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18/04/2004

  • Been a while since I updated the old web page. Nuthin' much to report. Decided to make the main machine dual boot, so I'm installing Knoppix on it. I'll still have Debian on the other caddy, so that it can be fully Linux when needed.
  • The broadband has been a success, so I'm going to stick with it. There's no dial-up as back up, but despite that, I'm giving the dial-up account the flick. The broadband seems reliable enough, and the few problems that have cropped up have been solved quickly with full disclosure. Good stuff! This web page has been moved over to the new account. Of course, you'd know that already if you're reading this ...
  • Going to go for a full time Linux server. I might go for one of those small form factor systems seeing they're usually built to be quiet.

5/12/2003

  • Survived the Great Flood of '03 unscathed. Slept through most of it. The thunder and lightning woke me up for a bit, and I thought "Ooh, storm!" and went back to sleep. Heard on the radio the following morning that there was a bit of water in Station Street, and it was closed for a while, but I was thinking maybe a couple of inches deep. Little did I know! Waist deep water only a couple of hundred metres away to the south (Update: one of the shops have left their front window unwashed to show how high the water went, and the tide mark reaches just under my armpits), and water over the top of wheel arches of cars just one street north of here. Freaky!
  • Finally solved the problem of the Netgear cards under Debian. It wasn't the cards at all, or Debian. The motherboard chipset was at fault. It is a SiS648 chipset that was messing up the IRQs of all ethernet connections, and just needed a one-line fix in LILO. So now I have Debian working properly on the main box.

8/11/2003

  • Gone broadband-ish. Trying out ADSL for three months to see if I like it. So far so good. Bought a router rather than a straight ADSL modem, and hung the wireless hub off it, so now I've got a setup that's working well.
  • Decided not to make the main box just Linux, and so I'm putting in removable drawers for Windows XP and Debian.
  • Got my first and second virus ever about half an hour after I had installed XP. Got the MSBLAST worm (Nashi.A?) and it's follower, Nashi.B, the one that tries to patch the vunerability. Had to download the patch for MSBLAST and being on the 'net to do that is what infected me. This was on dial-up, just before I got the ADSL connection, so no, the router wasn't at fault.

3/9/2003

  • Problems. Bought Netgear FA312 NICs for the server, and they don't quite work under Linux, despite what they say on the box (only for 2.0 kernels, I found out later). May have to recompile the natsemi modules so they can. Why, oh why did I not Google first? Investigating ...
  • Everything else worked alright on the box. Initially had Knoppix on it, but it points to Debian testing, and the downloads were a bit of a burden on dial-up. Had to wipe Knoppix and put on plain Debian stable. Got X working after a while, although I don't have the window manager I prefer on it yet.

22/8/2003

  • Built myself an el-cheapo computer to use as a replacement server. Bought a cheap case to go with it, and it bit me! Ended up in the Austin Hospital emergency department where they put three stiches in my finger. On top of that, my finger got infected, needing a course of antibiotics. So far, I've spent the equivalent of an entry level Lian Li case on it. Maybe next time I'll learn ...
  • Another reason to kick myself for not going for a good quality case. It's probably the noisiest computer I've ever heard, so I won't be keeping it on all the time like I did the little P100.

7/8/2003

  • Still settling into the one bedder. Seems to be quite a good posi, close to quite a few things. I didn't really have a good look at the shops on offer when I rented the place.
  • Decided to put a server together, so it's off to a swap-meet (Collingwood) this Sunday to buy a mobo and box. Going Intel ...

16/7/2003

  • Well, wimped out on buying that city flat, so I've ended up grabbing a one-bedder in Fairfield. Moving most of my stuff this Sunday, which will give me a week of overlap to clean the old place.
  • The storage of my stuff didn't really look good, as I'd very quickly be spending more than what the furniture was worth to store it. My options was either to get rid of it or buy more expensive stuff to store, so I just grabbed myself a flat...

1/07/2003

  • Hmm. Didn't quite think that one through. Looks as though it will be cheaper to rent a one bedroom place somewhere than to store my stuff and get a room. Might have to do that and just live there while I do my thing.
  • May have found a place, though. It's a two bedroom place in the city. One problem though, is that lenders tend to baulk at lending for an inner city apartment, so I may have to get a home loan that's a little more expensive. I'll have to decide how much more expensive is acceptable.

