port7 – co – uk

A strange mixed week, a few different things have happened that might be OK to blog about.

* We got a new carpet! It arrived on Wednesday and we are happy with the result, the colour was a bit of a gamble with the new wall paint, but we think it worked out well

* I am moving from Zen to Bytemark for my broadband provision. I was due to be disconnected from Zen yesterday on the 28th, but my connection is still active. I think this is because my router keeps the connection up constantly, so they might have removed my entry from their RADIUS servers so if I disconnected and tried to connect again it might fail. But as my current ‘session‘ has not dropped I am still OK.

* The new bed is due tomorrow! The old one has served us well for the past 7 years and so we think its time for a new one

* I think we will be moving from Debian Woody to Ubuntu Breezy for our new depot PC image. The reason being we are wanting to have things like nice handling for people plugging in Digital Cameras and more hardware support for the range of PC’s we are now having to support. We could have used Debian Sarge for this, but to get all we wanted we would have had to pinch bits from Etch and Sid. So instead of having a platform that is a patchwork of several different distro’s we have just one single distro to manage. Will this be the largest corporate deployment of Ubuntu yet? It would be interesting to hear of others that have done something similar

* I was informed by the tax office that my tax code is changing for the worse, meaning Gordon Brown will be getting more out of me! They claim that they didn’t know I was getting the fuel allowance! So UK Plc is taking more money from me and yet my brother over in Canada is being given money from his government! I need to move out of this country!

Interesting week all in all….

Well following on from yesterdays shenanigans I copied off the important data from the injured machine and went about installing etch from a netinst cd.

I was all going very well until it got to the bit where it install’s the base system and it fell over. After a little digging I found a ‘bug’ so like a good citizen I submitted a bug report, my 1st bug report!

It was a bit of an anti-climax though as it turned out to be a duplicate bug, but still my 1st bug report woo-hoo! I am glad that Frans was so polite about it too, rather than a piss off n00b! you should have checked for existing bugs……

Last night we had the 2nd MANLUG Beer and Curry nights, and it went well. We had 5 people turn up (though we were expecting more…) so there were plenty there for a good night. So we met at the Clarence and headed over to the Sangam.

One thing PerfDave mentioned was GWANNO, which apparently is an offshoot of MANLUG, and its purpose was / is to meet in a more social setting. Have we inadvertently created GWANNO v2?

I just did a very stupid thing. I am trying to add another IDE disk to erie one of my home servers. So I plug it into the secondary IDE channel with the jumper set to master. I boot into Debian and run cfdisk /dev/hdc create a single partition, then I create the filesystem using mke2fs -j -c /dev/hdc1 and go away while it does all that. Easy so far!

I come back later as see that its all done. So I just want to mount it and see if all is OK. So I do a mkdir /var/backup then mount -t ext3 /dev/hda3 /var/backup, I then cd /var/backup and ls I see a load of directories but think I must have used this disk before and so say ho hum and do a rm -rf ./*.

Spot the mistake? I didn’t till half-way through the rm and did a panicked ctrl-c. I repeat I am very stupid.

I am blaming it on the paint fumes as we are decorating at the moment.

Still, look on the bright side, /dev/hda3 was only the /usr filesystem, and I didn’t lose anything in /home. So I am going to find a live CD and use that to copy /home elsewhere. I think I will then install Debian Etch on that machine as I want to submit some bugs to the Debian BTS and the testing distro should give me plenty to go at.

Another LUG meeting in Manchester, Installfest this time. So sward and I managed to help someone get Linux up and running on his Palmax. He had previously tried installing Ubuntu by connecting the HDD of it to his desktop, installing it there and then moving it back to the Palmax. This resulted in it crashing when it got to running the init stage, we suspected this was something to do with it having only 32MB of RAM and the ramdisk getting filled up, it expecting to be run on a desktop with decent amounts of RAM.

Anyway with the help of the Debian boot floppies and the MCC net connection, we managed to get Debian Sarge installed. We just did a base install and gave the guy a quick tutorial on apt-get, he went away happy!

While we were helping this guy, Owen played Mark Shuttleworth’s Debconf talk on the projector. Not only was it an interesting talk but I didn’t know there were such videos around, apparently a lot of the Debconf talks were filmed and are now available for download! Cool! That should keep me amused for a bit!

