interandom

Seeqpod.com has a very badly written spider, apparently named ‘heritrix’. It has been responsible for two librivox outages in the last three days. Specifically, it makes an extremely large number of simultaneous connections, and requests the exact same URL over and over and over again. Here’s a log snippet. Imagine the same line about 6000 times in just a few minutes:

4.71.164.213 - - [26/Feb/2008:17:35:14 -0800] “GET /2007/06/ HTTP/1.0″ 200 21312 “http://librivox.org/far-away-and-long-ago-by-wh-hudson/” “Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; heritrix/1.12.1 +http://www.seeqpod.com)”

The hits all came from different IPs in the 4.71.164 block. Occasionally the User-Agent was “Python-urllib/2.4″. I blocked both with .htaccess. This kind of bad programming is totally inexcusable in this day and age. Especially considering that their about page claims their algorithm was developed at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Please fix this.

I spent way, way too long in a WoW dungeon today. As it always goes, when you try a dungeon with a random group of people, it seems fine at first.

The first sign of trouble was when I realized that no one was leading. We were all following eachother. I’d have lead but I didn’t know the dungeon. Eventually a leader was decided.

The second sign of trouble was when, after spending 2 hours getting there, the leader said that he took us to the wrong side of the dungeon. This actually happened twice more (I’m not joking.)

And the third sign of trouble, also the most hilarious one, was the following (paraphrased) series of events:

(priest) afk for 2 minutes
(me) ok
(1 minute later)
* dumbass tank runs into a group of 9 monsters
(15 seconds later)
Everyone is dead, including the afk priest.

For those unfamiliar with WoW, a priest is in charge of healing people. They also help kill things. 5 people against 9 monsters is challenging enough, but try doing it with just 4 and no priest. By the time everyone resurrected, ran back, got buffed and mana restored, another 20 minutes went by.

We eventually made it to the end. It took about twice as long as it should have. I earned very little experience. And to top it all off, I forgot to get a quest item off the last boss before I teleported out.

Hopefully tomorrow will be more productive.

Technorati Tags: wow, world of warcraft

IRC support at its finest. It should be noted that adilger_ was actually very helpful.


irq: does lustre support kernel 2.6.23?
irq: i'm guessing not?
adilger_: irq: there are some patches in CVS to add support for this, search bugzilla for 2.6.23 and you should find them… that is for clients only, no server support yet
irq: what is the latest support server kernel version?
brianjm: irq: given that lustre servers are supposed to be “dedicated” to the lustre task, what is the requirement for such a bleeding edge kernel on it? hardware dependencies perhaps?
irq: i don’t have a requirement for the newest kernel right now, but i do want to run the latest supported kernel
irq: that said, this will eventually be running on dell’s new blade platform, so hopefully the older kernel will support everything
brianjm: irq: “supported” by whom?
irq: um, that the kernel will have working drivers for fc and infiniband
brianjm: we provide support for the kernels which we make packages for
irq: i’m not asking about lustre support for the new dell blades.
brianjm: we have lots of customers using fc and ib with our kernels.
irq: i’m asking: what is the latest kernel that lustre servers will work with?
brianjm: typically hardware vendors want to be aligned with vendor (i.e. redhat, suse, etc.) kernels, so it’s not typical to need something as new as 2.6.23 to have hardware support.
irq: dude
brianjm: we align with those same kernels
irq: if you haven’t figured out that i’m already understanding that
irq: and that my question is “what is the latest kernel”
irq: please can you answer me directly?
irq: you could say something as simple as “2.6.18″ if that’s the answer
irq: okay. does anyone else happen to know what the latest clustre-supported kernel is?
irq: i see that lustre focuses on commercial distributions, but i won’t be using them. i’m happy to use an older version of fedora,
whichever one matches with RHEL5.
mjmac: lustre is officially supported on vendor kernels
irq: and unofficially, what is the latest kernel version it will work on?
adilger_: irq: this is in the lustre/ChangeLog for every lustre release:
adilger_: * version 1.6.4.2
adilger_: * Support for kernels:
adilger_: 2.6.5-7.286 (SLES 9),
adilger_: 2.6.9-55.0.9.EL (RHEL 4),
adilger_: 2.6.16.53-0.8 (SLES 10),
adilger_: 2.6.18-8.1.14.el5 (RHEL 5),
adilger_: 2.6.18.8 vanilla (kernel.org)
mjmac: i dunno… but have you at least explored the idea of using a kernel that is known to work well with lustre?
adilger_: for 1.6.5 the vanilla kernel will be 2.6.22