Max Clark

Like many on the interweb, over the years I have collected one or two email accounts. Most of them come free with registration to a service or site that I use for some piece of functionality (think schools, flickr, instant messenger, storefronts, etc…) - others are just part of registering a domain and publishing a site.

Managing this mess of accounts has always proved to be a challenge typically solved (I use solved loosely here) with the use of Sendmail/Qmail/Postfix virtual hosting + Thunderbird and IMAP/POP3 aggregating into a single set of folders on my desktop. In the past couple of years I have found myself using and preferring Google Mail for my personal accounts, both with their @gmail brand for mailing lists and newsgroups and also with the Google Apps for my custom domain hosting. While this has given me simple care free hosting it hasn’t solved the underlying issue of just too many accounts to manage and filter through and the time drain involved.

So today in an attempt at efficiency I have reshaped my inbound email to simplified email forwarding modeled after pobox.com (I thought about using their service but it literally costs me $0 to host on one of our many existing email servers). For the time being I will use my @gmail account as my primary personal inbox while maintaining my @clarksys account for permanency.

If you’d like to send me an email (click here to see my address) - you could probably guess it anyway.

There are no words… I was just forwarded a call from our NOC after the caller demanded to speak with the manager. I am still not clear what the issue is but the caller “Carlo” was demanding to speak with Juan. I repeated the same thing that Heather had said - that there was no person named Juan that worked for the company. Carlo goes on about how I’m a lier and that Juan is a security guard in my building. Okay so at this point I’m thinking Carlo must be talking about one of our datacenters which are all staffed by security. Before I can respond Carlo starts in that I’m a lier and he’s going to send a couple guys down to sort this out.

I still have no idea:

1. What building he’s talking about
2. Where he got our number
3. What his original issue was
4. What exactly he thinks he’s going to accomplish by sending some guys out to deal with building security. I’m not positive but I would guess that Securitas/Pinkerton has 911 on speed dial.

Unfortunately my curiosity is peaked and I doubt I’ll ever find out what exactly is going on.

I just finished installing OS X on my Dell Mini 9 pic (as an aside - probably one of the best form factors I have owned for a traveling laptop). The instructions here:

How-To: Install Mac OS X - DellEFI Method

are pretty good. I followed Section 2 Part A. One thing to note, when booting the system via the “small” USB drive you will have to press “esc” and select the larger USB drive to boot from. The syslinux/isolinux on the small USB drive will continue to boot in a loop until you break the cycle. Other than that everything worked like a charm right from the start (camera, audio, wifi, etc…).

I still need to install and tweet some additional settings and my 16 GB USB drive will always be close by (6 GB installation). Additional links and information are below - enjoy.

• How To: Hackintosh a Dell Mini 9 Into the Ultimate OS X Netbook
• Virtually increase your Dell Mini Screen Resolution
• http://code.google.com/p/mydellmini/downloads/list
• http://www.eternalstorms.at/utilities/presentyourapps/index.html

Small patch to the IRR Power Tools (irrpt) package to allow setting the prefix length via the irrpt_pfxgen script on the command line:

--- irrpt-1.27/bin/irrpt_pfxgen 2007-06-08 21:16:47.000000000 +0000
+++ irrpt/bin/irrpt_pfxgen 2009-05-01 19:36:30.000000000 +0000
@@ -50,7 +50,7 @@

case “-f”:


About a year ago I heard a stat that One Wilshire had 40 Gbit/s of utilization on their Fast Ethernet cross connects. Honestly this number floored me for a few reasons:

1. an average circuit will run at 30% utilization, this means that CRG had approximately 1,300 Fast Ethernet circuits run at the time. Or in revenue numbers, been $65k/month in fast ethernet cross connect fees.
2. Fiber cross connects are the overwhelming majority of installed circuits at any carrier neutral site. I couldn’t say what the exact ratio is but based on my personal experience Fiber to Ethernet is something on the order of 20 to 1. This would mean One Wilshire was billing $2.6/month in fiber cross connects.
3. One Wilshire is a relatively inexpensive location for cross connects, other facilities are way more expensive and could be billing way more.

While the largest revenue items for a given facility will most certainly be floor space and power, those also carry the highest cost of goods sold. With cross connects the facility bears a one time charge for the materials and labor (which is usually billed to the customer as an installation fee) and after that there is almost zero expense ongoing to service the cross connect. The margin is nearly 100%.