25/6/2003

  • Right. That's it. I've decided not only to bite the bullet but masticate it beyond recognition. Inspired by Brer Barry and Co., I'm looking for a place to buy. I'm putting my stuff into storage, getting myself a cheap room somewhere where I can pay month by month, and doing what I should have done a long time ago.

6/6/2003

  • Looks like I might not be as close as I intended with the new place. Things pretty pricy in Richmond, and few and far between. If I go a bit further out than I am now, I've got plenty to choose from. Might have to do that ...

1/6/2003

  • Blow. Converting the Linux box to Debian today, and it died on me. I won't be touching it again until I've moved.
  • Decided not to make an offer for the place. It's a little bit expensive for the condition.

29/5/2003

  • Got a call from the real-estate agent today, telling me the possible price that the flat will sell for. I've got two weeks to check things out and make an offer. Initial thoughts? Well ...

28/5/2003

  • Bum. Official notice from the landlord. Sixty days to nicky-woop. Last day is 29th July. The hunt commences ...
  • One timing is right, though. The union has put on overtime bans, and asked us to knock off one hour early. Extra time for flat hunting!

25/5/2003

  • Had a visit from the landlord yesterday, and I'm getting a visit from the Real Estate office tomorrow to appraise the place. The landlord is thinking of moving some family into my place or selling it, so he may need me to move out. Bummer. I've liked this place, it's very convenient for me. I'll have to get somewhere close to work again, so that I don't need a car. Let you know soon as I know if I have to move or not.
  • Complicating things is the fact that work is going to be busy until at least September (the timeline brought out by the same people who said the work was going to finish around about now, so in real terms it'll probably finish next decade), so I'm going to have limited time to look for a place. May have to just not do as much overtime, which puts a burden on the other guys doing the work.
  • The union and the company are going through wage negotiations at work, and things are going slowly. I may have some flat-finding time through this. :-)

19/5/2003

  • Been pretty slack with the web page lately. Nothing really to report. :-)

12/4/2003

  • Nothing much is happening. I'm preparing to change the Linux Box over to Debian. I've backed up the Box to the lappy, and made sure I could connect to the Internet through the lappy if needed. What's stopping me is the floppy drive seems to be a bit dodgy, so I may have to find another way to install Debian.
  • Work is still busy, though I haven't worked the weekends for the last two weeks, whoopee!

10/3/2003

  • Been a long while since I updated my web page, and a lot has happened since last November.
  • Went to the Big Day In at the docklands stadium (you know, the one that keeps changing its name) with Brer Barry and Sis Jenno. Had a good time there on the first day, headed off home that night, came back in the next morning to find that both Sis Jenno's and my 'puter gone AWOL. Bummer.
  • Got X working on the lappy, just had to tweak it a little bit.
  • Actually did get X working with the main box as well, changed the driver to Vesa and used IceWM. Not that it matters now (...sigh...)
  • Work has really started to be busy. I'm involved with commissioning the new automatic tanks in the storage area, and to keep everything on track, I'll be working late most nights and Saturdays. Good for the hip pocket, but not keen on doing too much overtime. Should only be for another 2 months, though.
  • I've decided I won't be replacing the main box anytime soon. The only thing I'm missing out on is games, and I've got a few other things I'd like to spend my money on first. Might go AMD when I do, though.
  • The Bus died (may it Rust In Peace - yeah I know, old joke). What happened is the cooling water has got into the engine and siezed it. I'm not getting it fixed, so to the Trading Post it goes. Ended up buying myself a motorcycle, a 750cc Kawasaki Zephyr. Nice bike to ride! And El Niño chooses now to finish ...

2/11/2002

  • Bumped Mandrake off the lappy, and put on Debian. Everything works well, except X. Don't quite know what to do, the only info on the net doesn't seem to work. May have to wait for the video drivers to be updated. Problem is, the drivers are binary only and proprietary, so taints my beautiful Debian [makes sign of the penguin with fingers].
  • X doesn't seem to work under Debian on the main box either. Ah well, may have to start learning C++ and actually start contributing to this open source stuff.
  • Got the NIC working on the main box, just had to update Debian ...

12/10/2002

  • Replaced Red Hat with Debian on the main box, so now with RH on the box and Mandrake on the lappy, I have the three main flavours of Linux to play with. Haven't yet got the NIC working under Debian, so no networking, but I'm very impressed with apt.

