IPCop traffic shapping does work

So over the weekend I got RoadRunner Business service to go along with my DSL. The idea is that if my DSL goes out again I'll have a secondary connection with the cable. The only requirement was that I had to have a static IP. OK so I ordered a 2.5M/768k business class service .

Since I'd now have 2 connections to the net I needed 2 routers/firewalls since IPCop doesn't support dual WANs. No problem, I just installed VMWare server on my firewall box an old AMD Duron 950Mhz computer with 385M of ram. Definitely not a power house. After loading IPCop into a VM I restored the backup from my original DSL configured box. Then I simply cloned the VM and renamed it ipcop-rr. Starting up the DSL vm and getting back on the Internet was a snap. Then I turned my attention to the VM for the new connection. I changed the IPs andwent to test it out....



Oh Oh! That's horrible! What's going. I tried hooking a laptop directly up to the cable modem and speeds were WAY faster. I thought it might be the whimpy server I was running the vm on so I set up a faster machine and just loaded up the single vm for the cable connections. Speeds weren't any better. What was going on?????

Then it dawned on me. I had copied the DSL image and several months ago I had turned on traffic shaping. A few clicks later and my suspension was true. I had traffic shaping turned on and it was for DSL speeds. Hence the poor performance. After turning off Traffic Shaping I ran the speed test again...



Now we're talking! That's more like it. Just for comparison I ran the same speed test on my DSL connection with Traffic Shaping turned off. Yikes!!!!



I'm supposed to be getting 3M/384k on the DSL. As the graph shows I'm not getting the bandwidth I'm paying for on DSL and I'm getting really good bandwidth on Cable. I think I'll make the Cable my primary connection and DSL my secondary.

Getting closer to having a 1&1 server up again!

So this past Saturday I was reimaging a server for a customer and things went awry. Here's the story.

Yesterday, Monday, I called in to find out what the progress was. Still the same old story. Waiting on the server department to identify the problem and fix it. For those who know me and know how I handle vendors I should have been taking people's heads off by now. But since 1&1 is such a large organization I thought I'd try a different approach. Politely asking to speak to their manager.

This morning I called into 1-877-HELP-AT-1AND1 and talked to Mary who dutifully told me the same old story. The server department is looking at it and will get back to me. I asked to speak to her supervisor so she put me on hold. When she came back her supervisor did not want to talk to me but instead wanted her to forward me to the "Server Line". This sounded promising. Next I spoke to Michael. I didn't ask him what department he was in but after giving him all the same information he said he was going to transfer me too the "Server Line". I guess I didn't make it the first time. Next I heard "Server Line may I have your customer id?". OK now I've gotten some where. The guy didn't even introduce himself. I gave him my info and he started looking at things. After a bit I got his name, Steve, and then he told me the same old thing. We have to wait on the Server Department who is working on it. I did not lose my temper, I simply asked him if he understood my problem. Then I asked if I could talk to a supervisor. He politely transferred.

"This is Richard", OK now some one who seems to want to get straight to the point. A nice British chap in the U.K. We talked for a little bit and I found out that the group I originally talked to on Saturday had goofed up and opened the wrong kind of ticket and that it was basically sitting in limbo. He went on to say that Steve had already opened the proper type of hardware ticket and that he expected some action in the next few hours. Now we are talking! I took this opportunity to ask a little more about the server support and how the data center is manned. It turns out that calling the 1-877-GO-1AND1 sales line and choosing the option for server support is the better way to reach the right group. Although it is possible that the call could still be routed to the general call group if they don't have enough people on the Server Line. As for the question of people manning the data center, he said they don't have an office immediately in the data center itself but that a Server Department person is on duty 24 hours a day and that their office is less than 5 minutes from the actual data center. I didn't ask if that was 5 minutes walking, running or driving. None the less someone with a pulse is near the data center all the time. That's the important part.