Like I said, the real money is in the cross connects.

I’ve been using Twitter lately for my short freeform thoughts (@maxclark if you are interested). Twitter has actually proven to be the perfect medium for the job - the side effect has been my untouched blog. In an effort to encourage more posting I’ve migrated back to Wordpress (to play around with the plugins and widgets) and I must say that I have been pleasantly surprised.

The export/import ran near perfect and the customizations and extensions for Wordpress have kept me interested in tinkering. Only serious side effect I’ve found so far (besides the expected image/upload broken links) has been the complete loss of text formatting (mostly do to the MT export). In the past I used Markdown syntax and need to experiment with what I want to do moving forward. That consideration is mostly based on the use of Marsedit or the WP-Admin moving forward. I still have some general category/tag cleanup to do and a rewrite of the template and I it should be good to go.

I’m thinking about using Amazon’s S3 moving forward for image and asset hosting for no other reason than it sounds cool.

I’ve been trying to get my head around IPv6 subnetting for some time now. Today was finally the day that forced the issue…

First some background:

All IP addresses (IPv4 and IPv6) are allocated in large blocks to a regional registry (ARIN, RIPE, etc…) these registries then in turn allocate addresses down to ISPs, ISPs to customers and so on. By default the registry will allocate a /32 to an ISP and the ISP is supposed to allocate a /48 to a customer. The IPv6 equivalent of a IPv4 /24 subnet is a /64 which is the space a customer should break their network segments into.

This is where my brain starts to hurt.

An IPv6 /32 is 2^16 (65536) /48 subnets, which in turn are each 2^16 /64 subnets. A /64 is 2^64 addresses, the square of the size of the entire IPv4 Internet. It took me a while to find a calculator that would actually give the expanded result - 18,446,744,073,709,552,000.

The numbers are just unbelievably large. Anyways back to the problem at hand, how does an ISP properly subnet their /32 space to customers (or better put what are the breakpoints in the subnets)?
The answer is incredibly simple, since IPv6 is going to be subnetted based on the existing “:” octet separator all you need to do is increase the number and volia. Phyber’s IPv6 allocation is 2637:f238/32 which means the subnets are:


2607:f238:0000/48
2607:f238:0001/48
2607:f238:0002/48


And so on and so on. Another trick, IPv6 isn’t just 0-9, the numbering is 0-9 + a-f or:


2607:f238:0008/48
2607:f238:0009/48
2607:f238:000a/48
2607:f238:000b/48


It is a ridiculous amount of IP space. I’ll post more when I figure out what we are doing for our cross connects and loopback interfaces.

For years I have been using the syntax:

$ find . -type f -exec rm {} \;

For some reason I took the time to read the man page for find today and guess what:

$ find . -type f -delete

Does the exact same thing and it is almost instant. Lesson learned, every now and again read the man page.

An Italian walked into a bank in New York City and asked for the loan officer. He needed to borrow $5,000 for two weeks, but he was not a depositor of the bank. The loan officer said that the bank would need some form of security for the loan, so the Italian handed over the keys to a new $250,000 Ferrari out front and they could hold it until the loan was paid off in two weeks. The title was produced and everything checked out, the car was driven into the bank’s underground garage and parked, and the loan granted at 12%.
Later, the bank’s president and officers all enjoyed a good laugh on the Italian for using a $250,000 Ferrari as collateral for a $5,000 loan.

Two weeks later, the Italian returned, repaid the $5,000 plus interest of $23.07. The loan officer said, “Sir, we are very happy to have had your business, and this transaction has worked out very nicely, but we are a little puzzled. While you were away, we checked you out and found that you are a multimillionaire. What puzzles us is, why would you bother to borrow $5,000?”

The Italian replied: “Where else in New York City can I park my car for two weeks for only $23.07 and expect it to be there when I return?”

I read an excellent post the other day discussing Python education. I personally identify with almost 100% the author has to say. With Perl and PHP online articles and available books provide task based examples. What better way to learn a programming language than to give examples on how to solve a specific problem. More than anything else the lack of task based instruction has stalled my adoption of Python.

http://troutgirl.wordpress.com/2008/08/08/learning-python/