Whiteboard
February 26, 2008
New (to me) Whiteboard(Click for bigger…)
When
Hopefully now I can stop scrawling quick notes on Post-It(-ish) notes and sticking them to the back of the workbench.
New (to me) Whiteboard(Click for bigger…)
Taco Bell & More
February 26, 2008
Paperclips at Taco BellWhen at Taco Bell† on Schoenherr and Hall Road / M-59 on Saturday morning before helping
Here’s a few more recently uploaded moblog photos I find interesting:
· The band Margin of Error claims that 21,000 friends and 140,000 plays is on MySpace is a positive attribute.
· Costco’s tasty and reasonably decent food counter.
· A nicely anachronistic cable TV error message.
· A decent falafel plate while waiting for an appointment to start.
† No, I didn’t eat there… We were just grabbing a quick bit of food for
Presenting: Trashwall
February 25, 2008
Presenting: the Trashwall, a repurposed Power Mac G4 AGP. It has been taken from an old, failing machine and turned into a powerful firewall which boots from flash, contains an 8-port managed switch, offers free public wireless via a segmented, built-in access point, and handles NAT, DNS, DHCP, NTP, and whatever else I might want it to do.
It’s also got a shiny serial console for setup / management and Open Firmware. It’s basically a real PowerPC UNIX box now.
The article is complete, I’m just waiting for a small antenna adapter cable to arrive so I can hook up the better 802.11b antenna. After that I’ll post one more photo to the article, but otherwise it’s complete.
So, if you’re wanting to stick together an OpenBSD-based do-everything firewall, you could do far worse than to check out the Trashwall.
Hitch & Rack
February 25, 2008
There. I have just ordered a Draw-Tite 24763 hitch and a Thule T2 (P/N 917) rack for my car.
It should all fit nicely on a 2006 Civic EX and will allow me to carry both my bike and Danielle’s bike easily and securely.
Bike Rack
February 24, 2008
So, now that Danielle has a bike, I need a bike rack for carrying them. I can’t really use hang-on-trunk rack, nor do I want a roof rack. After seeing
There are two kinds of hitch racks; those which the bikes hang from and those which cradle the wheels. With Danielle’s bike not having any horizontal pieces, I can’t really get a hanging type. That leaves me with the wheel nestling type. Unfortunately those all use a bar to hold down the front wheel, which may have issues with the fender on Danielle’s bike.
That all said, I came across these photos of someone using a Thule T2 wheel-nestling-type-rack on a Civic Si. I think this is the bike rack I’m going to end up with, even if I have to sort things out with the fender.
This should be good for taking bikes up north, to local parks, or things like that. It’ll cost a bit more than I wanted to spend (about $450 total), but it should be nicely usable. And, thankfully, the rack can be moved to other vehicles in the future.
OpenBSD Problem Fixing!
February 24, 2008
Back on the 13th I posted about a quirk in OpenBSD/macppc 4.2 which kept the serial console from working after first boot. This was submitted as PR 5732 and I listed a workaround here in the Trashwall article.
Late last night after going to bed I included on a message from Theo de Raadt asking for confirmation from another developer that it is fixed in -current. Poking around cvsweb brought me to this change to /src/distrib/miniroot/install.sub which appears to sort it out.
I’m very happy about this, and I’ll have to be sure to buy the 4.3 CD release when it becomes available.
nuxx.net Back Up
February 23, 2008
Well, even though rowla.nuxx.net made it to an uptime of 500 days back on the 11th, that didn’t last. Today Waveform unexpectedly moved my box to their new data center, causing a bit of an unexpected outage. As you can see in the bandwidthd graph above there was a period of time during which the server was unreachable.
I was ssh’d in at the time talking to people on #llamasoft when things just up and went away. It seems that Waveform simply pulled the plug on the boxes and moved them. Thankfully mine came back up safely.
Danielle’s New Bike
February 23, 2008
2007 Electra Townie 3Here’s Danielle’s new bike, a lime green 2007 Electra Townie 3. That is, three speed, internal gearing, with a rear coaster brake and a front V-brake. It also has the optional black plastic fenders fitted, which I think look great. The thing I particularly like about the plastic accessory fenders is that should something happen to them, they can be replaced. Bikes which come with metal painted to match fenders would be really hard to replace should they get scraped / scratched / bent.
nuxx.net Is Down
February 23, 2008
Hey everyone… My server at http://nuxx.net is down, and no, I don’t know why. I think Waveform is moving locations, but they didn’t notify me, so I’m just not sure what’s up. I have a support ticket open about it, but they haven’t replied yet. So, we’ll see… I hope I don’t have to move providers.
Reverse DNS
February 22, 2008
Having stuff like this working is fun:
trashwall# arp -a c-69-244-128-1.hsd1.mi.comcast.net (69.244.128.1) at 00:01:5c:22:71:82 on gem0 core-ap.home.nuxx.net (192.168.0.2) at 00:16:cb:c5:16:2f on fxp0 basement-ax.home.nuxx.net (192.168.0.3) at 00:11:24:05:7d:53 on fxp0 livingroom-ax.home.nuxx.net (192.168.0.4) at 00:11:24:0a:91:6d on fxp0 tivo.home.nuxx.net (192.168.0.6) at 00:11:d9:16:54:43 on fxp0 dhcp21.home.nuxx.net (192.168.0.21) at 00:1c:b3:b5:1b:77 on fxp0 trashwall#
The Trashwall and its associated article are nearly done. :D