my search results back.

(EDITORS: STORY CAN END HERE)

UPDATE: 10.9c

I can't believe I wasted an hour of my life on that crap.

I'll take my search results back now, plz.

Kernel 2.6.31 x86_64 on EXP4

Best kernel compile EVAH.

It worked on the first compile and booted up clean for the first time this morning just before 5AM.

In my experience that's damned near unheard of. In fact I did the build over ssh while the system was headless - no keyboard, no mouse, and no video - which is just asking for trouble.

I had to rebuild the nVidia driver to get X up and running so I could get back on the system with VNC. That ran incredibly smoothly with the latest x86_64 release (thanks, nVidia! And, yes, I still hate ATI!). Then ipatbles and ipset had to be brought up to the latest versions. I got everything just right and played a test round on BITCH House.

Smooth as silk. Slicker'n snot on a doorknob.

So I rerouted EXP4 back to the AMD64 box, rebooted yet again, and was back in business before 6:30AM.

I'll be playing today to see how it runs. See you around.

Twitterfication Update/Busman's Holiday

Since BOT House and EXPIV were put on Twitter the two servers have generated almost 40,000 tweets.

I haven't managed to control things enough to avoid the 150 tweets per hour maximum, so the servers get cut off quite a bit. Usually in about an hour they're back, chattering away.

If you have a Twitter account, it's not a good idead to "follow" the servers because they'll stomp over everyone else you're following.

At one point, BOT House had over 700 followers (mostly bots, I suppose) but overnight that number dropped to about 200 and has been there ever since. EXPIV is lagging behind with about 140 followers.

This whole exercize has me looking over the Chat-O-Matic code to see how I can liven things up, because, quite frankly, the chatterbots tend to say the same things over and over and over again. Plus there's that need to throttle things back so I don't get banned every hour.

I will be playing a bit more in the next two weeks since I'm on vacation. There will be a break in the action because my wife (Pinky Dink) and myself will be attending the kid's (Rinky Dink's) wedding to his True Love (the future Mrs. Twinky Dink).

Aside from the wedding festivities, this will be Yet Another Busman's Holiday. Sometime after the wedding I'm going to consolidate www.mrhinkydink.com and proxyobsession.net, mostly just to put everything into one account and partly to move the proxy material over to ProxyObsession and perhaps - just perhaps - to make some parking meter change off the content. Traffic to the Proxy List has tripled since last year and although it seems to have peaked for the time being I think it will continue to grow.

Some disruption to UT may be involved, but it shouldn't last for more than a few minutes.

Nali BITCHes

I stopped by the Unreal Admin Page today, something I rarely do anymore. Somehow, one thing led to another and I bumbled across the NaliWeaponsIIX package. Evidently it's been around for about five years, but it was new to me so I figured what the heck - give it a shot.

After all, I haven't done anything new and exciting with the servers in a long time.

So I put it on BITCH House.

Does anybody play UT2004 anymore?

Yeah, I didn't think so. Anyway, I stumbled across my cdkey while looking through some old files on the Proxy Project system and found out what I was doing wrong. I'd bring it online if there was any interest, but the truth is no one really played it much when it was "popular".

Alien Arena

I have found this game mildly amusing. Even bothered to recompile it for AMD64, so it can go on the new box any time. I played it online a couple of times but there was not much action on the few servers that were out there.

EXP IV Move

This didn't make much difference, although one thing definitely improved. Before the move any network activity caused the system to report high (90%) network utilization. Now it's dropped down to something like "normal". Still, it didn't help.

However, dicking around with the system today I happened to notice the "hinky" account (that's me) was getting flooded with email from the cron process, causing disk utilization to hit the roof.

It made no sense. It was cron activity from root, and nowhere in root's config or in crontab was there any directive to send email to "hinky"! This is not the first time I've had issues with email filling the disk up and I thought I had it hammered. Now, it's fixed (famous last words) and nobody is getting any email at all on the system.

And I don't mean the "nobody" account.

Linux Kernel 2.6.23

Dinkster has upgraded the BOT House Operating System. W00T!

This is a W00T-worthy upgrade because it has been the fastest, least painful upgrade EVAH. And the Dink has been building kernels since 1994, back when it took no less than 18 hours to compile the 1.3.x kernel on my old 386DX/16 with 6 megs (SIX!) of RAM.

Kernel 2.6.23 came out on 10/09/07. I had a working package, complete with the latest netfilter patches, on a Debian 4.0r0 Virtual Machine by 10/10/07 and I installed that package today, on the Ides of October (the Ides fall on the 13th in October).

Beware the Ides of October? I hope not.