Older blog entries for jkeating (starting at number 31)

Work

Had a mostly productive week thus far. Got a lot of things cleared up. Work now knows about Red Hat, so we're taking steps to ensure a quick transition if I were to leave. They're being very very cool about the whole thing. I think if I do leave I'll really miss working with these people.

The FC2 bug w/ some dual Xeon systems and ps/2 not working is getting really really annoying. We should get a fix for this if possible, or a proper workaround.

Fedora Legacy

A community member showed me what went wrong w/ cvs. A missing buildreq of tcsh caused problems, so I've added it in and everything is cool now. New packages are building and will be uploaded. When I get back from RH I'll officially announce that 7.2/8.0 support has been dropped and update / push tickets accordingly.

Personal

Went out with my wife last night, had dinner and then watched Shrek 2. Very very funny, I concur with Jeremy, highly recommended.

Picked up a new XBox game, Rally Sport Challenge 2, on the recommendation of a bunch of friends. Haven't played it yet, having some people over tonight to help me 'break it in'. I hope it's good!

What a fun week.....</sarcasm>

Work

Work stressed me out like never before. I came home most nights and just collapsed on the couch and slept for an hour or 3 before doing anything constructive. I was just dead exhausted from the mental strain at work. Whats worse, this seems to have done some odd things to my normal sleep patterns, and now I can't get more than 3~4 hours of sleep at night, which is only compounding the situation ): But now it's the weekend and I hope to catch up on some sleep and get things somewhat back in order, just to start over again next week. Good news is that I'm only at work for Mon - Wed of next week, due to flying out to Red Hat on Thursday. Also we have Monday off so a good weekend.

Fedora Legacy

The discussion of removing Fedora Legacy support of RHL 7.2 and 8.0 went pretty well. Most people saw good reasoning behind removing it, very few really really wanted to keep it. I think I've made up my mind and support will be dropped on Monday. I'll have to go through bugzilla and update all comments to reflect this, pushing some things into testing that were waiting on 7.2/8.0 stuff.

Pushed cvs into updates-testing, but a user reported that cvs was claiming it needed a dep of "no". User was able to just rebuild the srpm and no more "no" dep. Seems that something went wrong in mach to cause the dep. Will have to investigate.

Personal

NetFlix sent me Daredevil (well I picked it out). Watched it, wasn't too awful. My wife and I plan on going to see Shrek 2 in the very near future. Would have gone tonight if I hadn't taken a longer nap that I originally planned.

Tried to yum upgrade my FC1 x86-64 system to FC2 x86-64. Didn't realize I had "exactarch=1" set in my yum.conf and this seems to have caused some severe problems. All my applications seem to be looking for /lib and /usr/lib stuff rather than /lib64 and such. X is broken, so is most of KDE. I'm really not sure where to go from here, but I'll figure something out (with help from smarter people than I of course). So, word to the wise, remove exactarch=1 from your yumconf if doing upgrade.

So, advogato has been down for a while, so I haven't been able to blog. Grr.

So, pushed a LOT of packages out via Fedora Legacy. Cleaned up most of what is in updates-testing, and tried to touch on every bug in bugzilla. Managed to close a few. Did some package building tonight, and pushed them up for QA. Things should start rolling good now that I finished up some work that was sucking all my time.

So I'll be making a trip to Red Hat at the end of next week. I hope to meet a lot of the people I've been talking with online for the last couple years.

Gave an OS X presentation to my local LUG this past weekend. It went pretty well. Theme of the presentation was "Unix + Eye Candy". Most people seemed pretty impressed with Expose and Finder's spring loaded folders.

Sent mail to Fedora Legacy list about dropping 7.2/8.0 from officially supported releases. This will help streamline our updates with minimal user impact. Read the message (and resulting replies) here.

Fedora Core 2 is officially out now, thats major kick butt. I'm busy at work getting FC2 officially supported on our product line so that we can do pre-installs. Things are looking good, except for our p4 workstation, which is based on an Asus P4P800. FC2 is known to not work with this motherboard, but no solution is known yet. Bummer. Loving the +2TB support. Now we can fully populate some of our servers, and aggregate some servers together for even larger storage. Wheee!

Oh, and spot's blog entry has got to be one of the funniest things I've read in a while. Way way funny.

Busy day today. Had a new client at our offices, to oversee how we would be putting their systems together and helping us to get their software loaded on the systems. It was a good visit, they were impressed with how we did things.

Went out to dinner at Olive Garden with my wife, we try to have a nice dinner out at least once a week. Working on not eating as much, so brought home more than 1/2 the dinner. Will make a good breakfast tomorrow before the LUG.

Speaking of the LUG, I have to prep my laptop for a talk on OSX tomorrow. The theme is Unix but !Linux. I haven't written anything down for the talk, should be interesting (:

Better day today (: Gave my presentation to the sales people. They were looking for something far less indepth than I originally thought so I was able to 'off-the-cuff' it. Need to write up a presentation for when I go to a customer's location in a couple weeks. That should be fun-ish.

