I recently bought a couple Western Digital 1.5TB "Green" Drives (WD15EADS) to rebuild my home media storage array with higher-density disks. I already had one Segate 1.5TB drive (ST31500341AS) I was using for a "scratch" drive (rpm mock builds, storing MythTV recordings, secondary backup) that I had problems …
read moreOther articles
Default gnome-terminal size
Here's the command I found to set the default gnome-terminal height:
gconftool-2 /desktop/gnome/applications/terminal/exec --type string -s 'gnome-terminal --geometry=85x40'
Now when I hit "meta-t" I get the size gnome-terminal that I like.
Oh, to get "meta-t" to work, you might want to set this as well …
read moreSetting up an hdhomerun and "no devices found"
I'm trying to get an hdhomerun set up and my firewall is getting in the way.
After stracing the hdhomerun_config binary and seeing that the discover calls out on the network broadcast (192.168.0.255 here) on port 65001 I did some tcpdumping (also knowing my hdhomerun was at … read moreNew Years Update (3 month edition)
Lots of stuff have been going on around here. I've been busy with a number of household projects and Jocelyn and Jared continue to grow.
Project-wise I've been busy setting up some home-automation. It's mostly focused on Christmas-y things right now, but I'd like to move it past that. I … read moreVersion controlling my home dir
For awhile now I've noticed that things in my home dir aren't setup optimally for my work flow. I've been trying to run with SELinux enabled and I run into development problems when I try to run web applications out of my home directory. Various parts of my home directory …
read moreThis Modern Life
Jocelyn the Vi user
All your boxes are upgraded to F8
I finally have all my boxes upgraded to F8 (via yum; viva la Live Upgrage SIG!). It really wasn't as bad as I anticipated, and in fact, probably much better than my anaconda-based upgrade for F7 since I had all my third-party repos enabled for the upgrade and didn't have …
read moreDisable console blanking
read moreecho setterm -powersave off -powerdown 0 -blank 0 >> /etc/rc.localArgo hard drive upgrade with growing RAID1 array
Yesterday Kevin and I swapped in some 250G hard drives for our old 80G drives. The 80G drives were setup in a RAID-1 configuration. With our recent upgrade to CentOS 5 we gained the ability to do online growing of RAID-1 arrays, so it was a good time to upgrade …
read moreSome Clarifications and Concessions
My recent blog post about direction and online updates sparked some interest - and some interesting discussion. Through that discussion, I wanted to post some clarifications and concessions about the original article.
Concession: I wasn't correct about my statement that Fedora has a "lack of direction" - it's direction is exactly that … read moreWhat Fedora needs is some direction - and online upgrades
Some of the biggest problems I see in Fedora these days are the following:
1. Lack of directionread more</p> Since Fedora is a distribution for developers by developers in order to test out new technology, the main tree ends up being a hodge-podge of whatever each individual maintainer feels like …rcsedit
I've had this little script laying around for awhile that I use as a wrapper for RCS to check out a group of files in one batch, edit them all, and commit them. So I setup repository for rcsedit in case others want to try it out.
It should be … read moreremotebackup project
Maintaining Tripwire Sucks
So, I'm still running Tripwire 2.3.1.2 (hmm.. isn't 2.4.1.2 out now?) on Argo. You know what? Maintaining it sucks.
I hear samhain is the uber-cool IDS of the day (that actually has database signing using gpg, unlike aide), but then I need to learn … read moreRuby-on-Rails is not a PHP killer
My suspicions about RoR appear to be vindicated; at least by one person anyway.
I've tried to read some examples and howtos about Ruby and Ruby-on-Rails. The language seems very elegant, but I always heard that it's slow and suspected that it's ability to do lots of different things was … read moreIPv6 default route problems
When I rebooted my firewall the other day I ended up not being able to route via IPv6. This seemed very odd since
I eventually found that this is a kernel bug through a message on Sixxs' forums … read moreroute -n --inet6seemed very clear that I had a default route.Argo jabber up and running on ejabberd
Tonight I was able to get ejabberd up and running on Argo. I had to use the Fedora 7 package for now until I work out co-maintainership on the ejabberd package in EPEL, but it seems to be running fine.
I imported all the "major" domains - nivek.ws, pyxos.net …
read moreArgo CentOS 5 Upgrade
Argo is now upgraded to CentOS 5.0. There was the usual amount of pain for a server that runs all possible services, but for the most part the upgrade went very well.
So far the only remaining problem is jabberd. I don't have new packages available and the old …
read moreKonversation is miles above Kopete for IRC
I recently (last night) started using Konversation for IRC instead of Kopete and as the title says, it's miles above its main Kompetition (sorry - couldn't resist).
