Nosh.

Just thought I'd mention "L'Aviation" - Steak, Chips and Yummy sauce. All a mere spit from the number 9 bus stop too.

Furlong Floppies

Tired of confusing Mega and Mibi bytes? Hard disk choices getting you in a spin? well, FEAR NOT - Sanity is at hand. Most old-timers like myself will remember the 3.5" floppy disk (yes, the thing that you kept all your hard work on, mistreated and then wondered why you couldn't print your assignment at the deadline). Each held 1.44Mb of data and so....


Stack em all up, and a furlong (220 yards, or 201.16m) of em would contain 87.782 GB.


I hereby propose that we all use the new SI measurement of "furlong floppies" to describe data.

Windows 0 : Linux 2

I've just traded up an IBM P4 workstation to a brand shiny new Dell E520 Dual core goodness. Well. Semi goodness. According to Wikipedia I have a 915 chip and it's the 9x0 ones that support x86 virtualization. Boo Hiss.

Anyway, Threw in a ubuntu AMD64 install and it's up n running in 30 mins. (once I'd nuked the 'orribly nasty "Vista Home Basic 32bit" install off it. I was looking forwards to all the aqua toys but thats apparently an upgrade...

XP install not so smooth. Blue Screen complaining of "Stop 0x0000007B" - probably the SATA Raid card? Well dells website doesn't have any handy "Use this driver disk to install XP" links and following a v good scotlug virtualisation talk I decided to throw on QEMU following this guide

Videotastic

No, not another youtube one, but a 1975 classic featuring touch screen menus, electric bikes, distributed monitoring, a gripping title sequence, and of course, facial hair. Intrigued? head over to SPS : the control system and enjoy :-)

Wireless hacking

So my shiny macbook pro that I was promised with the new job turned into a battered R50e Thinkpad. Ho Hum. Still at least it has built in wireless.... hmmm. maybe not. Enter a Cheap n Cheerful Edimax EW-7108PCg PCMCIA card. Works fine under linux including kismet using ra0 - it's the rt2500 chipset driver.

However I'd like to make use of a decent external antenna for better range, so opened it up and discovered the antenna consisted of 2* 18mm tracks with no obvious points to solder in a pigtail.

"It's Big"

Experiment visit to ATLAS today. Flip. Tis impressive.

On a more mundane note I discovered this snippet while trying to get our areca raid cards monitored with SNMP on the out of band management


Basically if you want to avoid errors such as
snmpwalk -v1 -c community_name -m ./compile/snmp/areca1.mib mgmtaddress Areca
Bad operator (_): At line 20 in ./compile/snmp/areca1.mib
Areca: Unknown Object Identifier (Sub-id not found: (top) -> Areca)

Then you need to add -Pu to your command line

bash: apt-get: command not found

Minor Rant. There's nothing wrong with Redhat clones, and Scientific Linux is packaged nicely as the rest. However, running a 3.0.5 version on a Laptop, without any decent music (mp3) support when the latest is 4.4 is getting to me. Time... for a swift Ubuntu install.

Just another Perl Hacker^W^WBlogger

Caught up on userfriendly and yesterdays seems remarkably apt...

Transfer tests

OK, so discovered why the transfer tests were failing - I'd done the voms-proxy-init part but omitted the myproxy setup. Doh!

Finally got up n running, then discovered that one of the files was failing with a "550 - not a plain file" the helpful instructions here say

Although it appears in the DPM namespace, the file doesn't physically exist on disk anymore. You should un-register the file from the namespace, to avoid this inconsistency.

Well, that'd be good if they gave a hint as to how to do so. "dpns-rm" didn't seem to work as planned.

On the plus side, it appears our bandwith INTO glasgow is ~650Mb/s shame the outgoing peaked at ~250Mb/s though.