So here I sit, waiting... Well actually I have plenty of work to do besides worry about that server. The upgrade to Plesk 8.0 and CentOS didn't go so easy. There were problems with the DNS records, GID on mailman, the missing lists, and ownership of webuser accounts just to name a few. One good hint, always look at the /etc/psa/psa.conf file. It can let you know where things are just incase they are moved, like the mailman lists.

2:55pm:
Hooray!!! I got the email from 1&1 saying the re-imaging process has been competed. Hmmm lets try that one more time just to make sure it works.

3:55pm:
Back from the bank and all looks well. Time to start the install of CentOS and Plesk 8.0. Wow! it just installed CentOS in under 4 minutes. This is a happy server now.

Upgrading Plesk, what a nightmare!

I started upgrading 3 servers at 8pm tonight (Saturday). It's now 12:27am (Sunday). No server is up yet.

First, 1 server is hung in the reimaging process. I probably could have avoided the reimage altogether by using the stock plesk key and clicking retrieve key but I realized that too late. As it is I'm stuck waiting for some stupid 4 hour window to lapse before 1&1 will escalate the problem to a tech that can actually fix the problem. The person I talked to didn't even know where you went in the control panel to re-image the server. Oh boy!

So the other servers reimaged in record time and then I loaded my trusty CentOS load on there and let my cool little script load plesk 8.0.1. Everything is fine until.... I try to restore that backup that I made on the 7.5.4 version of the server. Ugggggg! It seems you can't restore a 7.5.4 backup onto a 8.0.1 server. Strange because I would have sworn that I had done that on another system. Apparently not!

So now I'm sitting here waiting for that one server to get reimaged, the other 2 servers are reloading a fresh install of CentOS 4.4 and then I'll install Plesk 7.5.4 manually using the autoinstall app. Then I should be able to restore the 7.5.4 backup. Then I plan to make a plesk 8.0 backup using their tool that I can download. Afterwards I'll update the servers in place, since it'll just be a plesk update and not an OS update.

More to come...

So it's now 1:20am. I've got plesk 7.5.4 installed on the 2 servers that reimaged earlier. Guess what? They won't retrieve 7.5.4 keys. Ugggg!!!! OK so 2 out of the 3 servers have backups of the /etc directory before all this mess started. I'll pull the keys out of there. Hopefully I can use the same key on 2 servers as longs as it's not at the same time. I have 8.0 keys for all 3 servers. The only really big down side to this step? Both of the keys are stored in really large backup sets that have to be ftp'd across from the backup server. Uggg!

Still waiting for 2am when hopefully(fingers crossed) that 1&1 oxygen wasting being will escalate to a real tech. We'll see.

More to come...

4:00am:

So 2am has come and gone. All I could get out of the 1&1 folks was that it had been escalated to the server techs and I'm supposed to wait around for some magical email. Hmmm, I wonder what they would do if my email was on the server that was down????

Progress is definitely being made on the other 2 servers though. One is almost done now. I made an 8.0 compatible backup and stored it on the FTP server. Right now I'm just waiting on a few additional Plesk 8.0.1 updates to finish installing. Then I need to add my favorite AtomicRocketTurtle packages and that server will be done.... SWEET! Just got the report that server is up to date! Now I can turn the email back on and forget about it.

More to come...

5:15am
Well I found a few more things I could do on that server that I thought I had finished. Now I'm just waiting for a nagios alert to clear. Presto! It's clear. Now I can mark off one server.

So what's the status on the downed server? Still nothing from 1&1 and the control panel is still telling me the server is being reimaged. I'll call them at 6am when it's been down for 8 hours. Maybe I can get some attention then. I'm starting to think the techs are asleep in the data center somewhere.

And the other server that made it through the reimage? It finally completed it's restore of the 7.5.4 backup. Now I'm running the yum update psa to upgrade it to 8.0.1. Crossing my fingers...

More to come...

