Archive for November, 2004
Lastly my parents have been thinking on making some reforms @
home, they asked me how I would like to have my furnitures (actually computer’s furnitures, because my bedroom’s ones are pretty new). I’ve been
google‘ing a little to find some nice well-designed tables and shelfs like those:
Also
Apurioe pointed an idea to me, he said some sort of hand-built rack could be cool too, for holding my 4 tower-type boxes and 1
SS5, also at the middle shelf should have a hidden keyboard slide under monitor’s support.
After trying to decide what could be the best choice for me…I got really confused, also it seems difficult to find a LAN STATIONS seller here at Spain, maybe what’s really happening is I don’t know how the hell these LAN STATIONS are called in Spanish and this is making me querying
google in a wrong way, so if someone knows where to find them or how they are called here, please
let me know ASAP!.
I was reading (and commenting) at
pof’s blog when I found this
poll titled Which OS are you?, it’s really worthless but quite funny, I’ve answered each question and the final result is:
Which OS are You?
OS2-Warp!?! WTF?, you see why I told you it’s funny? 
, while I answered the poll, I was thinking…omg, what if I am a windoze? (like
pof, he’s a Windoze98 
). Anyway…I’d rather to be a BSD OS like:
In the same site you could also find another poll, “Which File extension are you?, I made it too also got a funny result (but I guess it’s better):
Which File Extension are You?
I’m quite happy with this last result, after seeing
all possible.
Besides this entertainment things, I am @
work, and I forced a technical meeting tomorrow between my “team leader” (I really don’t know how to call him), the communication manager and some developers. Everything comes because developers need to get data from some boxes (ATV, Automatic TV) we use to sell, this machines are in the client place, usually behind an ADSL router (which I can not manage) and I’ve been told to call each client and ask to forward the usual ftp ports (20,21/tcp) from their routers to their ATVs because the coders have developed a collector application which uses the file transfer protocol to log in to the client ATV and get the needed data (IMHO, quite silly solution). Can you see where this is going…? What if the client already has a FTP server?, I can change the connection port (21/tcp) but what with ftp-data port (20/tcp)? I told the developers to change this, to not use FTP because it wasn’t thought to be nat’ed and you can not force to any of your clients to let the 20 and 21 ports because they are widely used, they are a standard!…the answer was NO, because they’d be coding an extra month to do so (one month?, they take their time writing code…).
I hope tomorrow they all together will reach another (more friendly for everybody) solution.
Starting on last Friday I felt some kind of bones pain I thought it was because my last gym session…how wrong I was…I’ve got a fucking cold, my nose is like a big red ball so I can not breath properly and my eyes are always wet…the weekend seemed to start so bad, luckly on Saturday I met a couple of friends [Apurioe,Forat] to take lunch in a Chinese restaurant and we planned a geek afternoon @
Apurioe’s home…but the surprise came when he showed to me his new
Alterpath ACS (console server). It’s _awesome_, it’s built with a ~50MHz PowerPC microprocessor (dual core), RAM 128MiB, 16MiB Compact Flash, 2 pcmcia slots and it’s running a
Montavista Linux with
OpenSSH enabled by default.
We started to configure it through a serial console from a
NetBSD using the command cu(1), but when we saw the sshd process running and some kernel modules for wireless pcmcia cards, tried to plug in my
poor UsRobotics and it worked! 
…then our brains started to boil with ideas about how to expand its possibilities…who knows?…Wireless Access Point, Network Storage, etc. I’ll be posting any news about this .
Now it’s being time to sleep, I am sick yet and tomorrow have to work.
My weekends are not so special…I use to stay @
home most of them, they start on Friday midday (when I leave my sit @
office) and finish Monday morning when my
mobile’s alarm sounds.
After having a couple of sandwiches I went to
home and took my parent’s car for going to buy some clothes for me (I use to dress quite urban, I’ll take some pictures I promise) and a
present for my little brother (paid by my mum, she promised him some time ago…), after I had burned my credit card a little I returned back to
home.
I have to say my brother’s
present is awesome…I don’t use to play games a lot, but I do just to quit some stress , and it’s perfect, killing, stealing…and so on (not really good for young minds…but I’m 25 ).
During Saturday and Sunday I’ve updated most of my boxes’ packages, almost everthing on workstations some packages remain outdated on servers (but not vulnerables . Also I’ve got some job done on the test machine (last
FreeBSD I installed, remember?), I set up a NIS server, now my brother and me can log in on any workstation of our LAN using our users without adding them to each box, and also
amd(8) takes care about mounting our NFS homes when needed. I read
this document where everything is detailed step by step.
FreeBSD’s handbook is like a
Linux’s howto collection for
FreeBSD, it helps you saving time having everthing centralized.
And…that’s it, this plus some time @gym made my weekend, not very exiciting but enough for me.
Some weeks ago I installed
Fedora Core 2 at work because I am trying to set up a
Legato Networker server for replacing our (faulty)
Veritas Backupexec. After having some problems updating to the latest core 2’s rpms (solved by hand), I read on my
feeds
Fedora Project had released its Core 3, so I decided to get my hands into the upgrading process. I wasn’t so comfy because too many rpms to be upgraded “automagically” at once, you know? . After two days trying to solve some problems with some dependencies (
Google gave me some clues) I’ve got my Core 3, but…(always there’s a but), it doesn’t boot properly, there are some processes (two ifup) wasting all the CPU, milosn on #netbsd @
freenode told me he already listened someone talking about same problem (it seemed not to be my fault . My guess, it has something to do somehow with a totally b0rked rpm…let’s see what I will figure out tomorrow.
First point where I use to start when I make a new OS installation is…upgrading ! ports and source trees using
cvsup and then rebuilding the base system, making my own kernel,
FreeBSD’s got really good
documentation on this.
After that I thought on setting up a
cvsup-mirror because I’ve got three boxes with
FreeBSD 5.3-STABLE, this will enable me to save some bandwidth, also will produce less work on the official cvsup mirrors.
I saved three partitions ad0s1[f,g,h] to set a RAID1 where the home will be mounted, so the mirror. As far as I understand, this should improve cvsup server’s performance (
FreeBSD’s handbook – The Vinum Volume Manager has some clues why .
I found some problems with vinum, they are known since last August, so I found
a working solution, took me some minutes googling . It seems like vinum is going to be deprecated, and gvinum (geom_vinum) will be its successor.
Well, as you can see I won’t be doing tutorials here, just some links and steps, showing the way I use to enjoy with my systems @ home (or work). So…if anybody somehow read this, and have a better way of doing things, please
let me know, I’ll be glad to read and talk about .
I was wondering how cool could be to have a Solaris around to play with it and learn how it works, but…after wasting the whole Sunday’s morning to get my poor realtek 8139 supported by the system I got bored with all those fancy tools (supposed for making the admin’s life easier) and realized how funny are BSD systems so… I’ve just installed
FreeBSD.
I will try to set up a PDC based on
samba and
OpenLDAP. Also NIS or Kerberos to get some control over NFS connections could be nice…let’s see .
I’ll post every step I’ll take to get it working…..be in touch
I don’t really know how to start this, I always was against *blogs ’cause I used to believe that people writing about themselves had nothing of interest.
But…today’s personal journals are turning on an important source of information, it is usually more reliable and objective than those considered “Professional news” (on TV, Internet or whatever).
So, here I am, giving a chance to
LiVEJOURNAL because of
jmmv (he seems to be quite happy with the free service provided and I didn’t know many others).
Maybe I will improve my fluency writing documents…or I will give up as soon as I’ve started it…any bet?
