Walking in Light With Christ - hip0's personal blog on System Administration, Free Software, Computer Security and Religion

In Sunday I was on the Church service. After which Bino called and suggested to go to Technomarket to see if they had Lenovo Thinkpads. For all those who didn't know. I'm thinking of buying a laptop for almost 2 months. I saw a lot of laptops and I liked only Lenovo Thinkpads, then Dell (Inspiron) and also Toshibas. Of course I'm very impressed of Thinkpads so I really wanted to have a thinkpad. Happily in Saturday a friend of mine said that he just bough his new laptop which is Gigabyte and he said that actually he saw Thinkpads in Technomarket I was interested into that because he said that this Thinkpads aren't very expensive. At Saturday I and Bino went to Technopolis and Technomarket but unfortunately both of them was closed. So at last in Sunday we went to Technopolis. Ivo was right they had TPs. They had the TP rseries. My personal preference for Thinkpad was the T series but since they're very expensive I decided to buy R. Now I have the laptop for 2 days and I like it very much ! Of course I should Praise and Bless the Lord. In some of my prayers I asked the Lord to bless me with a laptop. Of course God answered my prayer just like a lot of other prayers he did. Events happened in a way that my grandma and grandpa decided to give me 1200 levs with which to buy a machine, also I had some saved money and after a bit of wondering I decided to buy the Thinkpad. The TP costed 1349 levs. I also took a laptop bag (Toshiba). I have no idea that Toshiba produces computer case bags. The bag costed me 79 lv. There was another very cool bag(Case Logic) it costed 119 levs. The only thing I don't like it I had to buy the laptop with preinstalled Windows Vista (pay money to Microsoft) Despite of that I'm very happy having it right now. Today I spend the whole day in the college. Ina helped me with the explanations of the SPSS project which btw was a total mess. The next few weeks are going to be a hard ones. We had a lot of exams and we should be over with all of them until I think 12-th of January. Servers and everything runs smoothly for which again I should thank to God!

Nothing special. Last week went just fine thanks to the Lord ! Of Course :). It was mostly peaceful. What was interesting was a method our teacher at management choose to use to make us better understand ourselves. She said I want all of you to draw me a picture of how do you foresee yourself ten years from now :). We all was surprised but just as she requested we did draw the pictures. My picture had 4 possibly futures. In one of them I was with my wife and a kid in front of our house, on the other I was owning and leading an IT company. On one of them I was helping to get out of the terrible pit of depression, addiction to drug, alcoholism, telling them "Stop there is a reason to live, God Loves you!". In the other case I was a Senior SysAdmin in a middle size/big company managing servers/clusters. Now we had to make a report explaining our picture. I just did make my report hope the teacher would like it. Yesterday, Bino came home and proposed to go out, we went out we saw Stoyan (who btw is a Brother in Christ). Later we saw Dancho a friend of mine (a communist). First we started a normal talk later the talk just transformed into a terrible and useless argue I did a mistake not stopping whenever I had to. And in the end we decided not to see each other because it's bad for both of us. Later Alex (an ex class-mate) called me and we went we had a walk in the central park and talked 'bout if I can say it like this "the life, the universe, and everything else" :). The next few weeks outline to be a tough one. We are going to have a lot of exams 8 or 9 ! We had a lot of projects and assignments but still I trust on the Holy one to help me make all of them and do just fine on the exams just like he helped me the last semester and the previous year.

The day ran mostly smoothly for which thanks and praise the Lord of course ! I was at school we had a long discussion of world economic system, the possible future of humanity also physics, latest science discovery, philosophy etc. etc. Later I worked for some time, then Geri came home and asked me to help her to fix her computer because it didn't want to start. The problem was trivial I only have to unplug all the power supply calbles and plug them on again and it ran fine. In the evening we went out with Javor and because there was no free tables on the coffee "The Fountain", we went to Mino's coffee and I drinked one tea. I learned today about a very interesting blues singer his name is Stevie Ray Vaughan and his band is called "Double Trouble", this guy Stevie Ray Vaughan is famous with this that he is the best white blues musician. Also I should mention I prayed and well yes I think this is how my day just went by. I should say that the presence of God in our life is the most precious thing. I can clearly see now that without him everything just blews and wents away. I have to extensively thank him for he being so merciful to me

