ARIA Resort and Casino Mega-Review (Las Vegas, NV)

About Scott

I'm a computer guy with a new house and a love of DIY projects. I like ranting, and long drives on your lawn. I don't post everything I do, but when I do, I post it here. Maybe.

ARIA Resort and Casino Mega-Review (Las Vegas, NV)

By Scott • 2014-07-01 Rants, Reviews

Relaxing at the ARIA after the room was cleaned

I don’t usually post hotel reviews, but when I do… I’m not sure how much MGM paid for the ARIA’s Five Diamond award from AAA, but I’m sure it must have been a lot. Note to lawyers: My previous statement was intended as hyperbole, and not as an accusation of bribery on the part of MGM. That’s how poor the service is at this hotel: They’ve left me with the impression that they’d sooner sue me to take this review down rather than improve the overall customer experience. If I could sum up the attitude of the hotel staff in one word it would be uncaring. I stayed at the ARIA for 4 nights encompassing 3 different hotel rooms. I … Continue reading

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Oh, Pebble! You have a great product that’s being ruined by your support.

By Scott • 2014-06-16 Computers, Rants, Reviews

Two important things before I get started: I really like the original Pebble Smartwatch. I’d probably like the Steel as well, but I haven’t tried it. I have a lot of respect for Pebble as a company. It came into being through crowdsourced funding and actually delivered the product it promised. However, after about 6 months of ownership, my watch stopped vibrating. Trying to resolve this issue was my first interaction with Pebble support, and hopefully will be my last. Their process is slow, detrimental, and offensive. You may wonder at that last one: “Offensive?” My gripe isn’t with the particular customer service person that handled my case. (In fact I’ve redacted their name from this post.) The CS … Continue reading

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Fix for: Keepalived router enters fault state on link down

By Scott • 2014-06-06 Computers

TL;DR: This is the configuration option you want: dont_track_primary At work and at home I have pairs of redundant “core” routers in an active-passive (or master-backup as you like) configuration. They consist of commodity hardware, a few 4-port gigabit NICs, and CentOS. All of these machines had been running flawlessly for anywhere from two to six years (as they were put into service or upgraded). That is until yesterday when my primary router at home had an SSD failure which completely stopped it in its tracks. The backup router took over, and in less than a second traffic was being routed. All of my point-to-point VPNs reconnected within about 20 seconds. In other words, it worked exactly as it should. … Continue reading

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Redundant email servers with soft-fail (450) vs. hard-fail (550)

By Scott • 2014-02-10 Computers

I manage a fairly large number of incoming mail exchangers, which are numerous both to handle large message volumes as well as to provide redundancy. In most cases, these mail servers are Postfix with MySQL providing virtual alias maps, transport maps, relay domains, and virtual alias domains. Unfortunately the Postfix+MySQL implementation isn’t always 100% great. On very rare occasions the Postfix instance may fail to communicate with the MySQL server, for any number of reasons. From the perspective of the sender’s MX, this usually results in a 550 status code (often given as “Relay access denied”). This is a hard-fail, in that it tells the upstream MX that the recipient they’re trying to reach is permanently unavailable. The upstream MX … Continue reading

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SAN with Linux Cluster and CLVM: Is it Necessary?

By Scott • 2013-09-04 Computers

To answer the title of this post in one word: No. But as with all things computer related, that “no” needs to be followed by the caveat: “Well, it depends upon your needs.” From what I’ve seen, Linux clustering was designed primarily for high-availability services, with only a secondary effort to share disk resources across nodes. I have tried — and would never use in production — Linux clustering services for a VM host cluster. I know other people have done it and will continue to do it, but a properly configured (and managed) VM cluster does not need true clustering. (Again, “depending upon your needs”). Linux clustering requires fencing. (It didn’t always, but now it does). Fencing is a … Continue reading

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HTC One (Verizon) Nitpick Review

By Scott • 2013-08-27 Rants, Reviews

Unfortunately, if you want a subsidized phone today you’re stuck with carrier bloatware. I’m replacing a Samsung Galaxy Nexus with an HTC One, but if I had my druthers I’d have ordered the Galaxy S4 Play Edition. The problem is that I can’t bring myself to effectively spend $510 on stock Android; software that’s free. The Galaxy Nexus is a great phone. In two years of case-less operation, it hardly has a scratch on it. It survived drops, bumps, bangs, and all the other rigors of daily use. It has a replaceable battery and an SD card slot. In fact, Samsung’s bloatware was the only thing that stopped me from getting Verizon’s Galaxy S4. The Unboxing Like I said, this … Continue reading

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Google Chrome Reports “Duplicate headers received from server”

By Scott • 2013-06-10 Computers

It seems that this error message has been around since version 16 of Chrome, and was first reported sometime in 2011. The error message basically says that it received two Content-Disposition headers, and that the response was blocked to prevent HTTP response splitting attacks. However, in most cases this error isn’t caused by malicious code, but rather because of an innocuous comma in the filename parameter of the Content-Disposition header. Here’s an example of an actual response header I received while downloading a resume from a popular career site: Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=Beresky_Resume,6pg.docx That was the only Content-Disposition header in the entire response, which raises the question: Why is this a duplicate header? Because according to the HTTP 1.1 specification, section … Continue reading

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Reducing Fan Noise from a Dell PowerEdge R905

By Scott • 2013-06-08 Basement, Computers

If you’ve read my blog, you know that I have a quite a few servers in my basement that I use as a home lab environment. For home or low-demand virtualization, you can’t beat the Dell R905 for price. Consider that, as of the time I’m writing this post, you can get an R905 like I did with 128 GB of RAM for about $960. That’s only a little more than the cost of the RAM! That machine has 4x AMD Opteron 8356 quad-core CPUs @ 2.3Ghz and two built-in 10gbps ethernet ports (plus 2 gigabit ports), a PERC6i controller, dual PSUs, and a full enterprise DRAC. It’s a little old, but you can’t get those specs in any other … Continue reading

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Getting Started with Free CDN from KisoLabs

By Scott • 2013-04-29 Computers

When I was a teenager I had a basement full of computers. (Which is to say that my parents had a basement full of computers.) It was just a hobby at first, but computers eventually turned into an obsession and a profession for me. I liked every aspect of computers, from building hardware to networking to programming. Stay tuned for the bottom of this article where I’ve posted a referral code good for a $50 KisoLabs account credit. In those days (the mid- to late- 90s) DSL was the only way to get affordable static IPs, and I suffered with 192K SDSL (and later, 384K). Content was a lot lighter back then, but I was still suffering the same problems … Continue reading

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The Rackspace-Batman Deodorant Debacle

By Scott • 2012-11-19 Rants

What follows is a series of emails between myself and Rackspace, which is now one of my favorite companies. Some information has been redacted to protect the good citizens of Gotham (and/or San Antonio). Anything in italics is a note for the blog, and not part of the email chain. From: “John XXXXXX, Rackspace” <john.XXXX@rackspace.com> To: scott@scott Sent: Tuesday, November 13, 2012 8:09:23 AM Subject: Time to Protect Your “Hero” Server Hi Scott, The secret is out. We know the “Batman” server is your favorite. Know how we found out? He’s always at capacity and working up a sweat. Give the poor guy a break! With Cloud Load Balancers, you can add more servers & balance traffic across … Continue reading

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