The biggest problem with using Kopete for IRC is that it's mainly an IM program. There's probably only one bug that dramatically makes the … read moreCentOS upgrade success
Since yum isn't capable of downgrading the correct package, I decided to try smart.
And after a couple hours (literally) of computing transactions, it worked.
Now, there's definitely some cleanup to do, but it's pretty good. Unfortunately smart isn't available for RHEL 5 yet (I've emailed rpmforge to request it …
read moreCentOS upgrade time take 2
Figured I'd try upgrading again; this time from CentOS 4.5 to 5. When 4.5 came out I quickly tried just pushing the new centos-release and centos-release-notes packages onto the server and do a 'yum upgrade', but it failed trying to meet dependencies (kernel and kudzu, I believe).
So …
read moreFC6 Xen now working
For awhile now my file server has been running Fedora Core 6. I never have a good time to upgrade it to Fedora 7 because I'm always using it.
In the beginning I had envisioned running multiple VMs on it for compiling packages; it's an x86_64 box, so I would …
read moreSouth Park Mac vs. PC: Computers suck
South Park Mac vs. PC. Funny, true stuff.
read moreLook! It's me!
[silfreed@joshua ~]$ ssh argo Last login: Fri Sep 7 15:09:38 2007 from *joshua.wl.silfreed.net*
[silfreed@argo ~]$ last -ai -n1 silfreed pts/0 Fri Sep 7 15:09 still logged in *2001:4830:164c:30:290:4bff:fe4b:d76f*<
I'm such a dork.
read moreIPv6 for my LAN
I know I said I was using Hurricane Electric earlier today, but now I'm with SixXS.
HE only routes a single /64, which is good for one LAN if you want to use radvd to auto-configure your IPs based on mac addresses. I have two LANs (wireless and wired are … read moreIPv6 for me!
Okay, I said I would do it, but it took someone else beating me to it to get me to get things going.
Andy managed to find out that 6to4 is definitely the way to go if you have a static IPv4 address. There's lots of anycast servers that handle … read moreWhy social networking is scary
You can ignore Facebook's stalking side-nature, but what you can't ignore is that other people own your life.
This is the reason I've resisted Web 2.0 social networking sites for as long as I have; and even though I do use some of them now, I try to use …
read moreIPv6 for everyone
I've often wanted to setup IPv6 at home and for Argo, but I was intimidated by setting up tunnels and such since none of my providers (Comcast or CTI|Networks) has direct IPv6 support yet.
Now someone has gone and made a nice and easy how-they-did-it guide: http://berrange.com … read moreA non-custom CMS!? What are you thinking!?
This is a big step for me. It's the first time I've used a non-custom CMS.
Since I've owned silfreed.net it's always been a custom app. I used jogger (then jolem, then blogstar) to create blog posts through a jabber/XMPP bot. However, this lacked the flexibility to create …
read moreDell 2007wfp
After seeing the Dell 2007wfp show up on sale, I knew I needed one. I had gotten used to the extra desktop space, and being in several IRC rooms at the same time, it's definitely helpful to have the extra room.
I've used a Dell 2005wfp in the past and …
read moreCPlug Asterisk Presentation
Last night Brady and I gave our Asterisk Presentation at CPLUG (slides).
Overall, I think the presentation went pretty well, even if there was a lot of talking and not as much demoing as we would have liked. People had a decent amount of questions at the end that showed …
read moreJocelyn's first website
I've setup a short web redirection page for Jocelyn's photos. You can visit them at: Jocelyn.WarnerFam.net.
read moreWho hates you?
Apparently Microsoft loves bignate, but not me (last 4.25 weeks of logs, not years):
# for i in 'googlebot' 'Yahoo! Slurp' 'msnbot' ; do echo -n "$i: "; cat silfreed.net-access_log* | grep -ic "$i"; donegooglebot: 19043Yahoo! Slurp: 28627msnbot: 12348 read moreCentos 4.4 to 5 upgrade too much of a pain
Apparently upgrading from CentOS 4.4 to 5 isn't as easy as updating the centos-release package and typing `yum upgrade`. This is unfortunate, as the computers that I have running CentOS are typically the ones I like to have a high uptime, so this means I need to take them …
read moreThank god for backup superblocks
Last night I had a bit of a scare; I was googling around and got an error message in Konqueror that was very odd - something about a "read-only filesystem".
