Tonight we had a look round the local church yard for the common glow worm Lampyris noctiluca. It's not as warm or humid as it should be for the best viewing but even so we spotted 13 females doing their thing.
This weekend is the Overton Sheep Fair. Today we sold over 50% of the rhubarb jams we made earlier this year and tomorrow is supposed to be a nicer day so I expect we will sell it all!
Though representing the OBS I was also able to speak to a few local people about Linux/Unix which is always good. One of them is a former Windows SysAdmin now in the process of upgrading to Linux/Unix - which given his job is at the UK's Atomic Weapons Research Establishment, it's scary to think that they trusted our nuclear arsenal to a toy operating system with a reputation for not being secure...
This morning the SCSI sub-system on my development server Turing gave up. I switched him off took his disks out and put them in a spare chassis and rebooted him. All told he was off-line for about 5 minutes. It took an hour or so to rebuild the disk mirror and now it's all okay.
I now hope this box will last a little longer and eventually we will be able to migrate my Linux systems off their current antique hardware platforms onto a more modern VMware virtual platform.
On Monday morning both SCSI disks on my test system had died. We left the machine to cool and it successfully restarted later on. This morning one of disks again died, so I swapped it with one of my only two remaining spares. So far both disks are still running but I am expecting the older of the two disks to fail at some point this week. It's also possible that the SCSI sub-system it's self will fail, it's been a common failure on these Compaq DL servers.
I now have a new stack of salvaged disks from other decommissioned servers in my desk for when the next drive fails. Eventually these machines will be pensioned off and replaced with virtual systems within our VMWare solution but for the mean time they are real machines with real failing hardware.
At home I have needed a backup solution for some time. I've been rather lax and not had one for far too long, relying on mirrored disks is not a backup solution...
I decided to try out rsnapshot as it looks simple enough to be easy to do and powerful enough to do what I need.
After a certain amount of messing with the rsync and ssh options I've not got it backing up my home server and our two desktop systems all automatically. I've now got to back the snapshots up to something external (DVD or a USB 0.5 TB hard disk)...
Yesterday was a joint Hampshire/Surrey LUG meeting at the Nokia facility between Fleet and Farnborough. For a mid summer meeting it was quite busy and most productive.
Using Nokia's fast and plentiful Internet connection we upgraded a friend's Ubuntu system to the latest version and fixed a number of Apache/PHP related issues. We also got Dovecot IMAP working on the system and moved email into it from another system.
There were quite a few new faces, which is always good too see and plenty of familiar ones. Someone brought along a tiny Viglen MPC-L computer, listen to the next ubuntu uk podcast for a full review.
posted 09:19 :: /unix/foss :: permalink :: ^
After a few weeks delay Firefox 3 has arrived in Debian Lenny. Since it arrived in Debian SID a few more themes and add-ons have been ported so the upgrade hasn't been too painful. Compared with 2.x it does seem quite a bit faster and more responsive but on Linux Firefox 2 was always sluggish when compared to Konqeror or Opera. On Windows Firefox could sometimes be slow but on Windows there is always Microsoft's IE which was an order of magnitude slower...
I've turned on my experimental combined RSS feed planetajt.rss. I've yet to properly validate it or feed it into any other site, probably just Planet HantsLUG but so far so good. It combines my three blogs into one single feed and is at the moment updated daily.
I've decided to combine my various blog feeds with modified version of perlanet to create a single RSS feed. I'll probably run perlanet from a cron job and simply create a static xml file(s) with the corresponding feed in it as that's the simplest solution.
Today when I got home there was a letter from my bank. They have decided to automatically triple my overdraft limit, if I don't want all this cheap credit I can reply using the pre-paid envelope to let them know. It's very nice to know I can borrow a lot of money for very little it's even occasionally useful. However as I'm a tight northerner I avoid debt like a plague and doubt I'll do anything with this extra line of credit.
What is more annoying is that they sent it to the wrong address, we moved a month ago. It's not as if they don't know I have told them and they have already sent a statement to the new address... It must be brilliant if you are an ID thief to get a letter like mine...
Methinks the banks have only themselves to blame...
posted 21:20 :: /stuff/house :: permalink :: ^
In many respects I'm quite conservative, just as everyone else was abandoning CVS I started to use it. Over the past few weeks I've decided to upgrade to SVN (Subversion) just as everyone else moves on to git...
posted 22:40 :: /unix/foss :: permalink :: ^
Glyn Moody makes some very good points in his blog: Sir Bill and Sir Tim: A Tale of Two Knights.
posted 12:26 :: /unix/foss :: permalink :: ^
A new version swooshed up-to PAUSE last night and is appearing on CPAN today. It fixes a small bug in the 0.30 version that went up the night before. I'm still getting some FAIL data from some testers but that looks like a subtle bug in Test::More that I've not seen on any of my test systems, so that could be hard to fix.
I have an old SPARC 5 box in the loft running Solaris 2.5. We don't have enough space to have it out an used, so it's currently sitting unused gathering dust. My current AMD64 based desktop system is way more powerful and Debian Lenny is a vastly more modern and sophisticated operating system than Solaris 2.6.
This week I've been playing with various alternative operating systems on VirtualBox virtual machines. Today I thought it would be nice to give Solaris another go and OpenSolaris is a lot more modern than Solaris 2.6 so I'm hoping it will be a lot more useful.
At the moment OpenSolaris is installing it's self inside a virtual machine, a bit slow compared with Linux but still much faster than Windows systems which seem to take for ever and a day.
Once it's all up and running I'll see if Solaris still deserves the moniker "Slowaris", it really did have a reputation for being awfully slow as Unix goes...
posted 17:12 :: /unix/foss :: permalink :: ^
This week I've been working on XML::RSS::Tools. It's mostly a test/build fix, no real new features are being added.
Now that Perl has evolved to version 5.10, the 5.8.x branch is now legacy and the 5.6.x branch is "antique". While I don't want to deliberately exclude people trapped on older versions of Perl it is getting hard to work and test on them. This release may contain a warning that 5.6 isn't officially supported anymore because of the complex dependencies that exist.
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