I had a failure of my Cacti system over the weekend, entirely caused by bad Gentoo emerges. Two different problems, both caused by bad upgrades of packages brought in from ~amd64 or ~x86, made Cacti colourfully dysfunctional for a couple of days.The first was an update to the spine resource poller, part of the Cacti … Continue reading Sometimes, Gentoo bites
Category: Linux
Posts discussing Linux and related technology.
Sometimes when working with computers and networks (as with most things in life) the thing that causes the most problem is the last thing you suspect--or often something you never suspected. I had a reminder of this the other day, when a moderately complex task I'd set myself looked to be scuppered for absolutely no … Continue reading Don’t you hate it when defaults change?
Over the last fortnight I finally got the wriggle-on to upgrade all my (K)Ubuntu systems to Hardy Heron. Various issues occurred with each of them, but overall the entire exercise went smoothly (my wife's little old Fujitsu Lifebook was probably smoothest of the lot). I had one rather vexing issue however, on my old (I'm … Continue reading Ubuntu 8.04 Wireless Weirdness
I wrote about Zeroshell, and how I thought it was pretty great. I still do, but it hasn't taken centre-stage in my network configuration like I thought it would. I've had to tone down my raves about some of its integrated features as well. The fact that it hasn't taken centre-stage is possibly as much … Continue reading Zeroshell redux
I'm running Debian on a Linksys NSLU2 storage device, and it works really well in general. So well in fact that a lot of the time I forget the thing is even there! It's sitting in the garage minding its own business, serving out video and music files, and storing backups of the other systems … Continue reading When Upgrades Go Wrong
I love it when, almost by chance, I find something new. I decided yesterday to look at FLOSS-based router distributions. I've been using IPCop for a while, as an easy way to create a VPN to another location. Unfortunately, IPCop failed my latest requirement: 802.1Q VLAN support. So I went surfing and found an absolute … Continue reading Zeroshell: network services distro
Bad things don't always come in threes. For my MythTV setup, four bad things all happened at once. First was that the governments of the Australian states that run Daylight Savings Time (DST) decided to jump on the energy-saving bandwagon and change the end-time for DST this year. Second was that the OzTivo folks changed … Continue reading MythTV fun and games
Just wended my way through another SLES 10 install on s390x. It's b0rked though, and I'll probably have to redo it. I had some kind of I/O error during the install which seems to have resulted in a couple of the filesystems being remounted read-only. Not too much trouble you'd think...Some things aren't starting because … Continue reading SLES, you make it so hard to like you
I know I'm going to cop a beating on the Planet for this post, but here goes... For a long time I ran a desktop system built on Gentoo Linux. A while back I tried Ubuntu, and I've been running that as my desktop ever since. Every now and then, though, I feel an inclination … Continue reading Thinking of a Gentoo desktop
So I was catching up on the RSS feeds I subscribe to, and came across an article on the latest issue of Full Circle (a magazine about goings-on around Ubuntu Linux). In it I found an article on OpenTTD, an open-source clone of the old 90's game Transport Tycoon Deluxe. As one who spent many … Continue reading OpenTTD
Crossed Wires 