Landis Vinchattle An aggregation.

My world is eventful at present, and it seems to be preventing me from properly accomplishing much of anything.  Last Saturday my wife and I got new cell phones, finally extricating ourselves from Verizon (don’t get me started…). US Cellular has done well for us thus far – my wife has already had a support issue, and it was handled to resolution in a courteous manner.  My experience with Verizon was always courteous, but never resolved.  As part of this, I finally have an Android phone – very exciting, and I am enjoying it a great deal.  I have loaded the Froyo pre-release ROM, and it’s doing fairly well.  Haven’t had enough time to really play in detail (phone is the Samsung Mesmerize… another good reason to get away from Verizon; no locked down, eFuse Moto’s here :)).  Was hoping to port my old Verizon number to my Google Voice account since they are now allowing porting of mobile numbers, but it appears that BFE Nebraska is not on their list of locations which they can support porting from.  So, I will have to see if US Cell can port it to my new phone post hoc.  Wish me luck :/.

Have also been trying to get the WordPress app for Android to work with my blog, but that doesn’t seem to be happening just yet.  Had some issues with the client on my BlackBerry as well, so I think the finger currently points at the hosting provider configuration and not the phone(s).  Will work on that when (if?) I get the time.  Will also get back to my experimentation and testing of LxC’s hopefully sooner than later.  However, with my wife in Chicago from Saturday through Monday and myself on parent duty, it will probably be later rather than sooner.

Did experiment a little bit with the live disc for Clonezilla recently.  Acquired a bunch of systems, some of which will be finding new homes as soon as I can get them finished.  For the handful that came with drives, I had built a Windows image on one of them and tested replicating it to others.   Since the systems were all of similar-to-near-identical configuration, imaging was surprisingly fantastic and generally fast.  Imaging to a test VirtualBox on my daily driver Ubuntu box didn’t work quite as well, but I suspect there were a number of factors impacting that including 32-vs-64-bit processor config.  Again, something to worry about later since the actual PCs did great.  Kudos to Clonezilla on that one.

Have been looking at some of the descendants of FreeS/WAN recently, specifically StrongSwan (don’t bite me on the case tonight, I’m friggin’ tired!).  Looks neat, and I was hopeful to get a chance to run a test drive with it.  Don’t think that will actually happen unless I can somehow get it done tomorrow night (yeah, right).  May perhaps do so at home if I get the time.  It has pushed me to a somewhat better understanding of IPSec (I think), especially Main Mode vs Quick Mode.  I will continue to look at it and hope to at least make it work in a lab environment in case I ever have need of it in the future.  My current direction, as a result of tight time constraints, is probably going to be the ASR series of Cisco routers if their licensing proves tolerable, and something in the 7206 G2/VSA category if not.  I’m hearing 1.8Gbps throughput on those boys at the low end (though I assume that’s with 1400 byte packets, it’s still quite something).

Anyway, have to call it for tonight and work on some POs.  Just really needed to get some of what was going on out of my head and down on “paper”.  There is something at least mildly therapeutic about writing 🙂