More testing of kernel 2.6 and greater than 2TB block devices. I've got a 12 drive SATA raid box that exports the raid array as a block device over Fibre. Getting some weird benchmark numbers, much faster writes than reads, and I'm not sure if it's the device, fibre in general, or kernel 2.6. Need more investigation.

Got told this morning that I had to have a complete new network segment put together with its own kickstart server that is also a firewall/nat box for special installs for a company that will OEM our hardware up by, oh tomorrow morning. Nothing like a short deadline, joy. So worked on that most the day, and will continue working on that tomorrow. Repeat after me, "I love my job. I love my job." (:

Ugh, today == suck. Work was nuts, machines failing left and right, right and left, up and down, and well you get the idea. Vendors can't reproduce our issues, can't help, customers are screaming for the systems, and oh yeah, gotta prepare a presentation to the sales department for tomorrow. joy. Also found out that our office can't use ADSL. Something about our fax line being fibre switched and our voice line being a "hunting" line. Bottom ..er line.. is that we can't do ADSL. So now I have to look into something else for our backup Internet solution. joy.

I had hoped to get some Legacy stuff done tonight, but a monster stress headache is driving me to bed, very early. I just had time to submit two of my last 3 chapters for tech-editing. joy.

Long time, no blog.

Getting busy with Fedora Legacy again, pushed OpenSSL. Finished up enough tech-editing tonight to be able to spend tomorrow night doing Legacy work.

FC2 Test releases are looking VERY nice on my ibook. The PPC folks have been doing a great job. Very soon I plan on doing a complete writeup on doing an OS X/FC2 dual boot from scratch.

Work is extremely busy. Maybe some day they'll hire somebody to help me, but *shrug* I can only do so much during the day.

Watched Bad Boys II the other night (thanks netflix). it wasn't too bad, a little worse than the first one, but still watchable. Johnny English was slightly less watchable. Over 150 more titles on my netflix queue, what fun! What would be really neat is a "shuffle" function for your queue, so that what you get next is a total suprise.

Oh, if any of you catch the Saturn "Pac-Man" commercial, it's very funny (:

What a fun monday</sarcasm>.

Ran into a rather odd bug in Fedora Core 1 x86_64. Seems that when doing a kickstart, grabbing the ks file over http, anaconda will fail to retrieve a kickstart config file with a ".rm" somewhere in it, like "fc164.cfg.rm" or "fc164.rm.cfg". Very bizarre. Change the name to "fc164.cfg.small" or something else and it works. Will investigate this more.

Had a good weekend, went to a go-karting place to celebrate my birthday, and a coworker's. Then went out to a couple bars, wound up at a very cool Irish bar, listening to live Irish music. It was very fun.

Preparing my Fedora Core 2 presentation for Indiana University's Linux fest thing. Should be pretty cool.

Been a while....

Pushed out another Legacy update, and a couple packages into updates-testing. Rolling right along. Should be able to ship out the master mirror server soon, FC1 64 installed nicely on it.

Been reading up on Bacula, seems like some decent software. Put in a project request at work to start playing with it on larger hardware sets and possible do a package deal with Bacula on our big storage boxes. If nothing else, I want to use it internally to back our stuff up.

Playing a bit with dspam. Very cool spam filter. I set it up for my account on my mail server. After feeding it 20~ spams I had in my trash, it caught 99% of the spam I got for the rest of the day, with no false positive. I'm pretty impressed. Install is a bit freaky, perhaps I should package it up and toss it at fedora.us for future inclusion in Extras. Of course, then I'd have to figure out how to use it correctly with sendmail/postfix/procmail. Wheee! Currently I'm using it with Courier-mta and my mysql based virtual users.

Getting closer to my Athlon64 system. Picked out system board, cpu, ram, video card, 19" LCD, second (third?) harddrive, and a PVR card. I just need the check from the publisher for the work I've done on a couple books and it will be mine. Oh yes, it will be mine. Muahahahaha!

Went out to dinner with our Western Digital rep last night. They really want to push the Raptor drives. I have one in my personal system ( a pre-engineering sample ), but I'm going to hit them up for another one that I can buy at a reduced rate for more home testing. We went to a seafood place called "Seastar" in Bellevue. It was OK, but I didn't really like it. Too croweded, too expensive, and the crab pasta thing I ordered tasted like brine. I couldn't even eat half of it. At least I wasn't buying (;

Oh, think twice about every buying from Directron. I ordered a 9800SE video card from there, a very specific one, but they sent me the wrong one. When I complained to my sales guy, he proceeded to call me stupid and that I didn't know what video card I ordered. After my next nasty-gram, their customer service people contacted me to quiet me down, and long story short, they don't have the card they advertise, and I'm getting a full refund, no restocking fee, and they're paying shipping. Regardless, I'll never buy from them again.