28/9/2002

  • Wasn't quite successful at installing Debian on the lappy, couldn't get it to boot. Brer Barry of the Bandwidth helped me out by giving me Mandrake 9.0, which installed without a hiccup. I was impressed! Picked up the wireless card and all! It needs a wee bit of tweaking to get it working well, but all in all, excellent.

20/9/2002

  • Got myself a lappy, finally, a ThinkPad T23. I want to see if I can dual boot it with Debian and W2K, to see if Debian is as good as they say.

10/9/2002

  • I've decided to post up a spreadsheet I did a couple of month's back which compared home ASDL packages from various ISPs. Note that the standard disclaimer comes with it, that is, all care but no responsibility, I'm not an ADSL pricing expert etc.

1/9/2002

  • Had a buzz around on Brer Barry's scooter yesterday. A strange experience being able to accelerate and keep up with the traffic. A lot of fun!

17/8/2002

  • Sort of got postfix working a bit better on the big box, as it's handling internal mail a bit better. Don't know if I'll switch over to it because the Linux box has sendmail working well for external mail, but only for one account. Don't really know why sendmail works, too ...
  • Congrats to Brer Barry for getting his wireless node up and running, even though it sounds like nobody connected to it. When I get my lappy, I may do a drive-by CD caddy ejection!

10/8/2002

  • Added a new page, describing my plans for becoming a node on the Melbourne Wireless network. The page is here .

5/8/2002

  • OK, got the printer up and running on the linuxbox, and sharing it through samba. Works OK, just have to iron out a few bugs here and there. Not quite printing properly from the linuxbox itself. Looking into it.

2/8/2002

  • Been a while (again!) since updating the blog. What's been happening? Well nothing particularly much. Still fiddling around with sendmail. I've got one account working, but still haven't got the LAN mail to Big Bad Internet working. May have to get into (shudder!) ruleset modification.
  • I've been playing around with postfix on the big box. Got it up and working OK, enough for a simple dialup account from the same box, but not quite handling the LAN mail too well. Exim seems a little too simple for my needs.
  • OK, the issue of the lappy: I've got a quote for a 600 MHz 12" iBook that I'm tempted to take up. However, I may wait until the new round of lappy offers through CUB. Can't really knock the savings of buying through work, even though they are only offering Compaqs.

22/6/2002

  • Been a while since I've updated my web page, sorry. Nothing really much has changed except for my decision to go for an ibook laptop. Haven't hooked up the new printer to the Linux box yet, but I will.
  • Barry's given me his old AST P133. I'm going to use it to check out Debian.
  • Barry, news about your wireless LAN is here

8/4/2002

  • Got myself an Epson EPL-5900 laser printer, which is Linux compatible. At the moment, I'm checking it out by printing from the main box Linux. So far so good. Once I'm happy it can print OK, I'll hook it up to the Linuxbox and set it up as a Samba printer.

31/3/2002

  • W00t! Just got back from the Shafted 20 LAN, and still enjoy it as much as I did the others! Kill ratio still in the red, but slight improvements here and there. Still can't work out the tactics. Here's a couple of screen shots that show how well (or badly) I did.

14/3/2002

  • Finally finished writing up my Tasmanian holiday. Follow the link in the side panel to check it out.
  • OK. I am really jealous of Brer Barry. Not only has he bought himself a lappy, but his antennas are working well first try.
  • *Sigh* Got a phone call today from the boss telling me that I'm going back on shift as of next week, starting with my favourite, night shift.

12/2/2002

  • Huh! Cruelly goaded by Brer Barry to update my web page before I am ready ...

28/1/2002

  • Back in town again. Had a great time in Taz, but actually ran out of time to do the things I wanted to do. Have a look at my holidays page to see a brief outline of where I went and what I did.
  • I thought I was to start work today, but turned up for work and nobody was there. Apparently someone somewhere had a change of mind on what's a public holiday and what's not ... not that I'm complaining, mind!

