Recent blog entries for Seri

Saturday: Woke up early for a Saturday, actually made it out of bed before 10:30am.

Took my daughter to a birthday party, and then went to go and get my wife's birthday present, decisions and choices I hate them.

Returned home with daughter and then proceeded the thrash away with IPTables, experienced some strange Masquerading issues that took a while to resolve. Played my daughter at BomberMan and was suitably beaten.

Spent evening attempting to beat IPTables into submission.

Friday: Friday has finally shown it's beautifull face and announced the beginning of the weekend, time enough for me to do some serious work on trying to finish this doc, or at least get it to version 0.1.

ISDN link to Bangalore keeps going down, am convinced it's an error at their end but no way to decisively conclude as it may be a problem on the transatlantic link side of things.

Finalised the settings for invisible proxying with content scanning and it runs lovely, no longer need to specify any proxies just point it at the default gateway and hey presto.

More DevFS fun, decided to implement it on the server before migrating it to ReiserFS, as usual it did not go according to plan, recompiled the kernel, migrated boot onto a seperate drive, reran lilo and recieved a lovely message about boot signatures.

After checking that I hadn't gone above the 4Gb limit, then restoring the mbr, then rechecking the lilo.conf, then recompiling lilo 20 times I found it, thye most stupid of things, the most irratatingly simple, the partition I had migrated boot onto used to be the NT boot partition and I hadn't removed the entry from lilo, DOH!.

Thursday: One of the worst days I've had in a long time and one of the busiest (anybody would think that I link those things together :o) Had 3 of the Stratus HP-UX boxes collected, took about 3 hours trying to work out which ones they were and then an age trying to navigate them out of server rooms (who the hell put them right at the back).

I think the I.T. manager may be reading my diary, today he removed everyones access to the server room except mine and refused to restore it until it was tidy, spent 6 hours trying to chase cables.

Buggered my laptop for the second time this week, decided that having DevFS mounted over the top of my old /dev was untidy so I moved /dev and rebooted, then realised that I hadn't created a /dev folder to mount DevFS in, trawled freshmeat looking for a rescue disk that could handle ReiserFS (may I recommend Recovery Is Possible), 5 minutes later, presto.

Keep being nagged about project slipage, so many things to try and keep on top of atm.

Wednesday: E-Mail from heaven, I'm so happy I could sing, my previous company is no longer trying to take me to court and is willing to accept my offer, that potentially makes me £3000 better of, I am so glad they saw sense, I doubt I could have afforded the legal fees if they hadn't.

I'm currently distressed that someone has rated me as a journeyer, makes no sense to me.

Tuesday: Feel guilty about lack of participation in things Linux related, so I'm spending a large chunk of time answering questions on the LFS mailing lists. Keep being pestered to start tidying up the cables in the server room, our IT 'Manager' is threatening to remove access, if only he would my life could be a better place to live, ho hum.

Am still getting to grips with the trust metric system on advogato, was surprised when I logged on this morning to find I'd been certified by a few people, nice to see. In turn I went through each of the people looking at the projects they were involved in and being distressed that I had actually used most of them so I was aware of the quality of coding, used this knowledge to rate them in turn. Not sure if that's right but it works for me.

Hmmm, talked someone though how to move the /boot partition onto another drive and I carried out the instructions my self to make sure I hadn't missed anything, then moved it back, X locked my machine and rather the use SysRq I just rebooted, guess who forgot to rerun Lilo?
Had the lovely LI prompt. One tomsrtbr+loadlin later and I'm back in business.

Moderate success on the Advanced Server Howto, left DNS be for the mo and carried on with squid and squirm, still cannot decide between Apache Proxy and Squid, Apache seems to do a better job of getting cache hits but Squid can do a hell of a lot, setup squirm so that it blocks 90% percent of web adverts, gave me a warm feeling inside.

Monday: Work is extremely boring, project has been 75% signed off, we're just doing housekeeping now, means sitting round all day, ocassionally running some performance tests.