9:07am:
Yes, I'm still at it. 2 servers down and 1 to go. Here's the kicker to this last server. I finally got someone at 1&1 to admit they don't have server techs in the data center on the weekends. He started talking about being short handed and stuff, and then I asked him point blank. Did they staff techs on the weekend. Aaaaaaah, no. Then he tried to convince me that they weren't needed because this was all automated. Right......

OK, so the plan is to set up a vmware on another network and snag the plesk key. That should be good for a few weeks at least. That's more than enough time to get this stuff straightened out. Once I have a stable server running again and I do a migration one evening and be done with it!

Oh, and here's a valuable note on Plesk 8.0 on CentOS. It seems with the newer versions of Plesk you now have the ability to turn 'safe_mode' on and off at the domain level. That's fine except during the upgrade from 7.5.4 to 8.0.1 the system turned 'safe_mode' on for all the domains. I probably chased my tail for 2 hours working on Joomla sites. It kept telling me it couldn't find the templates. Google searches kept talking about corrupted files and permissions. Then finally I found a blog post comment that mentioned turning it off. Presto!


More to come...


10:50am:
So things are going as planned, sort of. For some reason the plesk 7.5.4 installation on CentOS 4.4 fought me tooth and nail the whole way. I think I got sloppy in the vm and added the Atomic repo too early. None the less I now have a updated 7.5.4 plesk server awaiting a dump file. Oh that. Yes I'm waiting on the download of the dump file from the 1&1 servers. I'm tapping out the circuit at 5M on the VM side. At least I know that IP Cop firewall protecting it isn't a bottleneck. 33 minutes to go according to the scp progress bar.

I've kind of sort of given up on 1&1 for today. Hopefully they'll get the server fixed by tomorrow, in the mean time I think I've got a slick way to get this customer back up thanks to VMware.

Hmmm, 30 minutes that's not enough time to get some rest. Maybe I'll go fumble around with VTBook card. I've got it working with FC4 but I'd like to have it working with FC6 because that's what is on my main laptop.

More to come...

12:30pm:
Hopefully I can take a break. The third server is up. Web pages are being served and email is flowing in. The spam filtering needs some tweaking and the postini mailmgr wedge needs to be put in but those things can wait as I have to wait for the full system backups to download. That'll be another hour or so but it can wait.

Wonder when someone from 1&1 is going to look at the server?

VTBook Video card on a Linux Laptop - FC4

So now that I have my fancy 24" monitor running with the laptop I decided if 2 screens are good 3 screens must be better! Right?

Well maybe...

I ordered a VTBook card from Villagetronic. Heck for $249 you can't go wrong.

Well it does seem to work but it's not for the faint of heart. I'm usually pretty reluctant to jump in a recompile the kernel anymore. Mainly because I use several packages from 3rd party repos that depend on a particular kernel. So what I did was download the kernel source rpm and then rebuild the package with the same naming id. This way I could add the changes necessary for the card while still keeping compatibility with the other modules I use.

OK, so the good news I have it working.... on a Fedora Core 4 laptop! So far I haven't been successful getting it to work on a Fedora Core 6 laptop. I've opened up a support request with the folks at Villagetronics but so far all I've gotten back was an automated email and a followup email saying they'd have someone contact me ASAP! Still waiting...

In the mean time, I've put my xorg.conf and the kernel.spec file up on a server so others can enjoy this as well. I rebuilt the kernel using the kernel-2.6.17-1.2142_FC4.src.rpm package. So you just have to download it and then copy my spec file into /usr/src/redhat/SPECS. Then it's just a little time spent waiting on
rpmbuild --target i686 -bp kernel-2.6.spec.vtbook

Ok so maybe it's a lot of time. Once I get more bandwidth I'll make the RPMs available for download.

I also had to change settings in /etc/grub.conf and remove the "rghb" option from the kernel options. Otherwise it would try to use the X server while booting and that would cause problems as the card wasn't ready yet.