8/01/2002

  • The mechanics were able to replace the high-beam switch today, so I'm off to Tassie tomorrow, only on the Devil Cat rather than the "Spirit of Tasmania". Bummer. That means a 4am start to be at station pier at about 5-5:30am. Booked the "Spirit of Tasmania" for the return trip, going overnight and arriving at Melbourne at 5am on the 27th. Seems I can't get away from these early times ...
  • Email address while on hols is phoheo@hotmail.com

6/01/2002

  • Changed my mind and gone for the transparent proxying. That means:
    1. downloading the latest kernel, 2.4.17 as of now (might as well seeing I'm going to do all this work)
    2. recompiling the Linuxbox's kernel for iptables support
    3. setting up a valid iptables firewall
    4. testing it all out on the Winbox Linux before setting it up on the Linuxbox
    Wish me luck.
  • Probably heading off to Tassie this Wednesday (9th Jan) on the "Spirit of Tasmania", the over-nighter to Devonport. Depends on when the mechanics can get a replacement high-beam switch for me on Monday or not.

3/01/2002

  • Happy new year everyone!
  • Got squid running OK now, it was fairly easy to set up. I haven't gone for transparent proxying, because that involves firewall modifications, something which I'm not quite up to speed on. As well as that, I think I may have to get iptables going instead of ipchains.
  • I've got apache running now, with a starting web page on the linuxbox. I've set up a samba share so I can edit both the linuxbox web page and my own TPG homepage (the page you're looking at, if you want to know).

11/12/2001

  • May be getting myself a laptop. CUB has a good deal on a Compaq Presario 1700T. I know, I know, it's a Compaq, but the price *is* good. And people have successfully installed Linux on it.

6/12/2001

  • Been a while since I've updated my web page. I have since moved it to a share on the Linux box.
  • Sorry about no e-mails going out from me at the moment. I am still trying to work out my sendmail configuration, and I'm getting bogged down and confused. I am RTMing. The F being liberally applied by me ...

3/11/2001

  • Trying to get samba up and running so I can share the odd file and back up properly (the shell script is coming along nicely). So far, I can see the Linux box, but the log in is confusing me.

27/10/2001

  • I curse RH7.2! Tried an update on my windows box and it spat the dummy when it got to changing to CD#2. Result: a system with half RH7.2, half RH7.1 and it no worky. Also due to a previous decision (don't ask me why), I had only assigned 1G of space to the root partition and the rest of the 9G to /home. I couldn't get into windows because RH7.2 was fiddling around with lilo, and on top of it all, I didn't back up my Linux stuff. (Hey, I was writing a shell script to automate it, it was coming along nicely!) End result: a complete reinstallation of RH7.1, *this* time assigning a far more reasonable amount of space to the root directory.
  • I was able to get IMAP up and running OK several weeks ago, so wiping off the winbox Linux wasn't a total disaster. Now all I have to do is work out how to sort the mail so that it's not one huge block of mixed e-mails.

21/10/2001

  • Swapmeeting today. Went to Ivanhoe, and got myself an Asus AGP V7700, a GeForce 2 GTS based video card with 32 M DDR Ram. Should be good, but I have yet to reinstall Counter Strike to see what frame rates I'm now getting.
  • Doing a lot of overtime lately. The last three weeks were 70h, 50h and 60h last week, and next week is looking like another 60h week. Sub Zero volumes are up, and I'm doing more than a month's usual production a week lately.

7/10/2001

  • Finished up at the Shafted LAN today, a little worse for wear. Yesterday, I was celebrating a noticeable improvement: one kill for every three deaths, up from one in four the previous LAN. Today, things came crashing down in a big way, for the five hours I was there I probably got about one kill an hour. It must have been all the clan players still hanging around ...
  • Modified the Linux box Internet dialling slightly. The modem now dials quietly between 10pm and 8am, so I'm not woken up by late night surfers.

23/9/2001

  • I'll be going to the next Shafted LAN party first weekend in October. I don't expect I've improved any, but it's still fun!

19/9/2001

  • Good news! The buzz-box lives again!

17/9/2001

  • Oh my god! I've done it! I have the linuxbox connected to the internet and I am masquerading through it! Whoo hoo!! All the problem was that I was missing a chat script for it to get the information on the connection. Quick read of the chat man page and Bob's your uncle! Next job: set up the linuxbox to download my mail and possibly use IMAP to read. Set up Squid proxying. Set up a caching name server. So much to do ...
  • Sad news: the little buzz-box may be on it's last legs. Brer Barry has said if the scooter costs more than $400 to fix, he's going to let it go. How could he be so cruel???

15/9/2001

  • I have decided that in light of recent events, I should cancel my holiday to Canada. I'll reconsider when things settle down.
  • Problems with the old linuxbox: it doesn't like ppp and I don't know why. I am slowly going through the ppp scripts to find out the reason.