`dmesg` confirmed my fears; lots of ext3 errors and DMA errors. Well - nothing left to do here but reboot. Only my … read moreCentOS 5 packages available
I've built a couple CentOS5 packages (syslog-ng, eventlog, and bash-silfreed-prompt-command). Let me know if there's others you need.
read moreDynamic Konsole Session Tabs/Names for Gentoo
Last time I made a file for Red Hat/Fedora, this time you can use this for Gentoo. I dropped this into /etc/profile.d/konsole-prompt-command.sh and made it executable (chmod 755 /etc/profile.d/konsole-prompt-command.sh). The problem is I have to modify each user's .bashrc because Gentoo …
read moreDynamic Konsole Session Tabs/Names Updated
I've previously wrote about setting konsole's tab names dynamically, but there have been some problems with my solution.
- The prompt gets kinda messed up for non-xterms (like when logging in locally
- You have to modify each user's .bashrc file
So I wanted to make sure these changes only got set …
read moreWeb 2.0 upgrade
I'm thinking I should go register warnr.net and setup a Web 2.0 site for myself that's a mashup of my currently blog using reflective web-2.0-approved colors for logos with reflective article titles. My website could be dougls.warnr.net.
The other alternative is to register ougl.as … read moreFile server finally done
I was finally able to get all my drives into my file server and get the array fully upgraded. First, the results:
read more# df -h /dev/md0Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on/dev/md0 1.8T 742G 1.1T 41% /mnt/storage# df -H /dev/md0Filesystem Size Used Avail Use …
Problems with Samba and newly created files fixed
For a very long time I've had problems that I couldn't get access to files I had just created on a SMBFS/CIFS mount. The problem was clear:
read more[silfreed@joshua test]$ ls -ld .drwxrwxrwx 13 nobody nobody 0 Feb 12 09:17 .[silfreed@joshua test]$ touch junktouch: setting times of …
Flame war - why not to use Gentoo on a server
I bet this guy didn't intend to start an Internet flame war, but he did.
I agree with most of his comments, even if they are a bit naive. But for the most part he's correct - Gentoo likes to change things far too frequently.
If you take the time to …
read moreXen and ivtv not quite happy yet
I tried to setup a separate domain to run ivtv and the mythbackend, but it apparently wasn't meant to be. After trying various incantations of "swiotlb=force" in both dom0 and domU, thing still didn't work. I eventually got the devices passed through (PVR-500 - essentially two PVR-250's on a PCI …
read moreDynamic Konsole Session Tabs/Names
I was finally annoyed with having to rename my Konsole sessions every time I ssh'd somewhere, and I finally found a really slick way to do this dynamically. It's only a slight pain of having to put a custom \$PS1 on every user you touch, but this would typically only …
read moreThor upgrade complete
Pictures, yeah! I've got four 400G drivfes, a 160G and a 250G drive LVM'd together to make a 400G, and another 400G in an RMA process. Add it together and you have around 2TB of data at home. Not too bad.
I managed to get Xen up and running - Fedora …
read moreLVM member drive dies; 180 billion bytes sent to an agonizing death
In the process of moving the data from the old LVM array to the new RAID array, I noticed a lot of "file disappeared" or other bad I/O-type errors. Upon further investigation it looked like one of my 120G drives was dying in the old array.
Eventually the drive …
read moreNew array running
# cat /proc/mdstatPersonalities : [raid6] [raid5] [raid4]md0 : active raid5 sde1[3] sdd1[2] sdc1[1] sdb1[0] 1562834944 blocks level 5, 64k chunk, algorithm 2 [5/4] [UUUU_] Now to just get … read more# df -hFilesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on/dev/md0 1.5T 198M 1.5T 1% /mnt/storage
And then the drive goes
The latest bit of fun is the 40G drive (that was in the computer that went poof and is probably over 5 years old) is now dying/dead.
read more# smartctl -a /dev/hdasmartctl version 5.36 [x86_64-redhat-linux-gnu] Copyright (C) 2002-6 Bruce AllenHome page is http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/=== START OF INFORMATION …
Dead DVD burners suck
So apparently my laptop's DVD burner is dead - not the entire DVD drive, just the burning part. That's the first hardware thing that's died in 5 years, so it's not too bad. Hopefully this latest rash of hardware problems doesn't persist too much longer, though.
read moreLaptop Upgrade Choices
Given that I got my laptop over 3 years ago and it's currently out of warranty, I thought it might be a good time to start looking at upgrades. I still don't have any real gripes about my laptop - it's performing incredibly well for being over 3 years old. The …
read morePVR Getting Better
Macromedia Flash finally works
Ever since I upgraded to FC5 my Flash plugin has crashed Firefox. This typically wasn't too big of a deal since I primarily use Konqueror, but I've been using Firefox more often recently since it's javascript support and web debugging tools are a little better. The browser crashing was getting …
read morePVR 2, Doug 1
HTPC One - Ignition!
