4 Nov 2000 (updated 4 Nov 2000 at 03:04 UTC)
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Been too long since i posted an entry. Things have been
really busy at Eazel because we've been getting ready for
the PR2 release of Nautilus, and it's the first time a lot
of the trilobite stuff will be visible and easily
accessible. Eskil and i have
been working
on the RPM installation system, and it's looking really
nice. He took my quick hack for resolving a Redhat 6.2
installation problem and turned into this generalized
problem-solver that's totally going to kick ass. I'm sure
it all has lots of bugs that we haven't found yet, but the
idea that this stuff works at all is really cool.
Greg and i finally solved the issue with the rack-mount case
by taking it back to Central Computer and exchanging it for
a Boom rack which had risers on two slots instead of one.
To our surprise, the risers were actually on slots 2 and 3:
they were prepared for the rise of AGP! So we can use both
slots in this case, which was really nice. The whole case
seems to be designed well, as if it was designed by people
who actually do a lot of rack mounting. I'm impressed and
pleased with Boom now.
We got the 3 60G drives in, and set up a RAID5 on it: 120G
block device with a redundant drive. The 120G block device
then became a 114G reiserfs partition (it journals, which
makes it much faster at recovering from crashes on big disks
than ext2). We need to do a little more testing, but i
think we'll be ready to put this machine in the coloc next
weekend -- yay!
Say2 switched over to using the database for user logins
now. The next task (which i avoided starting while work was
so heated up) is to figure out a way to use the openssl
library to do encrypted connections, without using the cert
baggage. I want to do my own authentication over ssl using
raw DSA keys (Frank at work convinced me that the overhead
of X509 certs is just not worth dealing with them). I
figure the client and server could exchange keys when they
first meet, just like ssh. At worst, i can make up a bogus
cert that's used by all say2 servers. Also, answer
convinced me that the details of splitting off the channel
server merited a little more thought.
I'm incredibly infatuated with Plaid now. Bought a
double-CD called "Trainer" which is just packed with stuff
that burrows into my brain. Very little new music beyond
that. Still working on the Venus EP, aiming for November.
Did absolutely nothing for Halloween. My PS2 arrived a few
days ago, and i bought a crappy game (Orphen) and tried out
the DVD player (much cooler). Gonna bring it up to the city
this weekend to show off and get better games for.