It doesn't take much to see just how rubbish I am at this blogging thing. The last few months have been full of interesting happenings, and the blog has been silent. I'm not going to embarrass myself by saying "I'll do more frequent updates, really I will" because I know it won't happen. Oh well, … Continue reading Slack blogger
Category: Uncategorized
I'm in the US right now, for a work conference and some meetings. It's been an interesting trip already: a non-eventful flight over (when I was expecting it to be really bad having not flown economy to the US before, yes I know I'm spoilt), and a fascinating and very enjoyable tour of Los Angeles … Continue reading USA travel!
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
A couple of weeks ago I had bootup problems with my old Sony laptop. I had replaced the hard disk in it last year (February), and everything was pointing to another busted hard disk. First time I'd had a machine outlive two hard disks! :(Sure enough, I put a different disk in the laptop and … Continue reading Laptop hard disk replacement, part one
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
Okay, I'm sure it's not really like that. I'm ashamed to admit this one bit me, though: ORDB, which 16 months ago called it quits but has still been online and more-or-less functional, decided last week to false-positive all queries (a mailing list thread on the issue can be seen here. Harsh, but fair--I do … Continue reading ORDB: “If I go down, I’ll bring you down with me”
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've been trying to solve a problem at work for a few weeks now -- one of those tricky "it's only software so it shouldn't be this hard" sort-of problems for which you know the solution is just a matter of putting the right bits and pieces together. At work, I'm more-or-less forced into using … Continue reading Are we letting Microsoft define our industry?
Crossed Wires 