Sorry - guess all the space shuttle stuff is getting to me ;-)
Thanks to a recent deliver of one ATI X300 w/ s-video output, my HTPC seems to be running. I'm currently watching The Polar Express through Xine, but there's a lot of configuring to go.
The display is currently pretty …
read moreDesktop No More
Well, I made my decision. I'm killing my desktop.
I swapped Thor's Athlon 64 mobo with Manfred's Athlon XP motherboard under the assumption that the 64bit stuff will be put to more use in the PVR. That went fine (Thor was still FC4 - i386 version :-/). The problem came when I …
read moreLife without a desktop?
So, I'm trying to figure out what to do about my dead Xbox. Well, not about the dead Xbox, but about not having a PVD. The problem is I don't have the hardware laying around to build a PVD/PVR/DVR. Unless I use something I already have - like my …
read moreXbox is on the way out
Looks like I might have to revive my PVR project. My Xbox's network card appears to have gone out, and after a night of fiddling w/ it, I don't think I want to put any more effort into it. Now I just have to get it working again so it …
read morekernel-2.6.17-1.2145 seems a little better
Well, it still tries to force the bcm43xx driver in place, but at least I can rmmod it and modprobe ndiswrapper without things getting wacky. I'm going to try to get the bcm43xx driver loaded up w/ WPA and see if it works at all... here's crossing my fingers.
read moreCrazy DNS
After a FC4 glibc update a couple weeks ago, I've found that yum updates stopped working. When I went to debug it, I eventually found that the "lesser" programs like ping and ftp worked, while the "higher-level" programs didn't; like curl, wget, ncftp, and yum.
I tracked this problem back …
read moreFC5 Upgrade Complete - Dual-Head broken
For the most part my upgrade to FC5 went very well. I spent a lot of time upgrading things I had done incorrectly in the past (like installing Eclipse plugins in the wrong place) and trying to get the Broadcom Linux Driver working w/ WPA, but for the most part …
read moreNew Phone Number
Asterisk and Firewalls
[Brady] and I finally found a VoIP provider that seemed to have decent rates and local DIDs in Teliax. This spurred us both to get Asterisk setup on our home networks. I purchased a Sipura SPA-1001 a while back (beginning of October), but haven't had the time or motivation to …
read moreBye Bye, Karma, Goodbye
So shortly after claiming that the Karma's life may be extended, I'm thinking about getting rid of it. I kind-of feel bad for the thing - it was really the best competitor that Apple had, but it's clunky UI and the fact that there have never been any third party integration …
read moreLinux USB Mass Storage Driver for Rio Karma
This is some exciting stuff. I've always loved my karma, but hated the interface. Having the possibility of real filesystem access to the Karma opens up whole new possiblities for syncing music to it. Bring it on!
read moreKonqueror Web Shortcuts Problem with eBay
Konqueror's Web Shortcuts are very nice; it's really handy just to be able to do "<alt-f2> gg: stuff n things <enter>" and have konqueror launch from the run menu searching google for stuff n things.
So, I figured I'd add an eBay shortcut - makes sense, right? It's all good, except …
read moreKopete Socks Proxy Problems
I've recently been trying out Kopete, and am very happy with its integration w/ KDE and KAddressBook. However, I've run into a snag.
Actually, it might not really be Kopete's fault, but it is really annoying. The only way to configure socks support for Kopete is to configure it globally …
read moreMonitoring Sensors on Argo
Seems that a little lm_sensors/net-snmp bug has bit me on the new Argo. Well, it might've been there before but I forgot about it. Anyway, according to Red Hat bug#150199, net-snmp is supposed to be pushed out with the next release with a fix; but that was 3 …
read moreArgo Upgrade Time Again
Not sure if you noticed a bunch of websites on Argo being down last night, but they were for awhile. We installed new 80G hard drives in RAID1 configuration that should give us a good bit more reliability (not that we've had problems). They should also be a good deal …
read moreXen Problems with sata_nv
Apparently Xen doesn't cooperate kindly with the sata_nv driver. I've only found a little evidence of this so far, but the fact that it was 8 months ago doesn't bode well for me. I had really hoped that Xen would have much better performance and be more stable than VMWare …
read moreDell 27xx 2708 Monitoring
Finally got around the login problems I was having trying to automate polling values. Unfortunately I just realized that they don't have transmitted bytes in the RMON page; how disappointing.
Anyway, you can track the work-in-progess of my gathering script in NetMRG's SVN tree. It can login and download the …
read moreThe Docs Don't Lie
Got the Dell PowerConnect 2708, and just like the docs say; no SNMP. It has RMON support built-in and viewable from the web interface, but you can't gather the statistics remotely via SNMP. I guess they're trying to justify how cheap it costs. I guess I'll have to whip up …
read moreThor Upgrade Time
Which can only mean one thing: [Brady] is having his 2nd annual LANnic!
