Books

I’m attempting to read 2 books/month this year.  It may not seem like much, and it isn’t, but for the woeful state of my literacy these days.

Thus far:

January

- The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler

- The Cuckoo’s Egg by Cliff Stoll

February

- The Road by Cormac McCarthy

- Havana Nocturne by T.J. English

I also intend to tackle The Brothers Karamazov over the next few months.  I was shined on to a Death March whereby interested readers can encourage each other to make it through the tome in small, weekly doses.

ASG Update

A quick addendum, since I bemoaned the Astaro gateway performance last month.  The recent 7.300 (and quick 7.301 followup) patch for the ASG appliances, a complete rewrite of the databse system used to process email, seems to have worked wonders.  I’m cautiously optimistic that the reduced load on resources will keep things humming along now.

McCain’s Radical Agenda

Privatization of Health Insurance. Yikes.

read more | digg story

ASG Blues

Astaro Secure Gateway 220

I’ve used Astaro’s firewall/proxy products for over 5 years now, with much success, but their appliances have given me nothing but heartache.  I suspect that the database engine in ASG v7, particularly the part responsible for SMTP proxy duties, is just too much of a bear for the anemic specs of the appliance.  I spent a day dealing with our company email going into content-filter limbo for an hour until I could manually release it.  Over & over again.  Astaro tech support was super friendly and industrious, but ultimately ineffective.  Eventually, around 8pm, I re-imaged the device, restored a backup config, and all seems well.

Seems I’m always babysitting the device, and I switched to hardware appliances from the PC based solution specifically to avoid nursemaiding the hardware.  I like the product, but I think it may be time to segue to virtualization of the Gateway duties.  I DO have an under-utilized ESX 3.5 server ready for action.

Sales Pitch

At work, I run the IT.  They sell fancy office furniture. I made a cartoon.  One of our partners/sales guys thinks ‘ridiculous’ is the highest praise one can offer.

Oh yeah…

I work in the IT industry, so when not doting over my, ahem, spirited two year old son, or my lovely wife, I’ll likely be blathering on about computers, gadgets, books, comics, PC games and the like.  Buckle up!

Hello World!

Right. Hello indeed.

Clearly you’ve played your cards rather poorly to have ended up here. Well, let’s try to make the best of it, shall we?

I plan to use this space as an exercise to re-learn language. It’s been nine years, and counting, under the same roof as a woman for whom English is a second language. Granted, she’s brilliant and bilingual, whereas I barely can grapple with my native tongue.  Compound that with two years of toddler-speak, and a generally lazy disposition, and this guy has his work cut out for him.

Let’s see how this plays out.