14/9/2001

  • Made a mistake yesterday: attempted to install an rpm file of a more recent kernel on my winbox, as reccommended by the people at Red Hat. Something went wrong, and it very nicely deleted my working kernel. Luckily I had downloaded a source tar-ball of another newer kernel a few weeks ago, and after about a dozen compilations, I have finally got a new 2.4.5 kernel up and running!
  • Haven't got the linuxbox connecting to the Internet yet, I have to set up masquerading on it. Going to use ipchains for that, there's plenty of info around on it, and nobody seems to be into iptables yet.

6/9/2001

  • Went to the Melbourne PC User Group LUBe SIG tonight. It started off poorly, straight into BeOS, (which is a great operating system, but not one I'm interested in) but when they couldn't get a couple of things to work, they dumped that and did an install of SUSE 7.2, which despite my biases, looked very nice. It's obvious why they tend to focus on BeOS, the convener is a great fan of it and not a lot of people who attend have much of a knowledge of Linux, so you don't tend to learn much. Might have to give this one a miss, and as the only reason I was hanging onto my Melbourne PCUG membership was for the Linux contacts, I might have to drop my membership altogether. I might have to start attending the LUV meetings.

2/9/2001

  • Shafted 17 was on this weekend, and I missed it, damn!
  • Sort of fixed my Internet connection problem. Gone from using wvdial to the scripts under /etc/sysconfig. They seem to work pretty well, but just give me a month or two to understand what they're actually doing. Apparently, the scripts fire up the routing and the firewall before or just after connection, and the firewall config file just stores the business part of the script, so I may not be getting the firewall script I thought I was when I installed Mr. Pengu's script.

31/8/2001

  • Booked my holidays to Canada! I was wrong about the airlines, I'm taking Air Canada. I've posted my schedule here , or click on the link in the side bar.
  • Spoke too soon when I said I had fixed my Internet connection. My routing is still not quite down pat, so I'll have to look into how to save that information. *Sigh* Back to square one.... Although, you won't be reading about this until I fix the problem.

29/8/2001

  • Finally have been able to log onto the Internet again after changing the winbox Linux configuration when setting up the Linux box. I've done the smart thing and saved the configuration using linuxconf's profile archiving.
  • Been able to log into Brer Barry's box, but I haven't really done anything to it. I don't want to do anything too radical to it.
  • Looks like Japan airlines is the one for the trip to Canada. I might see if I can have a look around Tokyo for a day if I stop there.
  • Was able to catch up with a friend who's just come back from Canada, and picked up a few good tips. (Ta muchly, Kaz!)
  • Have got DHCP working, thanks to the Home-Networking-mini-HOWTO.

16/8/2001

  • Went to the swap meet on Sunday, got myself a 10G 7200rpm Western Digital hard drive for the Linux machine, and a few other knick knacks, put the machine together and installed RH7.1 server edition on it. Installed no worries! Did the proper thing and saved all the information that RH puts on there as default, including the specs of the original kernel build, so I have all the info I need to see what changes I make to it.
  • First job I had to do was get either telnet or ssh up and running, so I didn't have to keep switching my screen between the two computers. Had to knock down the server's firewall to do that. RH puts a fairly severe ipchains firewall up initially that trusts no one nowhere. Eventually got ssh working, but at the moment it will accept any old connection it gets. I think I have to generate some keys with Gnupg to have it do it's job properly.
  • Adjusted Pengu's firewall script so it looks at ppp0 instead of eth1 as the source of the Big Bad Internet. Brilliant little script, no problems so far. Give that man a medal!
  • Jobs still to do:
    1. Set up DHCP for the local net
    2. Find out how to control the connection to the Internet from Windows
    3. Create a cron script for doing a few Internet things, like upload the web page, download mail, wget the odd popular web page, download news etc

11/8/2001

  • Finally got fetchmail working. It was a problem with procmail that was holding me up. Well, not really with procmail, more of a problem of me not understanding mail systems. I have changed the mda to sendmail, and things are happening! Now all I have to do is fiddle with sendmail to make it send mail to the Internet, substituting my local email address with the Internet one.
  • Now that fetchmail is working, I can start doing cron jobs fetching mail, uploading the home page, downloading the odd file etc.