As the instructions mention you need to add a line to /etc/init.d/pcmcia for the setpci command. Otherwise you'll have problems when your X windows does start up.

I've noticed that when you are shutting down the laptop the monitor connected to the VT card will sort of go crazy and flicker as if it's trying to get a signal. It might be wise to turn off the monitor when you start to shutdown the laptop. I notice the same problem when I switch to one of the console screens also. When I switch back I have to power cycle the screen to get my extra desktop back.

FC6 on my Toshiba P35-S611 Laptop Freezing

Since installing Fedora Core 6 I've noticed more and more freeze problems with my laptop. Sunday night I decided to backup my entire laptop HD onto a USB drive. Then I wiped the hard drive and reloaded Fedora Core 6.

There are some nice things when starting from scratch. One thing in particular is the suspend/hibernate features. Back in FC4 I could never get this to work. I managed to get most of my application settings back without having to manually enter them.
Evolution:
.evolution/*
.gnome2/gnome-pilot.d/*
.gconf/apps/evolution/*

Aqua Data Studio:
.datastudio/*

Firefox:
.mozilla/*

My Menu mods:
.local/*
.config/*


So after copying over all of this stuff I cranked up my xmms and started to listening to podcasts and mp3. Arrrrgh!!!!! The system froze. Thinking it was xmms I switched to Rhythmbox. Things seemed promising but 30 minutes after a reboot and the machine was freezing again.

I conducted a memory test and a stresslinux test with no problems. Hmmmm what is wrong?

I stumbled on to some posts that talked about cpuspeed. I disabled it and restared. The laptop has been running nicely for 2.5 hours.

I have had some problems with podcasts on an SD card. It seems that reading the card from the USB hub/card reader works well. Using the builtin card reader in my 80GB USB drive seems to cause pauses when reading from the card.

Time to go to work!

Living without DSL - Day 2

I had hoped the problem with my DSL would magically get fixed over night. No such luck.

At least this morning when I called in to Internet America their Auto Attendant had an updated message saying that Alltel, I mean Windstream, had a major piece of equipment fail and they didn't have a spare for it. That's just a guess but the prediction that it would be back up later this afternoon sounds like they are waiting on a part to come in. In the mean time I get to enjoy the not so high speeds of my EVDO connection. At least it's better than nothing.

Stupid Alltel DSL

So I get home from a meeting and I'm all jazzed to start working on some stuff that pays the bills. But first I need to figure out why I can't listen to xmradio online. Hmmm I need to figure out how to play Windows Media files in Linux and in firefox. Didn't I already accomplish that years ago????

Oh yeah, that was in FC4. So I start googling to remind myself what I need to do and BOOM!!! SPLAT!!! Nothing! My DSL connection is down. OK time to switch back to tech support mode and remember all the things I had people do when they called in with the same problem.
1. reboot modem and wait for all 4 lights to go solid - CHECK!
2. reboot firewall machine and restart PPPoE process - CHECK!
3. reboot modem one more time this time leaving it off for 5 minutes - CHECK!
4. call Internet America..... CHECK

After about 20 minutes on hold Brad comes on the line and asks what's the problem. I say my DSL isn't working. He asked if I was in Sugar Land and had Alltel. Yep! Well they started having problems an hour ago and they are working on it. I tried fishing to find out what areas were affected but he didn't know me from Adam and wasn't very cooperative. At least 2 other DSL customers are up so I guess I'm the lucky one today.

So I open up my Network Device Control applet and fire up USB Modem on the Treo. For some reason connecting to the Internet via the Treo seems slower at the house than at the deer camp. It's probably just a perception thing though. I mean at the deer camp I'm happy to have access to the outside world. At home I'm in the outside world already so I shouldn't have a slow connection to it.

Since I run my mail server here at the house that means that I can't receive email.
Break time!

