Lots going on here. I know I’ve been mostly absent from blogging for the last year. I’m trying to get back into it, and part of that is going back to update the status of previous entries.

  • Back in August I posted about installing a pfSense firewall. Whereas the firewall I installed worked, it had some problems. We finally found that the load we were putting on the firewall was too much for the computer we were using. We replaced that old machine with a system that has a Core 2 Duo processor running at 2.4 GHz, and four gigabytes of RAM. We haven’t had any problems with it since. pfSense could handle the data transfer throughput at 30 megabits, but couldn’t handle us making hundreds of connections per second.
  • Reader Roy Harvey responded to my post about the SQL Server transaction log filling up, and gave me some very good advice on how to prevent that from happening. In short: put the transaction log on a separate drive, give it and the database file a fixed size and turn off auto growth, and perform regular backups of the database and the transaction log. I definitely need to get a good book about SQL Server. Any suggestions?
  • My Weird Computer Problem looks like a faulty motherboard. After checking BIOS settings and verifying jumpers on the board, I ran some stress tests with 1, 2, 3, and 4 instances of a highly compute-bound task. The program runs at full speed when there are two instances. Half speed at four. Since I know the processor is good, that pretty much leaves just the motherboard. New one is on the way.
  • I got a couple of confusing “trackbacks” on my note about High School Math. The links are to sites that just post small excerpts of others’ blog entries. There doesn’t appear to be any original content on either of the sites, and there’s no “about” page or anything. The confusing part is that there aren’t any ads on the pages, either. I’ve received links from similar sites that are nothing but click magnets: people posting somewhat topical content on pages that have an over abundance of Google ads. It looks like a variation on the automated zombie attractor.