Instead of the Hard Drive dept this year, it's going to be the rest of the guts to give Thor a (substantial) speed boost, and hopefully make the gigabit switch I bought from Dell worthwhile. The specs …
read moreBluetooth in Linux Works
Yep, it really does work. Maybe not quite perfectly, but it's pretty nice that it works at all. Linux (in the past) has lagged behind new technologies, but it seems to be doing a good job at picking up new techs like this pretty quick.
I'm using both the Microsoft …
read moreArgo Upgrade Time
DVD Backups
I've been putting a good deal of time into ripping some Star Wars DVDs so I can watch them on my Xbox. Unfortunately, things don't want to cooperate. First I encoded everything into an OGM container using xvid4 and vorbis for the two english tracks (5.1 and directors commentary …
read moreUn-CoolMax
Strangest thing just happened: both [Brady] and I had these CoolMax quiet Power Supplies that we had been very impressed with.. up until this past weekend.
[Brady] emailed me Saturday night asking if I had a spare power supply as his in Oak had bit the dust. After I got …
read moreiTunes and DAAP is Almost Nice
Why, oh why does Apple ignore open standards like Ogg Vorbis? iTunes is a very slick program for sharing music, especially once you get DAAP working properly on your linux box (I'm using mt-daapd right now), but even with a DAAP server that supports OGGs, and the OGG Quicktime Component …
read moreComputers Are Not Fun
Tiff and I went down to visit my Sister over President's Day weekend. It was nice to go down; we haven't been down to see her in Virginia for several months, so I was happy to go see her at her place (as opposed to her coming up here to …
read morexbox fun
XBMC recently added EXIF parsing to their 'my pictures' section, so now your photos are all rotated correctly! Yeah!
I also recently discovered DAAP and a couple projects for serving it up from linux: daapd and mt-daapd (look: RPMs!). daapd seems to be working well, but I'm not overly fond …
read morejoys of ext3 growing
Actually, this was happening and resolved last weekend (Feb 4th-Feb 7th), but I'm just now getting around to blogging about it (bad Doug!).
Apparently resize2fs is broken in fc3. There's even a Red Hat bug about the problem. Of course, I discovered this the hard way ;)
Turns out resize2fs (used …
read moreTopoUSA DVD compilation not quite complete
I don't use the TopoUSA 4.0 Compilation DVD I made that often, so I didn't notice it before; but the DVD I made is missing elevation information. That makes the DVD about useless as a topographic map. Guess I'll have to try, try again. Or buy TopoUSA 5.0 …
read moreMy Bi-Annual Mac update
I occasionally dabble in Mac, although I've never been a big fan. Of course, Apple had their Keynote w/ Steve Jobs today (which was followed by Chris and Sam on IRC) which announced a couple interesting products.
If you're an Apple user, you might actually be interested in the new …
read moreXbox Live!
Oh; that's probably ™. Crap.
Anyway, the Xbox is up at my house running EvoX and XBMC; and it seems to play my anime very well so far; and they look great! I need to try some higher-quality stuff (I have an HD-version of The Punisher), but so far it's really …
read morexbox mods'r'us
This whole 'Xbox as DVR' thing has been a real nightmare. I expected it to be fairly easy to pick up a 3 year old gaming console after Christmas, but that wasn't the case. After looking everywhere to find one, I finally ordered an Xbox from Walmart.com. It came …
read moreEpilogue part 2.3
Yeah, so I realized that when you upgrade your WAP from 11Mbps to 54Mbps you need to upgrade your ethernet connection, too. So.. we'll just try putting a 10/100 card in the router tonight to see how that goes..
read moreBusy day epilogue
Well, things are progressing slowly with the hard drive. Got the first three drives' zcavs done; the one on the 400G is still going. Things are looking pretty good, though.
Things aren't looking quite as good for the WAP54g. The best I can currently get in G-Only mode is 900KB …
read moreBusy day upgrading
Dennis stopped by on his way back from visiting Michele in VA to pick up a 400G Seagate 7200.8 hard drive that was being run at CompUSA with this deal. $0.50/GB for 400G? I'll take that. I'm currently zcav-ing my drives to see how they all stack …
read moreI get mad when I can't watch my movie
over wireless. So I bought a Linksys WAP54G to put up in my house. This can do 802.11g (which is backwards compatible w/ 802.11b), so I shouldn't have a problem streaming videos over it. Should be a nice speed improvement. I imagine I'm going to setup crazy WEP …
read moreFC3 + KDE 3.3 System Notification Problems
After upgrading my laptop to FC3, I noticed that my system notifications in KDE no longer worked. After a little googling, I stumbled upong a thread that describes how to fix the KDE KNotify problem. I like having my sounds work!
read moreServer management is a pain
Keeping on top of security updates can be quite the pain sometimes. Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) bugs are probably the worst threat to server admins these days; popular packages that are widely deployed are much easier for script-kiddies to target than people's Bind or Sendmail installs of yesteryear. So this morning …
read moreTech support should always be paid
But if you're like me, it probably isn't.