Today was the last day of the lectures with Joop Vinke. Here is how my day passed. I woke up at 9:00, washed my teeth dressed combed my hair and went to the police station to look for our quarter police officer. I need to renew my personal ID card because it has been expired already for 4 years already. Thanks God everything went smoothly in the police station. After that I went to school we had lectures with Joop Vinke. After the school I went home and played around with my FreeBSD system. I succesfully upgraded gnome 2.20 to 2.22. Using the binary packages from http://www.marcuscom.com/tb/packages/7-STABLE-FreeBSD/gnome/. I'm trying to upgrade gnome from source for already almost 3 weeks with portmanager. After all of the required ports rebuilded still gnome wasn't functioning, so in order to make it working I downloaded packages from http://www.marcuscom.com/tb/packages/7-STABLE-FreeBSD/gnome/ and ran a little loop with for i in *; do pkg_add -vf $i; done to make all the .tbz files install I did that yesterday night today at the afternoon everything was installed and gnome ran just fine I only had to link few libraries because they were searched on a different places. All works just fine now I only have to rebuild few of my games because they're now linked to an old libraries. In the evening we went out with Javor for a coffee. As very often we went to the fountain we had a nice talk and then we went to his apartment to watch a film. He recommended a film called 1984 and we watched that. My impression is that this film is totally psychodelic and freaky, but still interesting to see. After I went home I went to see my grandma and now I'm home tired on a few steps of my bed I should also mention that today I upgraded clamav on 3 of the servers I maintain. It seems there are few configuration options which changed in the new clamav release (0.93). It was an easy day as a whole if we don't count my physical infirmity.

Today in the Orthodox Church we celebrate the memomy of St. The priest during the liturgy today narrated the fascinating story of this woman who used to be a leecher and later after a miraculous convert she become an ascet who lived in the Egyptian Desert. The monk one year before her dead saw her to walk on water. Pretty interesting this is absolutely a must read read it here .

Yesterday and today we had Management Games and Theathre Games with Joop Vinke. At the management game we play a sort of Human Resources Management game. All the students are devided into groups and we play a simulator game. We had to manage a company. First we setup our 2 year goals and then we play the game on quarters (6 quarters). Every quarter we have to made some managerial decisions (invest money into different stuff, hire personnel, promote ppl etc.). Basicly the company consists of 660 employees, there are 5 levels in the company starting from 1 where there is unqualified specialists and 5 which are the top management. When we make our choices then all this data is inputed into a computer which gives us some feedback which helps us in taking the decisions for the next quarter. At the meantime Vinke organizes fun games to entertain us and make us feel comfortable with him and through this games he tries to show us basic concepts in business. The last two days I really enjoyed. Today the game that impressed me the most was called "The Werewolves from Wackedan". Basicly it's a strategic game with roles. In it you've got a bunch of ppl who play different roles, 3 of them are werewolves, others are citizens others are ppl who have special abilities to foresee who are the werewolves. We had cards in front of us turned back to prevent others except us to see the cards. Some of the cards are citizens and ppl who belong to the citizens other 3 are werewolves. Every night the werewolf kills a person (by selecting somebody from the crowd, when they sleep), because the werewolves are out at night when everybody sleeps. At the morning citizens awake and one of their friends is dead so they try to revenge by pointing someone to be killed (it may be a citizen again it may be a werewolf). At the end only werewolves or citizens should servive It was a big fun today to play this simple game. At the end of the day at 18:00 we had a session of the so called Theathre/Games. Theathre Games include different entertaining games which are designed to improve our communication skills and teach us to act like an actors plus they are pretty entertaining That's all thanks to God everything seems to run smoothly around my life. Except my health I'm still having some health issues although I can say I have an improvement I am not still healed and I still drink herbs. At 20:00 I was out with Narf and we went to the fountain a little later Kimmo and Yavor joined us and we spend some time their. Well that's most of the day at night I went to my grandma just to see how she is doing and now I write this post tomorrow the Management Game continues at 09:00. So probably after few minutes I'll go for the night prayers and then I'll go to sleep.

Some time ago I thought of ways to optimize my Linux Servers network performanceand I googled around I found few interesting websites which give me the idea of some of the basic sysctl variables used for optimizing the GNU/Linux Network stack. Here are the variables themselves and some good example values.

net.ipv4.ip_forward = 0 ( Turn off IP Forwarding )
net.ipv4.conf.default.rp_filter = 1 ( Control Source route verification )
net.ipv4.conf.default.accept_redirects = 0 ( Disable ICMP redirects ) *
net.ipv4.conf.all.accept_redirects = 0 ( same as above )
net.ipv4.conf.default.accept_source_route = 0 ( Disable IP source routing )
net.ipv4.conf.all.accept_source_route = 0 ( - || - )
net.ipv4.tcp_fin_timeout = 40 ( Decrease FIN timeout ) - Useful on busy/high load servers
net.ipv4.tcp_keepalive_time = 4000 ( keepalive tcp timeout )
net.core.rmem_default = 786426 - Receive memory stack size ( a good idea to increase it if your server receives big files )
net.ipv4.tcp_rmem = "4096 87380 4194304"
net.core.wmem_default = 8388608 ( Reserved Memory per connection )
net.core.wmem_max = 8388608
net.core.optmem_max = 40960 ( maximum amount of option memory buffers )
# like a homework investigate by yourself what the variables below stand for  
net.ipv4.tcp_max_tw_buckets = 360000 
net.ipv4.tcp_reordering = 5
net.core.hot_list_length = 256
net.core.netdev_max_backlog = 1024

Hope this helps and gives you some idea of how network optimization in Linux is usually done. Happy tweakening !