FC6 on my Toshiba P35-S611 Laptop

So I've been running Linux on this laptop for almost 2 years now. After some procrastination I decided to upgrade from FC4 to FC6. While the stability doesn't seem to be as great I have gotten a number of things to work that I never bothered to get working on the FC4 install. Those things include the built-in modem, a bluetooth dongle and dual displays.

The easiest thing to do was getting the internal modem working. I found the slmodem-alsa package on the Livna repo. I just installed it since I already had the Livna repo installed on my la
yum install slmodem-alsa
Then I edited /etc/sysconfig/slmodemd
COUNTRY=USA
Then start up the daemon
/etc/init.d/slmodemd restart
Now I had a /dev/ttySL0 interface
ls -l /dev/ttyS0
I made a symlink to /dev/modem
ln -s /dev/ttySL0 /dev/modem
Then I went into the system-config-network applet and set up a dialup connection

Unfortunately I haven't been able to make the modem speaker work but I can now test dialup accounts when I need to. And in a pinch I can use a dialup account if I have to.

YOU DON'T NEED TO COMPILE slmodemd FROM SOURCE!

Here's a cool pic of my current dual head setup:


And my xorg.conf config:

Section "ServerLayout"
Identifier "Multihead layout"
Screen 0 "Screen0" absolute 0 0
Screen 1 "Screen1" absolute 1440 0
InputDevice "Mouse0" "CorePointer"
InputDevice "Keyboard0" "CoreKeyboard"
InputDevice "Synaptics" "AlwaysCore"
Option "Xinerama" "on"
Option "Clone" "off"
EndSection

Section "Files"

RgbPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/rgb"
FontPath "unix/:7100"
EndSection

Section "Module"
Load "dbe"
Load "extmod"
Load "fbdevhw"
Load "glx"
Load "record"
Load "freetype"
Load "type1"
Load "synaptics"
Load "dri"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"

Identifier "Keyboard0"
Driver "kbd"
Option "XkbModel" "pc105"
Option "XkbLayout" "us"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Mouse0"
Driver "mouse"
Option "Protocol" "IMPS/2"
Option "Device" "/dev/input/mice"
Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5"
Option "Emulate3Buttons" "yes"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Synaptics"
Driver "synaptics"
Option "Device" "/dev/input/mice"
Option "Protocol" "auto-dev"
Option "Emulate3Buttons" "yes"
Option "LeftEdge" "120"
Option "RightEdge" "830"
Option "TopEdge" "120"
Option "BottomEdge" "650"
Option "FingerLow" "14"
Option "FingerHigh" "15"
Option "MaxTapMove" "110"
Option "VertScrollDelta" "20"
Option "HorizScrollDelta" "20"
Option "MinSpeed" "0.3"
Option "MaxSpeed" "0.75"
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
Identifier "ExtMonitor"
VendorName "Monitor Vendor"
ModelName "LCD Panel 1900x1200"
### Comment all HorizSync and VertSync values to use DDC:
HorizSync 31.5 - 74
VertRefresh 50.0 - 60
Option "dpms"
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
Identifier "LaptopLCD"
VendorName "Monitor Vendor"
ModelName "LCD Panel 1440x900"
HorizSync 31.5 - 39.0
VertRefresh 50.0 - 70.0
Option "dpms"
EndSection

Section "Device"

Identifier "Videocard0"
Driver "radeon"
VendorName "Videocard vendor"
BoardName "ATI Radeon Mobility 9100 IGP"
Option "MonitorLayout" "LVDS, CRT"
BusID "PCI:1:5:0"

EndSection

Section "Device"
Identifier "Videocard1"
Driver "radeon"
VendorName "Videocard Vendor"
BoardName "ATI Technologies Inc RS300M AGP [Radeon Mobility 9100IGP]"
BusID "PCI:1:5:0"
Screen 1
EndSection