Besides my own computers there are really only two sets of people whose computers I maintain; my parents', and Tiff's parents'.
My parents' computer isn't too bad; typically my mom (Tiff said it doesn't matter if 'mom' is capitolized or not) will …
read moregpg-agent cache timeout
Looks like there's a nifty undocumented feature for gpg-agent that limits your max passphrase cache time to 1 hour, despite what you set the default-cache-ttl to. Luckily, it's just undocumented, not non-existant.
There is also a 'max-cache-ttl' parameter that you can set which defaults to 1 hour. The default-cache-ttl defaults …
read morebackups and updates are good
Somehow, somewhere, Thor's cron jobs for backing up stuff from my big (493G!) disk and for emailing me updates that need applied managed to disappear. Not good, not good.
read moreThe great browser switch of '04
Well, maybe not great, but it's a test at least.
Previously I've mentioned that I've gotten more into RSS recently; and it just so happens that akregator [RPMs] links into Konqueror quite nicely.
So, I've been using Konqueror recently. And, it seems to work pretty well for me. Most of …
read moreEvening happenenings
Recently I've been more and more annoyed by the fact that linux doesn't have some sort of auto-network-selection thing. Specifically, what I'd like is some applet to switch between wired and wireless and select the best wireless network (depending on work, home, etc).
So eventually last night I found NetworkManager …
read moreRSS Syndication
XBMC just might work
I know I previously said that I was probably going to build a PVR myself, my friends at work convinced me that an Xbox might be the way to go. Using a Xecuter 3 modchip and Xbox Media Center, you can pretty much watch or play any video or music …
read morePVR 1, Doug 0
Well, Thor is proving to be more stubborn than I thought. Apparently it's unhappy having all its PCI slots plus it's AGP slot used. Something about "IRQs" or something.
So, Thor's going back in the closet. [Brady] might be right about the box though; I'm afraid it might be ending …
read morecplug'd
It's probably been almost a year since I've been to a CP-LUG meeting, so I figured I should check it out again (plus it gave me a chance to talk to Andy about jobs over at Intellimark). While the meeting topics (synergy, VNC, and RDP) weren't too interesting, it did …
read morePVR Project, continued
lists.netmrg.net update
Following Ian's suggestion, I updated NetMRG's forums so it should be a little more crawlable. When you have that much data (especially Ian), it's really worth it to do that type of update. I generated a patch for my installation; hopefully it will help the next time I upgrade PhpBB …
read moreCloset Project done
Well, the closet is done, but not the other stuff.
There was a lot more work involved here than I orignally thought. I had the sheet of plywood to use (and it looks great!), but it didn't quite work the way I had imagined. The original piece that was in …
read morePVR Project, begin
Over the past week I've been preparing to turn Thor into more than just a fileserver. I've purchased a nVidia MX440-SE video card which has both composite and s-video outputs for about \$34; this card also has hardware mpeg-2 decoding, so it should prove very nice for video output. I …
read moresynergy is real
Yes, I think synergy as the word is often overused in marketing-type appliations, but [Daniel] pointed me to Synergy which is an open-source keyboard/mouse/clipboard sharing program.
"Big deal"™ you say? It's not. This gives me the ability to use one keyboard and mouse between my desktop and laptop …
read moreTopoUSA 4.0 DVD for CD customers
For those that bought TopoUSA 4.0 on CD (7 CDs - 1 install and 6 data), there's a fairly easy way to convert them to DVD and have all the regions available to you at all times.
