My web server, a co-located box in eastern North Carolina, is no longer reachable. Hurricanes suck. Lucky me. I get to spend my evening listening to customers complain...

You could always change your answering machine message to feature your voice shouting "Hello? Hello? I can't hear you! There's too much wind! Hello? <click>" with a lot of wind / static noise in the background. Then, just don't answer the phone.

Be sure to change the message back afterwards, though, or your customers will be suspicious.

UPDATE: server came back online. It was offline for 32 min. According to the logs, it lost the connection on eth0 but didn't go down. Looks like the ISP forgot to put their switch on a UPS or something.

The eye doesn't pass over there until later tonight, so I'm not "out of the water" yet.

luckily, I'm 200 mi. away in SC waiting it out in relative comfort.

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Hurricanes suck. Lucky me. I get to spend my evening listening to customers complain...

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What do they expect you to do about said complaints?
/etc/init.d/hurricane.Isabel stop

"I am sorry sir, my account on the Universe server does not have sufficent rights to stop this hurricane."

I take it you've got a SSL accelerator card? Got any opinions or recommendations?
I'm looking at getting an nCipher one for a server I'm building. Only chose them because I was talking to one of their technical guys at a exhibition a while back and it stuck in my head.

Ah, you've got it all wrong. Hurricane.Isabel isn't a service, but a rogue process. What you need is;


[root@dynsol init.d]# ssh meatballman@weather.com
meatballman@weather.com's password:
Last login: Mon Aug 18 15:24:07 2003 from home.meatballman.net
[[email protected]]$ su
Password:
[[email protected] /home/meatballman]# killall -v -9 Hurricane.Isabel
Killed Hurricane.Isabel(18988)
[[email protected] /home/meatballman]#

A student and I actually did a performance study on crypto accelerator cards. The long and the short of it is that these cards help somewhat, but don't expect a massive improvement. In a later version of the study (not yet published), we compared the performance of dual-processor systems with single-processor + accelerator and several other variants on that theme. In most cases, having a second CPU will increase your throughput more than having an accelerator card. Of course, having two CPUs and an accelerator will be even better.

It's all about dollars. If it's cheaper for you to add an accelerator card, do it. If it's cheaper for you to add another CPU, do that instead.

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In most cases, having a second CPU will increase your throughput more than having an accelerator card

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So now I just have to wait for multiprocessor support in OpenBSD...