The following is nmap output over Megabus-provided wifi (en route to Boston) showing the proxied ports.

Starting Nmap 5.00 ( http://nmap.org ) at 2010-11-02 19:39 EDT
Interesting ports on dagny.detechnis.com (173.255.227.97):
Not shown: 987 filtered ports
PORT     STATE  SERVICE
53/tcp   open   domain
80/tcp   closed http
110/tcp  closed pop3
143/tcp  closed imap
443/tcp  closed https
465/tcp  closed smtps
587/tcp  closed submission
993/tcp  closed imaps
995/tcp  closed pop3s
1863/tcp closed msnp
5190/tcp closed aol
5222/tcp closed unknown
8080/tcp closed http-proxy

Nmap done: 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 30.28 seconds

What’s sort of annoying is that:

1. Port 22 (ssh) is blocked.
2. ICMP Time Exceeded messages are blocked (not shown), making tracepath unusable.

I will be attending the Linux Plumbers Conference and the Beer Advocate Belgian BeerFest in the coming days. More on those as they happen.

I present two recommended reads. Oddly enough, both are written by Microsoft employees.

• “On Designing and Deploying Internet-Scale Services” (PDF link) by James Hamilton is essentially an end-to-end checklist for making an application work, scale, and be manageable. The paper, presented at LISA ‘07, is 12 pages of bullet points of recommendations from the author and various other employees of large application teams within Microsoft, focused around ten themes:

  • overall service design
  • designing for automation and provisioning
  • dependency management
  • release cycle and testing
  • hardware selection and standardization
  • operations and capacity planning
  • auditing monitoring and alerting
  • graceful degradation and admission control
  • customer and press communications plan
  • customer self-provisioning and self-help.

  It is definitely a concise way to make sure you’ve thought of how your services works, acts, and operates, and where you can improve it.

• “Does the Digital Classroom Enfeeble the Mind?” by Jaron Lanier is an essay that was included in the New York Times Magazine themed on technology and education a few weeks ago. This essay speaks volumes on how we interact with technology and how technology guides how we think. Technology itself won’t make better educators, he argues, but use of the right technologies in the right ways may enable us to be able to make better educators.