Basically, you need to make a new directory structure with a 'Data' directory …
read moreNetMRG Hackage
It's been both awhile since I blogged about NetMRG and since NetMRG has had a release, so I figured it's worth a mention
As you can see, we've been making some changes, and hopefully have 0.17 out either Monday or Tuesday. The good thing is, it's still exciting to …
read moreDell Axim X30
In case you haven't heard, I talked myself into buying a Dell Axim X30. It's an amazing little PDA; 624Mhz, 64/64 MB RAM/Flash, Bluetooth and 802.11b. What talked me into it was the price - \$267. That's \$3 cheaper than the slower model. With free shipping. I couldn't …
read moreiMac g5
gmail(fs?)!
desktop status - disabled
So, I was doing that whole case swapping thing the other day, and all was going well. The desktop was now in the mid-tower case and up and running, when all of a sudden it just shut off. Very odd. My first impression was that the CPU overheated and the …
read moreanother kde convert
time for router upgrade
I've been having problems with my router (gunter) for awhile; sometimes named will die, sometimes dhcpd will die. Just 'give up the ghost,' as it where. I've always attributed this to my overclocking the box (it was originally to be an mp3 player). I though it was only overclocked from …
read more2.6 kernel fun
Trying to transfer files at [Brady]'s the past couple times has been a pain; I've only been getting half of what I should from 100MBit (\~5MB/s). I surmised that it might be the test 2.6 kernels I was using from the Fedora development tree.
Needless to say …
read morenew rack update
new website
It's updated again. Woo-hoo. Most of the pages are XHTML Transitional (I have some legacy stuff to port), and I have some wierd issue w/ IE6 not showing the date of the articles (but you can select it..). Hopefully it's more accessibly now; I just need to work on the …
read morejabberd2 - not just for kids
In this month's update, jabberd 2, and other fun!
Okay, so Jabberd 2 is the biggest thing I've done. Oh, and wireless works in linux now. I've spent the last couple weeks on and off setting up a Jabberd 2 server on Argo to be running a more featureful and …
read morehp zt3000 review up
I'm even writing this blog on my new laptop! You can view pictures of my new laptop, and read how my linux installation has been going (Windows is boring, it just works ;). Things are pretty cozy now, just trying to get some things situated, but I am carrying it around …
read moreHP ZT3000cto update...
It's here! I've been taking lots of pics, so I'll try to update the page soon with more details.
read moreHP ZT3000cti
I finally broke down and spent my Christmas Bonus.
In a previous post, I wrote about this laptop; today I finally ordered it. It's a custom order, and isn't scheduled to ship until January 13th, but I've been reading about other orders that have arrived before their estimated ship date …
read moremac take 2
For a while now, I've been thinking that Apple has been the only people making a truly inovative laptops. However, I just can't 'switch', as they would say. I need to understand an OS before I change platforms; so I got myself a older 300MHz Blue & White G3
Now, I …
read moreyarrow & laptops
I've got Fedora Core 1 installed on my IBM T20 now, and it doesn't really seem all that different from RH9. There are some new things that I want to play with; namely the laptop support (supposedly caches i/o things) and ACPI.
The laptop support will be kind-of difficult …
read moredefinitely not man's best friend
how to run a network
Chants and Incantations; that's the best way to run a network
read morekt400 mobo & ati radeon 9600
Well, I figured out one reason my radeon 9600 pro doesn't work in linux; the AGP driver doesn't work with the Via KT400 chipset in Redhat 9! Apparently linux kernels < 2.4.21 don't recognize the chipset and won't load the agpgart driver; I'm recompiling 2.4.22 right now …
read morenew mobo; same old problems
I should know by now that installing a new motherboard isn't gonna be simple.
I picked out the Asus A7V8X (w/ SATA & Firewire) and an AMD Athlon XP 2600+. Seemed like an awesome combo - until I tried to boot. After much unjoy (no POST or screen), I decided to plug …
read moreduo upgrade complete
Well, got duo upgraded again. This time to RedHat 9. There were some minor difficulties getting services running again, but overall I think things went pretty well.
AFAIK, the only service currently not running is the MSN Transport for Jabber. I'm not even sure if that affected anyone. [Brady] had …
read morewin2k sp3 slow boots
I finally figured out what the problem with my slow booting win2k partition was; it all started after installing SP3. The old drivers for my promise controller were incompatible w/ SP3, and thus unhappy. The old drivers were v 1.60 build 33; to get the new ones to work …
read morenew handheld
I've finally replaced my old, kludgy iPAQ. I have intentions on making the iPAQ a car mp3/gps thing (if compaq ever gets off their butts and replies to my email about getting the digitizer repaired). In the meantime, I got myself a new handheld - a Palm TungstenT!! So far …
read morenew laptop!
