Computing and Tech

Fixing MySQL SSL Replication Errors

I spent 2 nights trying to get mysql replication over ssl to work.. and kept hitting this generic error message: connection error 2026. After much searching and trying different things I finally found the solution that worked for me. If you are hitting this error here’s a short list of things to check.

Clearwire In Seattle + Easy Google Mapping

I’m living in a part of town that has no good option for broadband internet. That’s very annoying as in some parts of town you can get verizon fios.. and in most of the rest you can get Comcast which isn’t terrible. Where I am your big choice is a company called Broadstripe.. which is so bad even the employees blog about it. So with that I decided to try Clearwire.. the Wimax broadband provider.

Keep FreeNAS From Crashing Tweaks

I found these settings on another site.. reposting here for my future reference and to double the possibility of someone else not having to spend hours trying to figure this out. My install of FreeNAS kept hanging under even moderate write loads… rendering it unusable until I applied these memory tweaks. I don’t know nearly as much about BSD internals as I do linux. You can apply these through the web GUI under System->Tunables.

Fraud System: Update 2

Progress has slowed a bit on the fraud management system… other priorities have come up over the last month or so but here’s a new walk though.  The backend hasn’t changed much.  What has changed is the hardware requirements.  When I started this project I had no idea how much processing power or space or IO was going to be required so I built the system in such a way that it could be easily scaled at several points.  As it turns out.. for this size of a network (about 250k customers) that was unnecessary.

Rackable HDAMA Bios Raid Upgrade Files

I picked up an inexpensive server last year from unixsurplus.com which I now want to re purpose as a FreeNas file server.  This is all fine and good.. but the bios and embedded sata raid drivers were out of date and didn’t support the 2TB drives I wanted to use.  I spent many hours trying to track down the right bios files and Phoenix flash utility to do this update and was finally able to get it done.  The original download sites for most of these are long gone.. so it was a real chore to find the right stuff.  So for those who have this board here are all the required files in one place.

What I do: Fraud Management System -Update1

It’s been about a month since I posted the initial overview and I thought it would be good to post an update of the progress. While I’ve not been able to devote 100% to this project over the last month there have been some significant improvements.  The most visible ones are to the web interface.  I’ve added a very flexible application level authorization system.  I’ve also added an interface for managing one of the key inputs to the system with a protective 2 level approval process. I’ve also been tweaking the scoring system to better handle corner cases as I’ve seen them. Still plenty of work to be done but it’s starting to take shape.   For the overview of this system check out my first post about it.  Screen shots after the break.

What I Do: Broadsoft CDR Files to Radius Accounting Records

As part of a larger project I needed to generate real time radius records from the CDR accounting files of several cluster pairs of Broadsoft application servers. So I wrote a perl script to do just that. It maps the CDR fields to radius attribs and encodes the accounting packet using the Net::Radius::Packet CPAN module. In my case I’m using the Radiator radius server from OSC Software on the other end with lots of custom ‘hook code’ to clean up and store the call data coming off our network into a Postgresql database.

What I do: Dynamic Daily Table Partitions With Postgres

As part of a new and fairly large project I have a need to partition a few postgres tables and have a rolling daily window.  That is.. I want to organize data by a timestamp storing each day in its own partition and maintain 90 days of historical data.  Doing this is possible in Postgresql but it’s not pretty or very clean to set it up.  To simplify the process I wrote this perl script that (when run daily) will pre-create a certain number of empty partitions into the future and remove the oldest partitions from your window.

OSX Mail App Using Tons of Memory and CPU?

![](http://farm1.static.flickr.com/30/44074632_687cc920b9.jpg =320x)

I’ve been using a mac for a while now and I recently decided to dump Entourage and go to using the native Mail.app.  I noticed a problem though.. within minutes of starting up it would consume several hundred megs of ram and have frequent CPU spikes of 80 to 100%.  If Mail was left open, memory usage would climb above 2 gig with continued CPU spikes.  After much digging I finally found the problem and fixed it.