Yesterday I went along to the sheflug meet where they had a talk by Jeremy Allison. It was good, for those that don’t know Jeremy is one of the lead developers in the cool Samba project. He gave us a good overview of the history, internals and future of Samba. Lots of work going on in version 3.x and 4.x looks interesting, its going to be a re-rewrite from the ground up. It was a good Q & A session also with some good ones coming from the floor, the cifsvfs looks cool, Jeremy seemed to be claiming that it will replace nfsv4 as the Unix to Unix remote filesystem of choice. A few other things that are on the roadmap that is good news to me is support for Group Policy Objects and LDAP Based configuration of Samba servers. While I was parking up a lady of the night (or day, as it was 1.30 in the afternoon) somehow mistook me for a customer as she asked me if I wanted any ‘business’, I don’t know whether to be insulted or complimented.

On another note I need to stop eating out, have done some traveling with work the past few weeks and am really missing home food, even if its just chicken kievs and some oven chips…

I have come to the conclusion that Sales Reps / Account Managers etc are the apendixes of the business world, meaning they are of no use to anyone!

Over the past few weeks I have been in numerous meetings and conferences with various companies that we may by doing business with. In these meetings there is usualy me and a few others from my company and some people from their side namely a techie, some sort of director and the sales rep.

In all these meetings the sales reps have contributed absolutly zero of value. Most of the talking is done by the director and the techie is the one we ask the questions of, but the sales rep does bugger all.

They also all seem to have the same image, namely fake tan and cheesy hairstyle. I guess its some sort of uniform. Even when you ask about pricing they always seem to say ‘I will have to get back to you on that’ so its not as if they are a fount of knowledge on that side.

My view is sack the lot of them, they are a risk to your business. They will say yes to anything, so if you ask the company if their system can do so an so, they will always say yes despite it being imposible for the company. You get more sense out of the techies, they are the people who know the products after all, the sales rep adds no value at all!

Well its that time of year again, and its my Birthday I am the grand old age of 33 and its not good. I don’t like growing old, I still feel like a kid. Anyway what did I get? In no particular order: Tin of Thorntons Special Toffee, a new Flece Jacket, a Casual shirt, a Crumpler ‘McBains Baby M’ laptop bag, Season 5 of SG1 on DVD, Revolution OS, a big jar of Jelly Babys, a weight watchers cookbook & some dark chocolate. Roll on Xmas!!

Well it has been some time! I really do need to blog more, but being the worlds worst procrastinator I have not done much.

Anyway what have I been up to? Well this last weekend we had a ManLUG meet, a good topic by Dave Fisher of GBDirect about things that are wrong with Open Source. This also led on to a great discussion on LUG’s getting organised and working on some problems / projects. We also had a talk from a chap from the Bolton TIC looking for some assistance with technical things. I suspect there could be some crossover with the 2 subjects, in the fact that the kids at the TIC could work on some Open Source projects!

I have also finally got my ibook back from the repair shop. It had been lying dormant under the bed for ages as I thought it was truly broken. It turned out that there was a general fault with some logic boards in some ibooks, and mine was one of the ones affected and Apple were recalling a load of them (mine being one) and I got it fixed for free. I am running OS X at the moment, I may install Ubuntu at some point, but we shall see.

Work is still interesting, the last weekend I was at our data centre upgrading the RS/6000 to 24gb RAM. We also took the oportunity while the server was down to give the comms cabinet a major tidy up. A few hours and a pile of cables and bay routers later, the cabinet was alot lighter!

OK, call me a chicken but I had to. After about 3 weeks I have gone back to the stable version of the Ubuntu Linux distro. Over the holidays I decided that I would give the testing version of the distro a go on the basis that the stable one was pretty good, so the testing one wouldn’t be that bad. The first few weeks were no that bad, there were a few minor irritations but nothing I couldn’t work round. I have even submited a few bug reports, but the past week has been really bad. A few things that really hit me bad were Openoffice.org crashing a few times a day, the Wifi card stopping working and running in 800×600 screen res. There is only so much a geek can take, so I have gone back to Warty, I will upgrade to Hoary when its been released propper.

On another note, has anyone ever tried Colonic Irrigation? If so I would apreciate your comments.