Section "Screen"
Identifier "Screen0"
Device "Videocard0"
Monitor "LaptopLCD"
DefaultDepth 16
SubSection "Display"
Depth 16
Modes "1440x900"
EndSubSection
EndSection

Section "Screen"
Identifier "Screen1"
Device "Videocard1"
Monitor "ExtMonitor"
DefaultDepth 16
SubSection "Display"
Depth 16
Modes "1900x1200"
EndSubSection
EndSection

Section "DRI"
Group 0
Mode 0666
EndSection


I use the bluetooth to network sync my Treo 700p

/etc/bluetooth/hcid.conf:
options {
autoinit yes;
security user;
pairing multi;


}

device {
name "laptop";
class 0x120104;
iscan enable; pscan enable;
lm accept;
lp hold,sniff,park;
auth enable;
encrypt enable;
}

/etc/bluetooth/rfcomm.conf:
rfcomm0 {
bind yes;

# My treo 700p
device 00:07:E0:B8:F2:D4;

channel 1;

comment "Brian's Treo 700p";
}

/etc/sysconfig/dund:
DUNDARGS='--listen --persist --msdun call dun'

chkconfig bluetooth on
chkconfig dund on

service bluetooth start
service dund start

Then I just paired the phone to the laptop and set up a network sync.

To get gpilotd to netsync,
.gnome2/gnome-pilot.d/gpilotd:
[Device0]
type=4
name=Cradle
timeout=5

I didn't actually want to bind it to any particular IP address or I'd have added a few other settings.

5 does in the field

Well this morning has been good although there has been 0 shots fired.. 5 does where in my area at the same time. 4 came in via the center shot lane while 1 appeared in the right lane. After a bit they finally met up in the right lane and headed back toward the feeder. Eventually they all left together via the center lane.

I reckon clearing the center lane was a good thing. Hopefully I'll be able to return this spring and do a little more clearing before things warm up. I'd like to take the lane all the way to the fence. I figure I'm halfway there so far. Maybe when the loggers come in they'll help me out a little.

While eating breakfast I looked through the log book. Turns out I got to hunt 21 days this season. That's not too bad considering how many other things take up my time in December every year.

If things go well this coming year maybe I can get the total up to 31 days. Heck if I win the lottery maybe it'll be 45 days even. :)

My 9 point rack should be finished drying in a few weeks so I can finally mount it. Looking forward to hanging it on the wall next to Papa's rack. Maybe I can bug Ron or Chris to bring their laser levels over and help me reorganize my racks. Maybe....

My treo takes deer hunting hi tech

So this deer season I've been using my treo to pass the quiet time on the stand. I've managed to read PDFs, read emails, review web sites and solve problems via texting. This afternoon though I took my Javo ear buds with me and listened to podcasts. Nice...

I've been using the mypodder beta on Linux for a few weeks now. I keep the podcasts on my SD card in the Treo and play them on my Laptop or on the Treo using mocean. Well after listening to all of my downloaded podcasts I thought I'd try out the podcast feature built into mocean. Well it certainly doesn't work nearly as well as mypodder but in a bind it'll suffice.

broken shower and a trip to town

Wouldn't you know the last weekend of the season and the shower gets broken. Ugggggg.

It looks like there was some water still in the vertical pipe going to the shower head. Normally that's ok but with all the freezing temps in December it finally just cracked the pipe.

I went into town to get some couplings so I could make a new section but the hardware store was already closed. Sure doesn't seem too smart to close the only hardware store in town at noon. Oh well it wasn't worth the 30 miles round trip to go to Dibol. I'll just have to bring the parts from home before next season. I need (2) 3/4 slip to 1/2 threaded couplings for the showerhead and valves. Maybe I'll find a better valve assembly while I'm at it.

While I was in town I thought I'd make a donation to the Texas Lottery a.k.a. buying a ticket. I asked for a quick pick, cash option for the next 5 drawings. The first lady didn't understand English very well and claimed the machine was broken and that I should come back in 30 minutes. Problem is I watched her sell a ticket to the guy in front of me. I guess spanning multiple drawings was too difficult. So I left that store and went to the Exxon.

