Today's "Cool!" ration

First of all, there's video of an airliner being struck by lightning on takeoff from a Japanese airport.  No-one was injured; it's not known whether there was any damage to the aircraft.  The interesting part is that the plane itself triggered the discharge.

And then, yndy found this article about young Saudis using Bluetooth to circumvent the strict segregation enforced by Saudi Arabia's wahhabist religious police.  I have to wonder how long it'll last, but it's one of those cases where the writing's on the wall for anyone who wants to read it.  The coming generation in Saudi Arabia has no use for the Wahhabis and their 7th-century idea of morality.

"Might" does not make right

"The FBI has warned police that al-Qaida cells might use fuel trucks as weapons to attack Los Angeles, New York and Chicago, but officials stressed Thursday the warning was based on uncorroborated intelligence."

Yeah.  "Might."  A completely uncorroborated, unsubstantiated assertion.  And the Earth "might" be about to be eaten by a giant mutant space goat.  What security threat level is this -- lilac?  Teal?  Burnt sepia?

If you don't have anything to back it up except some analyst's unsubstantiated speculation, if you have nothing you can even give a reliability level on, this isn't security; this is scaremongering and crying wolf.  But then, a lot of it is about scaremongering, isn't it?  Scared people do what authority figures tell them to do.

Geek alert: SNMP configuration

I have an odd problem, which can be seen here on my MRTG monitoring page.  You'll notice there is heavy sustained bandwidth from hme0 on minbar.babcom.com and ge1 on vorlon.babcom.com, on the order of 30 megabits per second.  That is backup traffic, and it's going to hme0 on babylon5.babcom.com.

So ... where is it on babylon5's graph?  It's just flat not there.

( Cut for geekery )

So ... can anyone tell me how I educate snmpd about eth0's actual capabilities?

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Update: Found the problem!

There's a directive that can be inserted into the snmpd.conf file to override an incorrectly-detected interface rate.  Simple enough, huh?  But snmpd was ignoring it.  Turns out that the documented syntax of that directive in the man page is WRONG.  So the directive was wrong .... and rather than reporting the error, snmpd was just silently ignoring it.  (Bastard!)

The directive is now fixed, snmpd is reporting the correct interface speed, and MRTG is now showing all the traffic it should be showing.