After months of talking about it, I finally got a new laptop. Man is it nice! More than twice as fast as my IBM Thinkpad 390e, this IBM Thinkpad T20 is a terrific little (really!) guy. At only 1.3" thick (thin?) and 5 lbs, it's almost half as thin …
read moreibm thinkpad 390e is fixed
My IBM Thinkpad 390e is happy again. After a couple weeks where I couldn't use it on battery power, it turned out it was just the battery, and not the dc-dc card that I suspected. Oh well. I did find a good source for IBM Thinkpad Parts at ACS Parts …
read moreannoying freezing powermac 5500
When I found a thread on google groops about a power macintosh 5500 freezing, I thought I was finally going to fix my stupid 5500/250. I ordered a new Rayovac Alkaline 4.5v battery and installed that. I got the whole way through the MacOS 9 installation. Then the …
read morethe time has come
for the new duo! I know you all could tell that duo is much faster than he was. I really should have some pics of him, but I don't. You'll just have to take my word that the paint job is awesome and the ultra-bright blue (power) and orange (hd …
read moreupdate on new duo
wow. duo's gonna be even more of a beast than he currently is ;)
We're getting dual p3 450's for him now, as well as the new case and mobo we already have. Of course, I had to buy a new stick of ram since I fried one when I removed …
read morenew duo in-progress
we finally got a new case, motherboard, and a bigger hard drive for duo. The motherboard is an Intel 440GX+; and after a bios update we were even able to install redhat 7.3 (only took 2.5 hrs to get to this point - would hang on aix7xxx previously)!
Now …
read moremanfred is back up!
well, i got redhat 7.3 installed on my box, and am starting to get programs re-installed (like gabber ;). Thankfully my /home directory wasn't wiped. I was able to save all of my /home, which was very good. I did have backups, but they were about a week old. Guess …
read more/lib!? who needs /lib!?
well, after surveying the damage after the fsck, it looks like my /lib directory is gone. Now, some people might be inclined to say, 'just copy one over from another computer!' But no.. I'm taking the more painful approach of backing everything up (the rest of my drive is fine …
read moreno init found
man this sucks. kernel says it's mounted root, but it can't find init; i've fsck'd the drive (lots of errors); stat'd the /sbin/init file (returns fine) - but the kernel can't find it. Acts like it's not the correct root partition; but everything seems to be there. I wouldn't mind …
read moreserver hackin
I just realized I need to get to work on duo. I need to make jabber site-wide; by this I mean that all the domains hosted here can get 'userid@domain.com' jabber addresses, which would be really easy to remember. This way, my email and jabber id can be …
read morenew mouseman
I recently got the Logitech Mousman Optical, and I have to say it rules. I had the Logitech MouseMan+ (the curvy one), and it was terrific as well. The new mouse is incredibly smooth, and I'll never have to worry about the rollers gunking up ever again!
The new mouse …
read moreAudiogalaxy update
Kevin (friend @ work) discovered the problem: don't use the '@xxx.net' part of your username. This worked for me; other people can try it out now!
read moreAudiogalaxy is being annoying
I'm running audiogalaxy on linux, and i'm having this problem where the satellite deletes my account.txt file and then tells me my account is invalid! This is very annoying. I know they're providing a free service, but this is quite irritating. I guess I'll write them and see what …
read moreJabberApplet
Alright! Now I can announce to the world that my Jabber server is up and running. I finally have a Java web-based applet up and running, so I can access Jabber from anywhere. The JabberApplet is terrific. It does have its quirks, but hopefully those will be ironed out. Of …
read morelaptops rule
wow. i've had an ibm 390e for about a month and a half now, and it rules. I can do all sorts of wireless stuff now that I couldn't before, and it's pretty kewl for portable transport as well.
read morelinux mail clients
okay, this is a pain
wow. now I need nat on gunter for stuff to get to the outside world. makes sense I guess, but it's a pain.
read morerouting in linux
echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward to forward ip traffic on a host. very useful when you have another router behind your firewall.
read moreiptables
iptables are neat. I'm using them to block people trying to do bad things to duo.
read morewindows virus vulnerability
usb mass storage
Found out that usb mass storage in linux needs scsi support. Didn't determine how much - just enabled scsi support, scsi disk support, and generic scsi support. wierd.
read moreIf you can't stand the heat
Kernel Panic! At least, that's what duo did. arrrrgh. definitely need to get some monitoring software on that box.
read moreY2k and network starting
Ooo. Y2k is here.
My computer is getting another upgrade, and the network is being started. Other than that, there is one more download in the Downloads section. Nice
read moreK6-2 CPU upgraded
Well, again I'm a week behind. I got a K6-2 400 last week. It is sweet. $46 dollars or so @ a computer show. The heat sink I bought is monsterous. I also got a 48x CD-ROM drive. Can we tell I'm on a budget? Check out the updated rigs page …
read moremain desktop upgrade
The beast has finally been built. I thought it would be easy, but noooooo. Win95 has to be a pain in the ass. Oh well. It's up and running now, OC'd to 300 (100x3) instead of 266 (66X4). Sweet. Now to reinstall apps...
Oh yeah-check out the details on my …
read more
