I hate them, really, really hate them, they are abusing the machine and I have to spend much time on dealing with the mess they generated.

It’s beastie again to appear in my diary. Well, I don’t like this pet pretty much because its components are too old for such a heavy load, it acts as primary DNS, Reverse Proxy, Mail, FTP, and VPN Gateway server, and which is not suitable for a Pentium II-350 box with only 128MB RAM.

I tend to give up the maintainership of the box, even while I have spent many times on it and I’d admit that I have sometime liked it :-( It must die or I will die, so, replace it with a new machine or I will simply leave it as-is.

I have written a watchdog to work around the dc(4) driver bug. It’s here:

#!/bin/sh

if ping -c 9 -o selab.bjut.edu.cn > /dev/null
then
return 0
else
echo “Ping selab.bjut.edu.cn with no response in 20 seconds, rebooting”
reboot
fi

Note that selab.bjut.edu.cn is a machine near it and due to the strict routing limits in my university, it’s not allowed to ping machines in other network blocks. While I really really hate this idea, it seems to be the only solution to block many worms, and which is important for the vulnerable networking devices in my university before they are replaced with new ones, planned in this March.

Rest in peace, beastie.frontfree.net, amen.