I submit the following for your humble perusal:

My second batch of hard cider is finally racked off into three ¹⁄₂ gallon growlers, and stuck into the back of a closet to let them mellow out a little more. All my gear is cleaned and put away until the next batch takes me, and we’re working our way through the last ¹⁄₂ gallon of the first brew. A couple of notes:

1. If you are using plastic Better Bottle carboys, be damn careful about the temperature of the water you use when rinsing out the remains of the last fermentation. I have destroyed a 3 gallon Better Bottle by adding 180°F water to it. It may be safe to keep using, the experts at the local brewery shop warned me that I’m running a risk if I’m not %100 sure that no bacteria can build up in possible cracks in the bottle. I guess it’s glass carboys from now on, even if they are more expensive and harder to move about.
2. Save your beer bottles. The local store sells beer bottles for bottling, but it’s honestly cheaper in many respects to simply buy a six pack of Fat Tire, drink the beer, and then clean the bottles. I’m using growlers for this batch, simply because they were so much cheaper to buy.
3. Buy a large quantity of both sanitizing solution as well as brewery wash. I have more Star-SAN than I need, but not enough Powered Brewery Wash.

Remember to share your brew – so others will share with you.

After several months of hemming and hawing, I’ve finally gotten my free-time project to a state that it deserves looking at by a wider community: the BadTraffic perl module is now on GitHub. It’s a Perl module that allows a group of Solaris, RHEL or Mac OS X hosts to subscribe to a database driven list of blocked hosts, as well as contribute to the list. The blocks are selectable from the command line based on tags assigned to the blocks when they are entered, and there is a whitelist feature.

The long and short of it, if you run a cluster of web servers, when one node blocks an IP address for abusive traffic, the rest of the nodes will block the address before the spammer/script kiddie/whoever tries the next node in the cluster. It also helps when you know netblocks that primarily generate illegitimate traffic, and you can block them outright and be done with it.

The strangest part of the module is that you can use BadTraffic to build Net::CIDR::Lite objects based on subnet subtraction: if you whitelist 10.0.1.0/24, and then blacklist 10.0.0.0/22, BadTraffic is smart enough to add blacklist entries for 10.0.0.0/24 and 10.0.2./23. This feature was added primarily for Solaris 8 hosts, who have no default built in firewall, so block are done with blackhole routes. As Solaris 8 really is a dead OS, and people should stop using it, the feature may disappear in BadTraffic 2.0, it’s in for the 1.x series.

More robust documentation is coming, as well as examples for setup and long term maintenance. I retain all copyright of the module and the associated scripts, for now.

I’ve decided to enable advertisements on this blog – primarily to offset the cost of hosting and running the thing. I’m going to use Google AdSense, as their ads aren’t really that irritating (no Flash), and hopefully they will be unobtrusive. If this turns out to be wrong, or they bother me, they will get shut down as fast as they were added.

Just letting everyone know.

It’s time to sell my 2006-vintage Mac Pro and get myself a new machine. I’m looking at a 27″ iMac rather than a new tower, as cost wise the Mac Pro is outside my budget, and I need the screen more than I need the memory capacity or raw CPU horsepower. This does mean that I am going to sell my Mac Pro, so if anyone is interested, ping me. I’m not quite ready to sell, as I imagine there are new iMac models on the way, but if you are interested, let me know. I’ll include a 21″ Dell LCD monitor, an Apple keyboard and an Apple Magic Mouse in the sale.

I’ve been dealing with some personal stuff, which is keeping me from posting about OpenAFS and the difficulty I’ve had finding working documentation that covers setting it up with Kerberos5 (not Krb4), and works on CentOS. More on both soon.

I’ve been spending a lot of time recently sitting on our Comfy Chair, snoozing baby in lap, playing games. This isn’t like me. I’m not a gamer, and never really have been, other than a brief diversion with the Halo series of console games a couple of years ago, and an excursion into EVE Online before I was married. I find that when I have free time, I’d rather be hacking on code or reading epic length fiction.

Sadly, when sitting in the chair all the time, I don’t have long stretches of time available to me. Either the child will wake up and need something, someone else in the house will need me to do something, or I’ll fall asleep. So I’ve been using the iPad a lot more recently and playing Bejeweled or Words With Friends, or digging into browser based games like Ikariam. I’ve even toyed with playing online card games (trying my hand at poker again, in preparation for a resurgence of the ill-fated Poker Nights in my past).

Anyway, I’m looking for suggestions of other games to play – ideally with some sort of social interaction, as I’m not getting a lot of that these days.