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
Category: Technology
Tech stuff goes here!
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
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
I made a somewhat cryptic tweet a little while ago about how I spent a crazy-long period of time researching what was, I believed, the next-big-thing in DNS resolution for IPv6 (or so my 2002 edition of "IPv6 Essentials" told me). I could not work out why I saw nothing about A6 records in any … Continue reading Another IPv6 instalment (subtitled: Watch Your Tech Library Currency!)
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
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
I posted on my developerWorks blog about an experience I had sharing an OSA port in Layer 2 mode. Thrilling stuff. What's more thrilling is the context of where I had my OSA-port-sharing experience: my large-scale Linux on System z cloning experiment. One of these days I'll get around to writing that up.
It's been ages since I did an update on the main network machine here, and I bit the bullet over the weekend. 250+ packages emerged with surprisingly little trouble, and all I was left to do was build the updated kernel and reboot. I usually end up with something that doesn't restart after the reboot, … Continue reading Asterisk and a Patton SmartNode
With Apple's abandonment of PPC as of Snow Leopard, I began wondering what to do with the old PowerMac. It's annoying that so (comparatively) recent a piece of equipment should be given up by its manufacturer, but that's a rant for another day. Yes, we can still run Leopard until it goes out of support, … Continue reading ppc Linux on the PowerMac G5
I've been doing a lot of mucking around with KVM with libvirt (I keep promising an update here, don't I). In my desktop virtualisation requirements I had a need for presenting VLAN traffic to guests: simple enough, and I've done it before. You can do what I usually do, and configure all your VLANs against … Continue reading Network virtualisation
Crossed Wires 