-> Build two CentOS 4.4 Linux routers. Minimal installation plus development tools. In my situation I used a dual 350Mhz PII and tunnel router #2 was an old Pentium Pro 200Mhz. The dual 350Mhz is located at the main data center and the older Linux box is located at my house.

-> Download and configure vtund from www.vtund.info. There are a number of example configurations available on their website. Below is what I have used.


# IP Tunnel Server Configuration
cobra {
passwd XXXXXXX; # Password
type tun; # IP tunnel
proto udp; # UDP protocol
compress lzo:9; # LZO compression level 9
encrypt no; # Encryption
keepalive yes; # Keep connection alive

up {
# Connection is Up
# XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX - local, XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX - remote
ifconfig “%% XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX pointopoint XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX mtu 1450″;
};
down {
# Connection is Down
# Shutdown interface
ifconfig “%% down”;
};
}

# IP Tunnel Client Configuration
cobra {
passwd XXXXXXX; # Password
device tun0; # Device tun0
persist yes; # Persist mode
up {
# Connection is Up

# Assign IP addresses.
ifconfig “%% XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX pointopoint XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX mtu 1450″;
};
}
The configuration above is very simlar to the example configurations provided by vtund. There is more you can do here to make this connection more robust but for the purpose of this blog entry I’ll show it works in more detail. To make the connection between to the two servers you run the following command on the client machine.

vtund cobra

This should create a new network interface called tun0 on both servers. This will allow you to connect across the tunnel. To test this i recommend using the following commands.


On the client
tcpdump -i tun0
On the server
ping


You should see packets come across the interface and reply back. Once you have established the tunnel connection there is a bit more required to route public IP address both in and out of the tunnel interface. For the sake of this example we’ll use 10.10.10.0/24 as the network block your routing. You’ll want to be using a public IP block for this to work correctly not the interal block from the example!

-> Assuming 10.10.10.0/24 is already routed to the tunnel server you’ll now need to route to packets from the tunnel server to the client. To do this you simply type:

ip route add 10.10.10.0/24 dev tun0


This will push packets from the server -> client. Once the packets are on the client end of the tunnel however they do not have a correct route back to the sender. In my situation the tunnel client is located on a cable modem with a default gateway on a different network. My block of 10.10.10.0/24 cannot be routed across someone elses network. The solution is to flag packets as they enter into the tunnel client router. Once the packets get flagged we can apply an alternate route table to them. The alternate route cable is identical to the standard table except the default gateway is tun0 rather then the cable modem interface. Below is a simple script to generate a duplicate route table and add the make the default gateway the tunnel server:


ip route show table main | grep -Ev ^default | while read ROUTE ; do
ip route add table 200 $ROUTE
done
ip route add default via XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX table 200


Now that the alternate table has been created you can verify it works by typing:

ip route list table 200


This should be a simlar table to your main route table except the default gateway should be the IP address of the server-side of the tunnel interface. Now that this table is in place we need to start flagging packets. In order to do this we need to make some special rules in ip tables. Below are the commands to create the flagging rules:

iptables -t mangle -A PREROUTING -i eth2 -j MARK --set-mark=200
iptables -t mangle -A PREROUTING -s 10.10.10.0/24 -j MARK --set-mark=200
iptables -t mangle -A OUTPUT -s 10.10.10.0/24 -j MARK --set-mark=200

Once the iptable rules are in place you can check them by issuing the ‘iptables -nvL -t mangle’ command. In the output you should see packets hitting your new iptable rules. Once you have active hits you’ll need to add a rule that all packets with a flag need to use the alternate table. To create this rule you need the following

ip rule add fwmark 200 table 200

To verify the rule was added you can issue the ‘ip rule list’ command.
Once you have does this your ready to route packets in and out of the tunnel. In my situation I added a third network interface card running NAT for my home computers.

Dell PowerEdge 2850
Dual Xeon 2.8GHz CPU
2GB ECC DDR-SDRAM
RAID 5 LSI RAID Controller
6 x 73GB Maxtor SCSI Disks

Below is the complete saga with Dell broken down.

On 4/27/2006 around 10AM we attempted to log into our clients production web server which hosts their critical business application. Our logins were successful, but we were immediately being bumped back to the login screen. We checked the servers drive state and noticed it had rejected a hard drive from the array. To resolve the problem we attempted to restart the server, however it was unable to fully boot into Windows. FAIL at this point the server is completely unresponsive and will not bring up a login screen.

After some research we found the RAID control was corrupting the data which was being written to the disk. This had been going on for some time, and appears to have corrupted the winlogon.exe.

Within a short amount of time we were able to bring their corporate website back online on the backup server. However their business application took significantly longer to bring back up because of the frequently changing data. To retrieve the live data off the server we booted using a restore tool, and copies the files / database onto a spare hard drive. This was to ensure we had the 100% most recent version of data from any morning transaction. We were able to bring everything back online by 3:30PM on the backup server.

We immediately called Dell who recommended we upgrade the firmware server RAID controller. Dell pointed out that this specific machine had shipped with a firmware which had known problems. First thing in the morning on 4/28/2006 we upgraded the firmware to the recommend version. We also upgraded the motherboard BIOS firmware as recommended by Dell. After letting the server run we scheduled a turn-up for Tuesday May 2nd. This was intended to give the server time to burn-in and ensure the firmware fixed the problem. We also had to completely reinstall Windows 2003 Server + MS SQL server 2000 to bring the server back online.

On 05/02/2006 at 8PM we attempted to bring all the data back over to the production machine. Immediately we checked the servers drive state and noticed it had rejected another hard drive from the array. This is a sign that the problem was not fixed from our firmware update.

