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
Tag: problem
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
Observant readers will notice that they are no longer able to respond to posts. The blog-spammers have won the battle but, as they say in the classics, they will not win the war…I've turned off the comment capability, until I can get something in place to bring the rubbish under control (a recent update to … Continue reading Comments and Downtime
Newcomers to UNIX-like operating systems are often confused by the difference between the shell operations pipe and redirection. The difference is easily explained with an example, in the context of web development. The shell command echo "st=1" | ./lifeswork.pl shows how a pipe is used to supply command line input to a script usually invoked … Continue reading The difference between pipe and redirection
I was about to post about how pleased I was with Synergy in helping me tidy up my desktop clutter (by removing a keyboard and mouse from the surface). Ironically, I'm instead posting about a problem with the configuration that will cause me to throw it out and look for something else. Why the title? … Continue reading Security blows
If you can read this, it means that Round 3 of my fight with my ISP is over and my ADSL is back up, which is a good thing because it means that I can tell you about why my ClustrMaps image has so many red dots on it suddenly...Every so often I found that … Continue reading Scourges of the Universe: Blog Spam, and ISPs
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
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'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 like Gentoo Linux, but sometimes I find it's not really applicable for some of what I'm using it for. Like my main server. This machine is one of the two machines at my place that just HAVE to work (the firewall/phone server is the other), and there's been a few instances recently where Gentoo has let … Continue reading Gentoo Linux wastes a bit more of my life
Crossed Wires 