Today I was in Varna. First in the Morning with Koko and Pavel my college colleagues we had to print the SPSS project we did yesterday. After that I went to the bus station and took a bus in the bus I met the sister of a friend of mine and I helped her to remove some of her programs on her Sony VAIO Laptop. Somewhere around 15:30 I walked from the Varna's bus station to the office. I had a bit of work @work also I took my sallary I have increase in the sallary with 50 leva! Praise The Lord! Also the Lord's peace and love guides me during the whole day for which I can humbly thank him. At the evening when I came home from Varna I went to buy some fruits for my grandma and I went to her home to see her. We had a long talk. I have such a lovely and smart grandma! My grandma is called Stefka I hope and pray that God would keep her and heal her and give her a long live because of her goodness and good virtues. I went home ate and discussed with my sisters the Universities and specialties in them for which she may candidate. I'm going to beg the Lord in prayer for mercy and blessing in my night prayers and go to bed a little later.

I spend the weekend with a lot of friends. God has prepared another great time for me. In Friday I was out with Alex, and we had a long discussion for who is God, because he thinks he can know the Lord without our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ which is completely wrong and impossible like it's written how our Lord says "I and the Father are one" and again "Noone comes to the Father except through me". At friday I was out with Static a friend and brother in Christ We went to the school where he lives "Dimitar Talev". This is the second time when I visit this school but it's so colourful and I like it so much that I wished for a second to be pupil again :). In Sunday I went to Liturgy as often I went to bed very late in Saturday so I wasn't able to wake in the morning and I went to the Church service somewhere around 9:30. The Priest's preach was about the gospel's where our Lord Jesus freed and healed a boy who was very often abused by wicked spirits, he also mentioned how some of the ppl fasts only abstaining from food and how this ain't fast at all. He gave us interesting example how the animals who ate meet are cruel and animals who eat grass are very meek and pure. For example he said look into the fox, wolf they eat meet and they're fierce animals whether animals like sheeps and rabbits eat only grass and are mostly good. He also mentioned that the st. Ioan Zlatoust(James the Goldenmouth) said that the fasting gives wings to the soul. In the church I saw Stelio the man who introduced me to the Orthodox Faith and after the Service we spend some great time in the park talking about the past during the communist regime here in Bulgaria, also the current state in the country etc. etc. In 12:30 we had previously arranged meeting with two of my colleagues from the College. We had to make the SPSS project which we have to complete and pass to the teacher today. Thanks God everything just went smoothly. And we had to make just a little text to the project in order to complete it. In 09:00 we went to the Fountain with Vlado (hellpain), because he was here for the weekend. Now just after I came home I prayed I take a shower. And I intend to read a bit from the bible and go to sleep.

It's Friday. The week went smoothly yesterday we had presentation on the topic of Organizational Structure and Culture in Management. I and two other colleague had to select three companies and research data on the company's Organizational Structure and Culture and match the Culture against Hofstede's 5 cultural dimensions. Our choice for companies was Starbucks, Electrolux, IKEA. I had to speak about IKEA. What I mainly used was the things written in Wikipedia for IKEA, that IKEA is a Swedish company the IKEA's creator konrad etc. etc. Most of the time I listen to a classical music this kind of music really brings big peace with it. I'm thinking of completely stop listening to metal since it exhausts me instead of filling me with joy. Also I should know that the work week went just fine Servers and Stuff at the office works just fine for which of course Praise be to Our Lord and Saviour (The Father, The Son and The Holy Spirit) Now and Forever and Ever! Amen. Today I was out with Alex and Mitko (Metallicata). First I met Alex and we went to a computer shop called Ramirez because I was searching for 1G of DDR1 memory (my mainboard doesn't support >DDR1 :(). It's quite possible that tomorrow I buy 1G of memory give my old 2x256 banks of memory pay 60 leva above and take a giga. After that we went to the fountain to meet Mitko. An argue occured just like often happens about was Jesus Christ real and about the Church. After that I and Alex went out for a walk in the central park and discussed who is God. Alex claimed that you can have faith in God without Christ something I thing is wrong and impossible (at least not a living faith). After that just before we were thinking of going home an homeless drunk met us and begged for some money for bread so Alex took him a bread and gave it to him. After which I went home ate a meal called "Rulo Stefani", prayed. And right now I'm infront of the PC chatting with friends.