I asked for the same thing, QP CO 5 drawings. The lady looked at the machine and then said the other cashier would have to do it because she didn't know how to work the machine for complicated tickets. Meanwhile the other cashier was on the phone trying to straighten out a previous problem caused by this cashier. It seems she had inadvertently charged a young lady's credit card $540 for a $4 purchase. Oooops!!!! The real problem was that it was a debit card and that had just tied up that money in her account.

Honestly, I'm not making this up...

Oh did I forget to mention the poor girl said she didn't have $500 in her checking account to even cover the charge. She also didn't have enough cash to get home or another credit card. I have to give her credit though she was far calmer than I would have been in the same situation. At the point they were at I would have been demanding to see the store owner and calling the cops for potential credit card fraud.

So this clueless cashier was perfectly happy to let me just stand there waiting on the other cashier while holding up the line. When I realized she wasn't going to try and help one of the 5 other customers behind me, I suggested she go ahead and take care of the next person in line while I waited. This confused her. At this point I moved away from the counter so I could watch the checkout process hoping the customer would try to pay by credit card. No such luck but paying by cash appeared to be equally challenging for this cashier. That's enough entertainment for me I'm heading to another store.

So I drive across the street to the Brookshire Bros grocery store. Yep they sell Loto tickets. They even had a sign out front saying so. The other side said Beer And Wine To Go. I guess that's the big news in Corrigan. I walk in and go to customer service. By this time I'm willing to fill out one of those forms you normally use when you are picking the numbers manually figuring all they have to do is insert it into the scanner. Problem is there's no pencils but plenty of forms. So I ask the girl for the same ticket that I've asked for @ 2 other stores. QP CO 5 drawings. Oh boy I get a deer in the head lights gaze from this poor highschool student. Fortunately for me she's quick on her feet and gets the manager's attention to show her how to do it. About a minute later I hear "that'll be 5 dollars". I pass her the money while I double check the ticket. All looks good so I take my change and walk out the door.

So it appears while the lottery has been going on for a number of years it's still a challenge to get a multi drawing ticket in Corrigan,Tx. Thanks to a thinking high schooler and a trained manager I managed to get my ticket.

Whoever said small town America was boring.

it's a quail, it's a pheasant, what the heck is it?

If you sit on the stand long enough you eventually see something you haven't seen before. That's what happened just now. (11:15)

Since it's closing weekend I figured there's nothing to do at camp so I'll stay on the stand until lunch. Up pops this fat bird in the center shot lane I cleared earlier this season. At least twice as large as a dove. He had markings like a bobtail quail but more of a flat top looking do on his head. The other interesting feature was the long tail. At least 1.5 times the length of it's body. The feathers were brown with white spots. I think this might be a pheasant hen but I'm not sure. A quick search on Google didn't yield any good pictures for my Treo.

BTW: Staying on the stand until Lunch has yet to yield any big deer but it's a relaxing way to pass the time.

is anybody out there

Sometimes when you're setting on the stand you start to wonder if you are the only out there. This is just such a morning.

It's a little past 8 and I haven't heard a single gunshot all morning. The sky was pretty clear last and we had a bright moon. This morning however was wet. Not rainy wet more like foggy wet but without the reduced visiblity. There's water on the pine needles like you have after a good rain.

The temperature is in the low 50's and the wind is non-existent. The number of feeders going off this morning sounded lower too. Most likely they have run out of corn as mine has. Strange that most of the stores around here were out of corn by Thanksgiving weekend this year.

At last, a rifle shot in the distance. That's one more deer that won't make it to the end of the season I guess. Less than 48 hours remain of the 2006-07 season and I think the deer know it. Maybe they've decided to sleep in for the weekend. Certainly not a bad idea from their perspective.