I spoke with my friends this week about television. Not the latest plot developments in our favorite shows—although we do quite a bit of that, too. No, this was about the object itself: the television.

I explained that I have an uncle who enjoys restoring old radios and televisions—he particularly enjoys working on the ones that do not have transistors in them, but vacuum tubes. He will pick one up at a garage sale or salvage it from the garbage, and then spend the time to determine the make and model and find the parts necessary to repair it. Sometimes the research-oriented approach is not possible and he must experiment. His rate of success is relatively high. More often than not he can successfully resuscitate these devices. I have seen him collect several copies of the same item, each broken in its own peculiar way, in order to produce one working model.

My father has always had a strong interest in electronics, as well. Another uncle, my father’s other brother, works for IBM. All three of these brothers share a strong curiosity for tinkering. Cars, motorcycles, boats could commonly be found in various states of dismantling and reconstruction around our home growing up. When the three of them are together, the conversation often turns to gadgets and gizmos. This shared interest I do not find particularly curious; my experience has been that brothers often have more common traits and interests than they do differentiating ones. What grabs my interest is the speculation on the possible sources. I believe that I may have the germ of a theory. These three men all share the same father—my grandfather. And while I do not know the source of his fascination with tinkering electronics, I do have some anecdotes that may paint his fascination with some clarity.

I trust my faithful readers will forgive me that cumbersome allusion.

Grandpa grew up on a farm in rural Illinois. He left the farm shortly before he married and worked for forty years as a machinist. He served in the Navy at the end of World War II. He died earlier this year. He was ninety years old. Quiet, considerate, forthright, honest—these are romantic ways to describe him. They are accurate descriptions, true. But there is more to grandpa’s legacy than romanticism—time and sorrow have provided a clear platform where I am able to reflect on what has been lost. And what remains.

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My work requires me to test various email functions throughout a broad range of systems. I often do this testing from the commandline, but there are times when you want to automate the testing, to repeat the same task many times to make sure that things are behaving reliably.

What follows is a bit of perl code I have developed over the years to test the SMTP engine on a particular host. The code requires the CPAN modules Net::SMTP, Email::MessageID, Email::Address, Time::HiRes. I use this code for all kinds of email testing– anti-spam, mail redirection, anti-virus, mail routing. The script connects directly to a defined mailserver and dumps appropriate data to it. I change that data depending on the needs of the test. The script listed below is set to send 3 messages. That is easily adjustable by redefining the value of the $count variable.

I am positive there are more efficient ways of doing this. I like my script because it is transparent. I am able to see what it is doing and understand every element of it. It makes sense to me. And when troubleshooting, that is an important quality.

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It’s been a long week. The largest majority of my time has been taken up by a series of bizarre problems at work. The element common to each of these problems is the firewall systems we employ. If you do not know what a firewall is exactly, a short definition might run something like this: it’s the chokepoint that regulates what sorts of traffic traverse the boundary between the wild and wooly public-access network and an individual’s or organizations’ private networks. Any (and hopefully all) traffic that moves from one of those networks to the other does so through the firewall. The firewall, in turn, inspects the traffic to see if it is benign or malicious. If benign, it lets it through, sometimes with some cosmetic modifications. If malicious the firewall systems can block the traffic from going out or in. Think of it as a rural county sheriff’s office looking for out-of-state speeders to delay and ticket.

Here’s the abbreviated version of what transpired: the company adminisphere asked my group to add a new feature to our company’s firewall system. We got the instructions from the systems’ manufacturer; we followed them. The system broke.
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