8/8/2001

  • Whoo hoo! Got the call! The Big Event has happened and I'm an uncle twice over again, the result being twin girls! Congrats to Brer Barry and Sis Sandra on the new arrivals.
  • Going to hit the swap meet trail again, adding one or two bits and pieces to Sis Jenno's machine. Anybody need anything?

4/8/2001

  • Trying a new look web page. Haven't quite worked out how I want it to look, yet.

31/7/2001

  • Cancelled the notice to move out, so now have all the time in the world to move. We have decided to do the smart thing and find ourselves flats before giving notice. I know, I know, a novel idea, but somehow I think it may just work!
  • I have decided that if I'm going to have a bit of time to look, why not look to buy rather than rent. I'm after a two bedroom unit that I don't have to sell my soul to the Devil for, though I'd probably consider leasing it out to him short term at a pinch.
  • I am looking into going back to school next year, too, doing something in the computer field. At first glance Latrobe Uni has a post graduate course in networking that looks interesting. I don't know if I can buy a place and afford to pay the full HECS for a part time post-grad course, so the lease mentioned above may be long term ...
  • Trotted off to the Shafted 16 LAN for a couple of hours with Brer Barry last weekend minus my machine but able to occasionally borrow his. Final conclusion: still a hell of a lot of fun playing the games but no noticeable improvement in skills. Still the same 4 deaths for every kill. There seem to be as many people there exchanging files as playing games.

25/7/2001

  • Given another two week extension to moving out. Looks like we're going to need it. When you turn up for an inspection appointment, there's about a dozen other people waiting. Don't know why there are so many people looking.
  • Bro Barry and himself may be off to do a bit of LANing this weekend. Last chance for the Bro before the Big Event.

20/7/2001

  • Computers everywhere! Jenno's computer in bits, my Linux computer in bits, and a laptop that's playing up! Working on all at once when I get some free time.
  • No bites for a flat yet, and rapidly running out of time. A week and a half to go.

8/7/2001

  • Still getting the odd error with Linux mail. Brer Barry is reporting that my email address is bouncing with the username parkman, which is odd. I've had a look through my setup and can't see anywhere where I have set the address to that. Investigations are continuing ...
  • I think I have broken the record for consecutive swap meet attendance. The figure stands at five.

1/7/2001

  • Got the Bus back yesterday, good as new. Well, as good as it can be for it's age ... Hit the road up to Wrinkly Dad's place for an overnight visit, and down here with him today visiting the odd swap meet or two. Had a look at the swap meet out at the Caribbean Gardens market. Not too bad, more second-hand stuff than the other meets, but then again you get the benefit of all the rest of the market to look at too when you're finished looking at computers.
  • Added a couple of hyperlinks for Wrinkly Dad, Sis Jenno and Brer Barry on the side bar.

28/06/2001

  • The Bus is due back from the mechanics tomorrow (Friday). While they were doing the service, they noticed the brakes needed work, and seeing I'm rather fond of stopping, I asked them to do it.
  • Trying to do the Internet the tough way: no wimpy X. I've got to be able to do this so that I can automatically fire up the link and do everything I need using cron jobs. Everything's fine except email. Firstly, I had fetchmail working well, but sendmail very badly configured (apologies for all the bounces!). Now I think I've fixed the problem, but fetchmail won't do what it's name says. I can check, but not fetch. Still looking into it.
  • By the way: I've given up recompiling kernels for now, and gone back to the kernel that came with RH7.1.

22/06/2001

  • Woo hoo! Mobile again, but only temporarily. I have rented a bomb from Rent-A-Bomb (well, it is on the business card) while the Bus is in for repairs. I should be able to pick it up Monday.
  • A few problems with Linux: since updating to the 2.4.5 kernel, I've had a few spectacular crash and burns in X while using a browser. Don't know why this is happening, but I suspect when I compiled the kernel, I switched something off that I should have had on. Mozilla locks everything up after a while, and Netscape keeps dropping out. When things restart, there seems to be a problem file in the cache. Hmm, shall keep looking into it ...
  • Just had another crash and burn in Linux, this time in the console, but while accessing the Internet. Got the link up and running, went to ping www.tpg.com.au to check the connection, and after about half a dozen pings - whammo! Kernel panic. It's gotta be something I've done. May have to recompile the kernel and see if that fixes it. Of course, I could always go back to the 2.4.2 kernel that came with RH7.1, but I don't want to be licked yet! So, uploading this with Windows.
  • Changed the configuration of the Windows drives again. Seeing NTFS is read-only to Linux, I've reformatted one of the Windows partitions as VFAT, which can be set up as read and write.

