IC3MAN's Domain - Home

Believe the best in people

2007-04-20T09:08:00Z

So I was travelling with my wife, sitting there just chilling in the airport when we noticed that the australian olympic team was on the same flight, fresh off their defeat on Suadi soil. Interestingly enough, the referees from referees Uzbekhistan, were also on the flight. They were huddled together on a couch with a laptop in front of them, watching it attentivly. So a discussion insued between me and my wife. What were they watching? I was thinking they might be going over a recording of the match they just officiated. Maybe trying to see if they did a good job. I thought it showed dedication on their part to put effort into enhancing themselves. The truth it turned out was not so glamourous.

Buy sheer luck they were sitting in front of us on the plane, again with the laptop open and attentive gazes. Now I could clearly see what all the fuss was about. They were watching Prison Break, Season 2. I guess that just goes to show you that no matter what you do or where you live, people are people. That, and bittorrent is everywhere.

Another Victory

2007-03-19T14:19:00Z

Inter won yet again, in a game that was not aired live. This might be the first time this has happened all year. With Roma managing only a draw the lead grows to 18 points with 10 games remaining. With all the tough matches remaining played at home in the San Siro, the league has pretty much been decided.

I have to say it has been a rather spectacular season as an Inter fan. Breaking records for consecutive wins, running off with a huge lead in the league. This is not how a typical season goes for us, with a decade of struggling it is great and perplexing to feel this way.

I guess what Beppe Severgnini, an Italian journalist and a famous FC Internazionale Milano supporter wrote best describes it, “Supporting Inter means deciding to make your life more complicated. It’s like supporting the Indians against the cowboys, it means having a touch of masochism and melancholy. We know we have chosen a difficult love, but this makes it even more beautiful.”

So Long Recoba

2007-03-17T09:22:00Z

I always knew this day would come, and to be honest I expected it to come much sooner than this. It has been 10 years since Recoba joined Inter and except for a brilliant but brief loan stint in Venezia he has loyally worn the black and blue shirt, even though he hasn’t had nearly enough field time. Had it been the fault of the injuries, of which there were many, or the coaches, of which there were also many, Recoba never really played consistently for Inter in these 10 years. At his best he was one of the top players in the world. He is suprisingly fast, extremely skillful, capable of moments of brilliance and has one of the most dangerous left foots in the game.

Reading his last interview it seems that his mind is set on leaving. Part of me wants him to finish his career at Inter, while another part wants to see him leave to another team so he can showcase his talent on the field. As much as it hurts me to say it, but I just don’t see Recoba getting much playing time in Inter. He is a creative forward, and that position has not been in demand since the days of Roberto Baggio. Coaches don’t want beauty, they want results, and no matter what is said that is what the fans ultimatly want too.

Whatever he decides, as an inter fan, I just want to say, “El chino, we wish you all the best and thanks for all the memories.”

TCP Receive Buffer

2007-03-14T02:29:00Z

I have been struggling with a problem of TCP freezing on my VPS. Mainly when using SSH to tunnel traffic. Initially it appeared to be a problem with OpenSSH, as the problem manifested itself when the tunnel was under heavy load. But days of searching did not yield any indication of a problem with openssh that would cause freezing, not only of the tunnel, but the entire server’s TCP connections.

After a ton of searching (whatever did we do before google?), I found the answer in the server’s Virtuozzo panel. The answer was 3 not-so-simple words, TCP receive buffer. My vps host only gave me 2 MB worth, and at idle I was already using 256 KB just from the services that were listening (the kernel gives about 87 KB as a receive buffer to every tcp socket by default). Then I learned I couldn’t really change the kernel default in a virtualized environment as sysctl failed with an unknown error.

The real trouble came from the fact that due to the tunneling the receive buffer was allocated twice, once for the connection from the server to the internet and one more internally between the server and the ssh tunnel. Since the ssh tunnel is much slower than the servers connection to the internet (god bless Saudi bandwidth), the tunnel’s receive buffer was maxing out (using ~170 KB) which was causing the upstream connection to also max out. In short, three ongoing connections were enough to bring the server to its knees. One solution I found was to set the upstream server, in this case squid, to buffer more incoming data into memory (the squid tag is read_ahead_gap in case anyone is wondering). This way only the tunnel would be maxed out allowing roughly 25% increase in active connections without killing the server (the other buffers still use up space even when they aren’t maxed).

So, the main issue that has been plaguing me this whole time is that I need more buffer space. I guess I have to get in touch with my host to see if I can increase it.

Why I am not a blogger

2007-03-13T11:57:00Z

Seriously, I have registered this website since 2002, moved through various webhosts. Used several CMSs and the site is still not there. I might as well put a “Under Construction” sign up, as an animated gif no less. The only thing the site is used for now is a placeholder for a half dead forum. I realize now the simple reason is I am not a blogger. You see, bloggers are dedicated, while I adhere to a different school of thought. Bloggers are interesting, while enjoy number theory. You get the picture…. In short, I am an anti-social blogger with nothing interesting to say. Lets see how far this gets.