The next morning I called Dell back and they shipped overnight a new RAID “Key” chip, controller card memory, and a new backplane for the drives to mount into. We replaced all of this equipment and let the server “burn-in” to ensure this fix would work. We scheduled another launch date for 05/09/2006 after letting the server run over the weekend. At 7PM we meet at the office and moved the site files and database back over. At approximately 9PM, after a final reboot we noticed the server rejected another hard drive. To be safe we immediately moved the site back to the backup server.

On 05/16/2006 after heavy lobbying Dell shipped a new server which seems to have resolved the problem. After further inspection I noticed they changed SCSI hard disk vendors. It’s my theory there is something wrong between MAXTOR + LSI RAID, but at this point I cannot prove anything. The replacement Seagate’s seem to resolve the problem.

This is intended to be a heads up for anyone dealing with the same issue. Level 1 Dell server support seemed to have failed us here, however once the problem was escalated they took action quickly to ship a new server.

My first handheld computer was the Compaq iPaq 3850. I was happy with the device, but it didn’t offer much connectivity options back to home base. Also the device was a tad bulky to carry around in a pocket. It always seemed silly to carry around a cell phone and iPaq. The Treo 700w solves that problem by combined an amazing cell phone with all the Windows Mobile features you need. Although there is less screen real estate, the device seems much faster then my iPaq. They have definitely made major improvements in mobile computing. This palm device uses Microsoft Windows Mobile (scary). I’d prefer the traditional palm interface, but the ability to synchronize with Exchange without any special configuration too nice to pass up. I am willing to deal with some interface short-comings for this extra functionality.

Some of the most important features are:

• ActiveSync with Exchange server
• Slimmer profile then Treo 650. More like a 90’s cell phone then a handheld computer
• Clear bright screen
• Improved layout on desktop page

After using the Treo 700w for just a few days I would highly recommend it to anyone who wants to access all of their change contact, calander, and e-mail on the road. This is not only the best solution, but also one of the only solutions which works directly with Exchange. I am sure more smart phones will be released using this new technology, but for now this is by far the best handheld and phone I’ve ever owned.

As if it wasn’t hard enough to understand their support staff. Although this article points out this is just a manufacturing center. It will take Dell one step closer to finally outsourcing all of their technical / support staff. There is no doubt this will have an impact on their quality of service. I believe a company as big as Dell should have support safe in all different regions of the country. This would help do a number of things:

For more information about Dell checkout my article - Dell Laptops Suck


[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS

[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS=”Microsoft Windows Server 2003, Standard” /fastdetect


I believe I dodged a bullet here. The web server was still had all the site files, and all the data. The individual beyond this could have easy do more damage then they did.

Once I found the source of my frustration I contacted Webtrends for a solution to this problem. They referred me to their professional development department to pay to have an application written to remove the pages from my log files. It sounds like this has been a problem with web trends in the past. This custom programming from webtrends was going to be very expensive. Why not development this small “frame stripper” application and integrate it into Webtrends!

Why should I spend thousands more dollars, and tons more man hours when webtrends has already written this application before. Why not simply include their completed code with the final product? I seriously doubt it would be hard to add-on to webtrends. My opinion is they are attempting to create another revenue stream. Customers either need to upgrade to WAY more page view licenses then they need to, OR pay for custom programming to fix the application. It’s a lose – lose situation.

I completely understand their desire to make money. I also believe if you have a giant website you should pay more for analytics. I feel as a customer I’ve fallen through the cracks and been overlooked. The situation which I am in is not that out of the ordinary. The same way a website needs to be accessible using different browsers, analytics programs need to be functional on different style websites, including frames.

Annual Page Views (and why they suck)
For our client we’ve ordered WebTrends 7 Small Business with an add-on of 1,000,000 annual page views to get them started. This should be plenty of page views per year right? WRONG. According to WebTrends you need to have licenses for all the page views you’re going to generate in a given year, which means, if I process logs from 2003 in 2005 those work against my 2,000,000 cap. Their solution is to call their sales staff and have them give me unlimited licenses while we import all the old data. Sure this might resolve the problem, but imagine how many people are out there ripping their hair out trying to import old data? This is the old application I know of which handles licensing is such an odd way. I believe WebTrends is more concerned about making money on their larger clients, then making their software user-friendly.

Interface Reviewed
Once I got the software working correctly, things started to look better. They have definitely created a very user friendly analytics solution. The user management seems to be top notice. I can tell they’ve pulled some ideas from their competition however. I see some similarities to both NetTracker & Urchin. The reporting layout is easy to follow, and makes better sense then many of the applications on the market. You can definitely tell WebTrends has been doing this for awhile. I can give them no fault on the application itself. They have definitely got their act together since WebTrends 6.0 log analyzer (which I still use for some websites).

Conclusion
Although the Interface is nice, the licensing is very poorly done. With that said, I cannot recommend this software solution. There are a number of other applications on the market which are more capable for significantly less investment. If you’re looking to buying WebTrends 7 Small Business I recommend you try NetTracker. If you still want to buy WebTrends be ready for a fight over licensing.

A few others my from experience:
1.) Computers don’t delete files, people do.
2.) It’s always your fault.
3.) Money can fix problems.
4.) Working on computers is only fun while they are working.
5.) Marketing people will install spyware.
6.) Sales people will install viruses.
7.) Production people will delete important files.
8.) E-Mail is the most important thing in the world, to everyone except you.
9.) No matter how hard you work it will be there waiting for you in the morning.
10.) Hard drives will die.