Ho hum.

Went to see an old friend to show off the car, had fun driving round London back roads.

Sunday: Shoot the people who try to include SCART sockets on devices, none of them are standard! Woke up this morning with my Daughter complaining that the Nintendo doesn't work, investigate the problem, the Nintendo has picture but no sound, spend the majority of the morning trying different wiring combinations. Should be easy:
TV with 2 SCART Sockets
Sky Box with 2 SCART Sockets
Video with 2 SCART Sockets
Nintendo with 1 SCART Output
Stereo with 1 SCART Input (not strictly true but close enough)
Should be able to wire TV to stereo so all sound from TV will also go to stereo, should then be able to wire Sky into TV, should then be able to wire Video into Sky and lastly Nintendo into Video, when I do I get no sound from stereo (bugger) Finally after much head scratching I get it sorted.

Discover that my server is still rebooting itself, worry that the processor may have already fried and is merely finishing its death throes. After investigation it appears that it randomly decides to reboot when the lid is closed, bizarre bahaviour, it can wait a random ammount of time, implement a temporary fix by jamming a thin book under the lid to stop it tripping the close detection button.

Get sidetracked away from DNS by Squid and Squirm, have fun getting them configured to block all traffic from ad sites, then try to tackle getting the Apache proxy server to route through them, is probably very easy but I can't think straight atm.

To tired, job for another day.

Saturday: Good intentions have a funny way of being easily forgot until it's to late. Had big plans for today, I should have gone to the gym (still vainly trying to pursue fitness), then gone into town with Ranj to look at DVD players, after that I could devote the day to sorting out DNS. What actually happend, I woke up late with the headache from hell, said stuff it to going to the gym, met with Ranj and tootled into town, wandered around aimelessly looking like the living dead, brought some new CD's (PJ Harvey, Daft Punk and Death in Vegas), then tootled home, never made it as far as looking for DVD players, phoned on the way home by the wife to ask if I could get some compost (the moment the suns out she gets all these gardening ideas).

Started tinkering with the server, came to the conclusion that it's overheating (the server is a small P233MMX Laptop), after some dissasembly I've found that the chassis cooling fan isn't being powered. Snipped the wires and soldered on some new longer ones then investigated wiring it into other sources of power on the mboard, all too high, the fan wants 12V and all the ones I'm finding are 48V, good for cooling, bad for noise. Hit on a brain wave, dig out an old variable transformer, cut of one of the connectors that I never use, set it to 14V and then wire it up to the fan, presto, it's running slightly faster with no noticeable noise increase, admitidly it now uses up an extra plug socket but so what.

Decide to leave tinkering for a while whilst I investigate storage in the bedroom (spurred on by the fact that whilst looking for the tranformer I filled the living room with all my cables and useless gizmo's), decide to buy some new wardrobes and end up trying to fathom the strangest logic ever.

Point: Acording to wife we can't afford two new wardrobes which with all the fittings come to about £350, so we decide to buy one this month and one next. Get to Ikea and walk out with no wardrobes but two bedside cabinets, a new chest of drawers and a new TV unit, total cost £400, all chosen by her, where's the logic?

Well my productivity time has been eaten away, got back at about 6:30 and finished putting Ikea furniture together at about 10:00 and then spent a further 3 hours trying to wire the SCART sockets up correctly, am now to tired to be productive.

Friday: Feel a bit of a fraud, have opened an advogato account although the ammount of development I actually do is minimal.

Never mind, I'll make it up with the ammount of documentation I'm churning out (oh my how we love those HOWTO's).

Trying to skive out the office, one of the first days in ages that the suns been shining and the skies are clear, god I hate the British climate, problem, supposed to be going into town for drinks, unfortunately this is one of the few times that we have the option of a babysitter, should I risk a womans wrath?

Hmmm, still have to finish the auto DNS section of the Linux Advanced Server Howto, linking in the DHCPD to auto update DNS records isn't as easy as it seems.