Raspberry Pi adventures, Part Two

The first part introduced my Raspberry Pi tower and some of the progress I’ve made in interfacing with OLED and LCD devices over I2C. Now, I’m going to talk about some of the infrastructure software used in the system. Gentoo Linux Firstly, as I introduced previously, I’m using Gentoo Linux as the base OS layer … Continue reading Raspberry Pi adventures, Part Two

DisplayLink and x2x brings back Zaphod mode

Ever since work issued me a Lenovo T61 and I installed Fedora on it, I have lamented the loss of something that X afficionados referred to as "Zaphod mode".  By gluing together a few different software and hardware components I managed to get close to the old Zaphod mode days -- but first some background... … Continue reading DisplayLink and x2x brings back Zaphod mode

Oracle Database 11gR2 on Linux on System z

Earlier this year (30 March, to be precise) Oracle announced that Oracle Database 11gR2 was available as a fully-supported product for Linux on IBM System z.  A while before that they had announced E-Business Suite as available for Linux on System z, but at the time the database behind it had to be 10g.  Shortly after 30 … Continue reading Oracle Database 11gR2 on Linux on System z

What a difference a working resolver makes

The next phase in tidying up my user authentication environment in the lab was to enable SSL/TLS on the z/VM LDAP server I use for my Linux authentication (I'll discuss the process on the DeveloperWorks blog, and put a link here).  Apart from being the right way to do things, LDAP authentication appears to require SSL or TLS in … Continue reading What a difference a working resolver makes

Another round of Gentoo fun

A little while back I did an "emerge system" on my VPS and didn't think much more about it.  First time back to the box today to emerge something else, and was greeted with this: >>> Unpacking source... >>> Unpacking traceroute-2.0.15.tar.gz to /var/tmp/portage/net-analyzer/traceroute-2.0.15/work touch: setting times of `/var/tmp/portage/net-analyzer/traceroute-2.0.15/.unpacked': No such file or directory ...and the … Continue reading Another round of Gentoo fun

Nagios service check for IAX

I've been using Nagios for ages to monitor the Crossed Wires campus network, but it's fallen into a little disrepair.  Nothing worse than your monitoring needing monitoring...  so I set about tidying it up. Network topology changes, removal of old kit, and some fixes to service checks no longer working correctly. One of the problems … Continue reading Nagios service check for IAX