the BSD box
.. on Linux
Release 81
Jan 30th
No sign of release 79 or 80… so they’ve skipped them.
http://opensolaris.org/os/downloads/sol_ex_dvd/
Trying to do an install now, it appears that previous releases would install with 512Mb whereas this one will have you staring at
Setting up Java. Please wait…
Which will stay on your screen until you die of old age, or leave the house, which ever the more likely.
So I’ve created my template domain and will be starting attempt 99,9999,9999999,9999999 to build a cluster from virtual machines.
P.s. sys-unconfig is pretty useful.. forgotten about this one from starting afresh !
CANADA LAND !!!!
Jan 11th
Tomorrow I take flight to Canada !! Banff to be precice, The weather is looking mighty cold, going to go as low as -20c so i’ve been getting in as much practice as I can as I don’t want to die on a mountain 
I’ve even been out and purchased a snowboard (below) which I aim to thrash down the mountain sides in the coming days. Going to be good!
Hangover?
Jan 9th
My New years resolution was to quit drinking, however a 30th birthday party one week in to the new year kind of made a mess of it. Drinking until 3-4am isn’t in keeping with my original resolution, but nevermind noone ever really manages to keep up with there resolutions. The next day wondering around tescos (with stinking headache) I noticed this strange bottle on the shelves.
The tag line “Hypertonic for alcohol consumers” made me curious, so I picked one up to see if it did help at all. After we got back and put the shopping into various cupboards etc… I tried this drink…
BLOODY MINGING
The aftertaste of rotting vomit really didn’t do it for me, Kim hated it as well so majority was that i’ll stick to water.
The Desk
Jan 9th
I decided to re-0rganise my desk recently, so that it’s a bit easier to get to bits and bobs. However here is living proof of the working output from my ‘modified’ poweredge machine -> how-to. The silver fronted machine is the server, quad core with 4Gb of ram which is next my ‘workstation’ which is the dual core xeon with another 4Gb of ram. All in all my set up is nearly put together, under the desk which you can’t see is the gigabit switch and the NAS.
The NAS is an Maxtor MSS II, which i’m part way through botching in order to make it more useful. The MSS II is alright but it’s really designed for small businesses that generally don’t have an IT department, just one of those members of staff who buys some daft magazine every now and then, but assumes he knows everything. With that in mind the NAS is a simple little linux box with a web front end and samba running on it. This would be alright in a simple office with a couple of xp/vista boxes but start to mix OS’s and utilise the device a little bit more than it likes and thinks will break quite quickly. The people from openmss.org are always coming up with new ideas and bits of software and it’s looking like NFS and iSCSI may be not too far away.
Seperate spreadsheets, seperate windows, stupid excel
Dec 19th
Who knows what goes through the mind of developers these days, you have an application where it’s entire basis is the display and management of lots of data. Being able to move around various columns of data and move data from one place to another, sometimes one entirely different spreadsheet. It appears that Microsoft have decided that only a single window view is the way to go, this is quite an old problem btw. This means that opening multiple spreadsheets makes management of them an absolute nightmare as you can only manouver them around in the same window. Any spreadsheet opened through windows explorer as added to the already running excel so the plan of having multiple excels opening wont work either. More >
Poweredge Sc440 Pci-e hack (x16 vga card in any slot)
Dec 17th
I decided to re-write this looking at what i wrote last night, I was evidentally effected by the inhilation of melted plastic fumes.
I was recently sent a link to dell.com where there was an offer on their servers, making a dual core xeon with 4gb of ram etc.. dirt cheap. So without any hesitation I wipped the card out and a week later my brandnew machine arrived, the reasoning to myself was that this was going to be my new workstation. I stuck in a vista install disk and off I went, didn’t take long and a fresh install and a new machine was there ready to use. The poweredge comes with an onboard ATI es1000, which honestly is bloody awful. So without any real investigation i went out and purchased a gfx card allowing me to hopefully have some sort of graphics acceleration in my machine. New GFX card in hand I opened up my dell machine and found there was no where inside the machine for this card to fit…
Centos 5.1 Xen build (domU)
Dec 14th
Here is a quick how to for installing centOS 5.1 in a domU, this is a netinstall so all thats required is a kernel and a ramdisk. The latest release is 5.1 and i’m in the uk so I’m using the UK mirror.
The Kernel and ramdisk are found here, download these using wget or any of your favourite methods and place somewhere in your dom0. In my templates folder/xen you will find a simple template for a centos config, change the paths to match your kernel and ramdisk… you’ll also need to change the disk to whatever you’re using, disk image or another LV.
then xm create -c <centos_config> and you’re away.
The templates folder can be found here.
Twin
Dec 10th
I’ve used GNU screen for absolutely ages, a recent chat made me have a look around for an alternative, the alternatives are at best weak. The best i found was a program called twin, which cleverly enough stands for Text WINdow manager….
It works *just* there is a screenshot, but I think im going to stick to screen for now
os X icon choices
Dec 9th
I noticed today whilst browsing some SMB shares on my network the choice of icon that apple have used. Normally this icon is too small to actually work out what it is, however changing file view to columns you’re presented with a larger icon. More >
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