Sunday 31 October 2004

Renaming

I just renamed a couple machines to fit a naming scheme. My machines were always supposed to be named after female fictional characters... I was just drunk as fuck when I named dulcea and michael is named for his previous incarnation which was a match to nikita. However since michael and nikita have been living in different homes for a while and different cities for at least a year, it's time to move on.

So dulcea is now siona from Herbert's God Emperor of Dune. She gets down with Idaho and kills the old worm. Fun stuff. And michael is now friday after Heinleins renowned character. A clone, a killer, and a lover. Friday is mostly about the lovin. Especially in large groups. Go Heinlein!

Siona will still answer to dulcea though. I know a couple peeps use that name for mail. Otherwise, there's not much else to it. Most of the stuff online refers to uro.mine.nu rather then her actual host name. I guess we'll see if anything breaks.

Sunday 24 October 2004

Here Comes Sarge!

Upgrading Dulcea has been interesting. Trying to do a Debian install from Knoppix was a really bumpy ride it turns out. After several aborted attempts, I grabbed and burned the net-install image. It's about 100MB on that image and it gives you the very very base system and all the hardware detection you could expect.

The Sarge installer, once I finally got it going, is really great. It's curses so there's no images to distract you from the important task of installing debian. I went with the default install method which is "duh, just do it all for me". I had to pick partitions, and the manual partitioning tool is fabulous, and select locale and that was about it. For "packages" I just chose no packages at that time so that was it.

When I booted to my new debian install, it had a little first-time configurator thing which I just sort of hit "enter" till it was happy. I didn't really check drive space until well after I had been installing packages but I was at 330MB the first time I checked. Nice and small. Now that the system is almost finished, it's still under 800MB including compilers and libraries and everything else.

Some parts of the system config were easy, restoring users, configuring sshd, network, bind .... But there were a couple odd hiccups. Mostly dhcpd was the biggest problem. I wish now I knew what version of dhcpd I was running before because I had to comment out a whole mess of options to get it working in debian (dhcpd 2.0pl5-19).

At any rate, the one last thing I need is to get samba working. Mail, DNS, everything else is flying. I did take the opportunity to upgrade PHP and Apache installations (naturally) and that was good too. So far, I'm likin what I see.

archangel@dulcea:~$ uname -a
Linux dulcea.dl.nibble.bz 2.4.27-1-386 #1 Fri Sep 3 06:24:46 UTC 2004 i686 GNU/Linux
archangel@dulcea:~$ uptime
09:23:48 up 18:28, 1 user, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00

Wednesday 20 October 2004

1 Year Uptime

Nikita is coming up on her first full year of uptime. She's a cute little AMD K6 266 that czak had put a base debian install on and dante and I hardened (somewhat) and loaded. She is the primary DNS server for the nibble.bz domain. She's got a few services installed for mail and some web based stuff. As a side-note, her power supply fan failed a long time ago :P

Her last boot date was November 5th, 2003 so we're all very excited and proud of our little box.

Sunday 17 October 2004

Out with the Old, In with More of the Same

Well though this little Linksys router is still falling over every couple days at least, I'm not too keen to replace it. I bought it from Future Shop and they'll give me a replacement over the counter. The catch is that when I bought the router, it came bundled with a wireless pcmcia card. So I have to trade both in together but there's no bundle for the newer model wireless gear yet. Ergo, I'll get fucked around a little. I'm not confident either that the newer router is the solution anyhow. I'll have to figure out which way I want to go. I'm sure it will all just be flaky and lame anyhow.

And in more adrenline-pumping news, I'm going to try to upgrade dulcea. The basic battle plan is backup the entire root fs too the data drive and then go to debian for the base system. Fine except there's so much tweaked shit it's going to be nuts. I currenlty only have a couple packages that are compiled from source (apache and php5), but if I do SVN it may have to be from source as well. That and the doped-up Samba, NIS, NFS, DNS, mail, and all the user accounts... It'll be fine, right? Right? Oh dear God!

And finaly, it's movie review time. Mostly good stuff too.

THX 1138 (Director's Cut)

This is the first time that I saw THX 1138, believe it or not. What a fabulous Sci Fi movie. I'll rate this as master-time-and-space-so-you-can-watch-it-more... Or something of the likes ;) Okay, maybe it's not worth forming a cult over but it's a classic sci fi telling of a future people conquered by impersonal entities (corporations or robots, whatever). THX 1138 is a man who is suffering stress for reasons he can't articulate and is eventually arrested for deviance. And then he gets attacked by monkeys. I shit you not. In this re-release, George Lucas attacks Robert Duvall (THX 1138) with a pack of CG monkeys. Really. It makes no sense. None. But otherwise, the remastering and the CG touch-ups are all good. (Monkeys?)

Spartan

Val Kilmer as a Secret Service agent that goes off to save the daughter of some important political figure. Good characters, good story, good work with little surprises. Definately worth tracking down if you like action/spy type movies in the least.

Uh, Some Other Movie

I'm sure I saw another movie and it was good too. Yeah, I'm going to submit this blog/.plan/news crap and step away now...

"Do the 421. Okay, move on to the 631..." - robot cops in THX

Saturday 2 October 2004

New Feature in Linux 2.6: Working!

Michael's been a little wonky the last while. Actually, he's had quirks for a long while with the Alsa sound drivers. Today I upgraded my linux kernel to 2.6 from 2.4 (to 2.6.8-gentoo-r3, actually) and that cleared up the sound problems right away. I've got my fingers crossed, but I think that may have been what was hanging. Maybe not. Either way, it should make for more reliable X and everything else what with being the actively maintained kernel tree.

The other good fun stuff is that I hooked my second monitor back up to Michael. Life is good :D I just poked the xorg.conf I had from Lewk and not it is teh 4w350m3! The sucky thing with my upgrade to 2.6 is that the usual framebuffer stuff ain't workin so great. I'm not sure what I'm missing but the new kernel doesn't react well to a vga parameter in either decimal or hex. *sigh* No 1280x1024 console until I figure that one out.

Dulcea, on the other hand, is going to need a kick to the seat of the pants. I've installed Subversion http://subversion.tigris.org/ but I can't create a new repository. I keep getting Berkley DB errors. I can't upgrade the Berkley DB installation since that's something that lives deep in rpm-hell. As Kevin Smith says: "Fuck DVD." Upgrading distros or pretty much anything else I want to do isn't going to work out so well since I've going a bunch of packages compiled from source (see apache and php5). Waa! Waa!

At any rate, I need to buckle-down and get back to studying the school books now. You kids are always screwing around.

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