19/06/2001

  • Change of plans again. We are going to move out end of July, and I'm putting it in writing!!
  • Redone my main computer setup. I have put Linux on the secondary drive, and am using the primary drive solely for Win2k, dual booting with LILO. I had to recompile a new kernel so that Linux could see the NTFS. Seeing I was going to do that, I downloaded the new 2.4.5 kernel, twice. The first time I downloaded what I thought was the kernel, but looks like something else. An hour and a half to download 25M. You can stop laughing now, Barry.

17/06/2001

  • Change of plans again. The flat mate has changed their mind about moving, and now still wants to move on 2nd July. Means I've wasted a weekend that should have been spent flat hunting. Two weeks only to find something. Oh well ...
  • Thanks muchly to Brer Barry, Sis Sandra, Nef Sam, Bump One and Bump Two for their greatly appreciated offer of back-up bunk.

16/06/2001

  • Finally worked out the style sheet background, thanks to the Web Design Group's HTML help page.
  • Trying out style sheets for the first time. Can't seem to get the body background working.
  • Installed WS-FTP and everything's honky-dory.
  • The Winboxen is much better: I can now upload the web page using Homesite. I haven't installed WS-FTP yet, so I don't know if the problem's fixed on that as well.

14/06/2001

  • Change of plans again: The flat mate's sister is coming from Canada for a quick holiday (two weeks) early July, so we will have to put back the moving out date for a month. This means: 1) I can get the Bus fixed at my own leisure; and 2) I can flat-hunt at my leisure. I was a bit worried that I wouldn't find something in time.
  • Wiped the windows disk, repartitioned it and reinstalled W2k today. Now I'm back down to 1.5G, compared to 10G+ the other day. It's amazing how much stuff gets added on if you don't do a clean install in about 18 months and you upgrade to W2k over the top of W98 ... Got to remember that I now don't have HL and HLCS installed. Now for another trip to Brer Barry's place, to apply the service packs that he's kept.
  • Bummer! Problems with the Old Bus, a 1987 Nissan Pintara. Bad time for it, seeing I'm trying to move house. The heater tube is leaking water, so I have to either patch it or put in a new one.
  • Managed to pick up something rather naughty - a port scanner. I promise you it will be used for good and not for evil.

5/6/2001

  • More reasons to move to Linux. The Winboxen for some reason, won't send an e-mail with a Mickeysoft Word attachment, yet Linux will. I have no idea why.
  • {Sigh} Due to my far-from-talented showing at CPL Pacific's recent LAN party at Flemington Racecourse, I am considering changing my nick to "Frag Bunny". I had a great time, but four deaths for every kill doesn't exactly put me in the 'leet field... I can only assume I have a target painted on my forehead and back. For some reason, I couldn't join the Quake III server.
  • Finally got Linux up and running on my big machine, all thanks to RH7.1, which installed like a dream! Now, all I have to do is to get the P100 up and running and install Linux onto that and use it as a server, and really start having fun! I have absolutely no need for a server, but hey, I won't let that stop me.
  • I'm wondering how I can do without Mickey-soft. Two things I can't seem to do without: Quicken, a financial package and Counterstrike Halflife. I've tried running Quicken under Wine on my last Linux setup (RH6.1 on a P100 - incidentally the same one I intend to make into a server) things didn't run too smoothly. Brer Barry has suggested VMware, which I have never tried. I might have one more go at Wine before I give that a go. I don't think CS would work too well under Wine, although I could blame my atrocious record on that ... Hmm, it may have credibility.
  • Still having problems with my PS/2 mouse port. I put it in for testing with the people I bought it off, and they said nothing's wrong. I suspect my problem is a dry solder joint, which only starts playing up when the board's warmed up sufficiently. I've sort of got around the problem by buying myself a USB mouse, ignoring the PS/2 mouse port altogether. Otherwise, things are pretty rosy.
  • Brer Barry, please don't laugh so hard at my page ....
  • Going to be moving house again at the end of this month (June), bummer. Might look for a place close to work, so I can leave the car at home. A one bedroom flat looks good at the moment.

Email: The Geekazoid

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