Hilarity

http://www.cbc.ca/story/canada/national/2006/03/26/loney-home060326.html :

The three men were rescued by an elite multinational unit known as Task Force Black, led by British Special Air Service members. They encountered no kidnappers during the raid.

Probably for the best.. I suspect that any group of the SAS known as Task Force Black wouldn't have left too many people alive. cf: Iran Embassy, 1980. 5 of 6 hostage takers dead, 1 of 20 hostages killed, all over in under 15 minutes. SAS were investigated over killing two of the hostage takers who were unarmed, but they claimed to believe they may have been reaching for grenades. I think if a hostage situation gets to the point where the SAS is coming to deal with it, you should know your ass is toast.

(no subject)

So much of work today was spent playing with a Packeteer. *drools* OMFG the thing is awesome. It actually does what it said it would! I stuck part of the office behind it and applied some cute rate limiting and prioritisation on it, and it actually worked. I did a bunch of downloads from various on-campus FTP/HTTP servers, playing with priorities, and BitTorrenting down a Knoppix ISO at the same time, tweaking the priorities and limits and seeing what happened. I set HTTP's priority to the lowest setting while using all my allocated 2Mbps for FTP.. the Packeteer transproxied the request and gave a "503 - Too Busy" error back to the client, which I thought was particullary cute.

As for why I have a Packeteer.. we're looking at getting two of them.. one that does up to 45Mbps (10Mbps initially), and another that does 100Mbps. We're having a play with one for a few weeks, and going on a training course at the end of it. Don't worry, the 100Mbps will only be for reporting initially, any shaping will be only on request, and if said link does do over 100Mbps total, it will just pass the traffic :P