Rantings by Nick Buraglio

A recent post about integrating our new son into our family of four legged kids led me to a goldmine that I never knew existed. Von Welch sent me a funny video from Cracked.com. I had no idea that they had video, and most of it is pretty darned funny. Anyway, Von sent me this video, which I thoroughly enjoyed.

There is a wealth of other funny stuff, like this video about 5 things that you shouldn’t be able to buy on ebay:

I have a feeling that this site is going to be a time vortex for me. Thanks Von.

It’s a widely known fact that I love good coffee. There is something about waking up to the great smell of coffee brewing and then getting a drink of the first cup of the day that is invigorating.
I like to cook, and I really like to make interesting things and I really, really like to make stuff that tastes good (who doesn’t?), so when I make coffee I try to make the best tasting coffee that I can. Well, thanks to Twitter, I discovered Ken from Weekly Roast (actually he added me after I posted about my French Press)

So, when I found that Ken had a blog detailing the finer points of brewing a good cup of coffee. He also has a start up business roasting and sellingfresh coffee beans.
Some of the stuff I already knew, similar to making beer, good tasting coffee depends on good tasting ingredients. Use of a water filter is a must, and freshness is a definite factor in drinking good coffee.
I was already using a french press and have always been pretty adamant about not drinking scorched, old coffee, but some of the things about bean freshness that he posted was pretty surprising to me. Check out his blog and online shop for some great info and coffee. I have a bag waiting for me at home that I can’t wait to try!

In keeping with tradition, Luke decided to make a grand entrance after much drama at 0627 on December 30, 2008, weighing in at a svelte 6lb 10.7oz and 21″ in length. Both Luke and his strong, resilient mother are doing exceptionally well. There have been a lot of friends and family swinging by to visit, with more to come.

Luke Buraglio Sleeping

Keep track of updates at his little corner of the web.

Glad to be here!! See you soon!

Once again the pfSense team has given the open source and commercial community another great release of their marvelous firewall software. CHECK IT OUT, DONATE, or HELP OUT!

I have a few cron jobs that run on my home mac machines and I like to get the notifications generated from the MAILTO parameter. Well, a while ago (I believe after the comcast acquisition of insightbb), this stopped working. I did a little debugging and it is my belief that port 25 is being blocked outbound from the comcast network. Many people speculatethis, and as a network engineer I think it is actually a good idea. First, port 25 isn’t *really* the port that you should be using for host to mail relay. I was always taught that the submission port was best practice per RFC 2476 . In practice, many folks don’t use this port simply because since as far back as I can remember documentation has always pointed end users at port 25.
So, long story short, something I wanted to do for a long time was to set up a special account under my google apps that can be used to relay and record this data, as well as be used for things like an email wild card for my domain.
I was about to embark on hacking up the postfix installs then I came across this macosxhints article.
It’s a very handy walk through of doing exactly what I wanted to do, relay mail on port 587, over ssl through my ISP to an externally hosted email account.
Very handy.

I enjoyed this….white guys that dance as poorly as I do.

…obviously it’s Mac, BTW.

These guys are rocking right along with the Layer 7 QoS stuff for pfSense.

I can’t wait to get some time to test it.

I’ve been revisiting IPv6 a lot again lately, and one thing I wanted to do was to get my home network back running IPv6 again after having it off for a while. IPv6 isn’t that hard to understand, configure, route or use, it’s just different and I need to know it well for my job so this is a good excuse to play around and re-read some of the books I bought years ago on the subject.
Since my lovely provider, Comcast, has no plan to deploy v6 yet I turned to one of the several IPv6 Tunnel Brokers. I had used the Hurricane Electric Tunnel Broker service a lot when first pawing at v6 years ago, and my tunnel info was still there.
OK, Tunnel up. Reverse DNS delegated and working. Router Advertisements flying all over the network and modified EUI-64 addresses all looking good.

# ifconfig
lo0: flags=8049 mtu 33208
groups: lo
inet 127.0.0.1 netmask 0xff000000
inet6 ::1 prefixlen 128
inet6 fe80::1%lo0 prefixlen 64 scopeid 0×5
vic0: flags=8843 mtu 1500
lladdr 00:0c:29:38:49:eb
groups: egress
media: Ethernet autoselect
status: active
inet6 fe80::20c:29ff:fe38:49eb%vic0 prefixlen 64 scopeid 0×1
inet6 2001:470:1f07:447:20c:29ff:fe38:49eb prefixlen 64 pltime 604786 vltime 2591986
inet 192.168.209.11 netmask 0xffffffc0 broadcast 192.168.209.63


inet6 2001:470:1f07:447:20c:29ff:fe38:49eb prefixlen 64 pltime 604786 vltime 2591986 being the important string in there.

…..Flash back like 12 months. In an effort to be a little more conscious of money as well as environment, and out of good old fashioned cheapness, I took down my nice rack of servers, powered them all off, saved up my pennies and got a really nice 24″ iMac, packed to the hilt with RAM and disk with the idea of using one of my copies of vmware fusion to run my FreeBSD, OpenBSD and pfSense stuff on.

OK, time for the fun…..geting some v6 stuff to work through my network, over wireless, using vmware fusion with the gust OS in bridge mode….uuuumm, nope.
Hmmmm, why could this be? It’s just a network interface, right? Wrong. After troubleshooting this for a while and seeing nothing in packet dumps from anything outside of the box I decided to hit up my the smartest place I know to look, Google (yes, I used http://ipv6.google.com).
Low and behold, I found this post.

Apparently wireless interfaces are a problem, and as so tersely stated more than once in that thread “VMware policy is to not comment on unannounced products, features, or timelines”.
Crud. Well, I’m running vmware fusion 1.1.4 still….maybe I’ll see if it’s supported in 2.0, but not tonight. That would make life too easy so I’m not counting on it.

Taken from Fail Blog, I found this absolutely hilarious.

The new Wolverine origins movie is highly anticipated by pretty much everyone Ive talked to. I’ve been searching the ‘net looking for a decent trailer, even though I know it’s not released it. Well, I found a trailer. the quality isn’t the greatest but at least it gets the point across that the movie looks pretty darned awesome.