Christopher Schmidt

I think I just killed my computer.

So, I have a computer that I've been using for the past 7 years. It was originally a pretty powerful desktop machine, and has slowly migrated from Windows to Gentoo to Debian to Ubuntu. It's gone through roles as my primary webserver -- on Windows and Linux -- to mail server to file server.

It's gotten upgrades from a single 80GB hard drive with a CD player to 500GB of space with a DVD reader and DVD burner.

Earlier tonight, the 'big' hard drive -- a 300GB Seagate -- bit the dust. I wasn't sure if it was the expansion SATA card or if it was the drive, so I was doing some futzing about...

and in the process, I broke a fan blade on my CPU fan. Shit.

In general, this wouldn't be such a bad thing, but this broken fan blade is causing the fan to vibrate like crazy -- enough to vibrate the whole case loudly enough that I can't really leave it on. So not only did I lose a 300gb hard drive which was mostly movies, I've also now got a computer that I can't really turn on.

Sigh.

I think that it may be time to replace zeus with something slightly more suitable for being a fileserver. It had really become a frankenstein over the years, and it may be time to move on. But even so, it is a bit sad to look at moving on from something that I've had just under 7 years of history with.

So, I think I'm going to spend tomorrow figuring out what I want to do for a new computer. I think I want something that's quiet enough to keep in the living room, and has enough space that I can stick in cards for video out and (eventually) some kind of TV input for MythTV-like stuff or something. The *idea* of an AppleTV appeals, but the practicality of dealing with not having a 'real computer' for this feels like it would bug me. This might be silly, I'm not sure. Also, the AppleTV isn't really a DVR, which would be nice to get eventually.

Ah well. So life goes.

Hm, the text box for entry on this mobile client is kind of weird and small. Maybe it will work. Ah, it automatically gets bigger.

I've been wanting to post to lj during my walks to/from work, and posting by text message just isn't enough. Using j2me now.

Device: NokiaN95/20.0.015

Reinstalled my desktop machine today. I've spent the last hour or so getting the machine back in exactly the same state I had it in 4 years ago in my second year of college.

Things that this means I'm running, in no particular order:
* evilwm (yay)
* xbindkeys
* xmms (though that was actually replaced by gnump3d when I realized I didn't have sound on the machine in question -- which is actually working quite nicely.)
* Logjam!

I'm sure more things will come to me as the process wears on, and I'm also not deliberately trying to make the system unusable by anyone else, so at the moment, it's still just this session configuration. Still, it is somewhat nice to be back in a state that I was actually reasonably productive in way back when. Simply having reasonable window snapping without all the crap that macs tend to stick on top of it is nice in and of itself.

I should really see if I can work out how to make this be my user profile without breaking everything else that goes along with it -- for example, I'm quite happy to have things like ssh-agent started for me automatically, which I don't want to break.

I suppose if I knew more about gdm, I could probably figure this out, but seeing as I don't...

Sadly, this monitor is going, and it does make using the machine somewhat hard. Additionally, the redrawing is painfully slow in many cases. And since I'm using Ubuntu, I'm hardly being as supportive of the whole Free Software movement as I could be -- but I suppose it can't get much worse than using a Mac :)

I really do like Logjam. All the clients for OS X are too clunky feeling -- too many buttons and knobs. Logjam's got almost nothing -- and I like it like that :)

So, last night around 10pm, LiveJournal stopped working for me (and pretty much everyone else, apparently). I played around a bit, and realized that the problem was with the DNS servers -- the LiveJournal servers themselves worked fine. opal1159 was wonderful enough to let me know the IP of LiveJournal -- 66.150.66.50 obviously doesn't work anymore ;) With the appropriate IP in /etc/hosts, everything worked fine.

So I added that to /etc/hosts, then played a bit and realized that LiveJournal.org's DNS was on the same servers as LiveJournal.com's -- the result being that the status.livejournal.org page was equally dead. I was kind of curious as to why someone wouldn't have thought of moving the DNS for that domain to at least have a secondary nameserver in some other place -- LJ used to do that by using a DNS server running on ns2.bradfitz.com or something like that as a backup.

So, after the lj-maint post (and reading some of the comments by crucially) I decided to check out the whois for LiveJournal again:

Domain Name Servers:
NS.LAYER42.NET
USW2.AKAM.NET
EUR1.AKAM.NET
ASIA2.AKAM.NET
NS1-118.AKAM.NET
NS1-142.AKAM.NET
USE3.AKAM.NET
USW7.AKAM.NET
AUS1.AKAM.NET

Yes, I suppose that switching your DNS service to be run by akamai would be *one* way to avoid a DDoS on your nameservers...

Speakeasy came through! This morning, woke up, plugged in DSL modem, and it lit up. Hooray, DSL!

Of course, it wasn't quite that simple. First, Speakeasy apparently doesn't do DHCP for its static IP customers. I liked this about MV: They did everything for me. Still, the information was on the packing slip, so I was able to put it in without a problem... except then it didn't work. Called Speakeasy support, got told that it was the wrong info. (Strange, since my userid was printed right on there...)

once I updated it, everything worked fine for about an hour, until Jenn woke up and got on dialup...

Since we don't have filters right now, that completely ruined the DSL line: 95% packet loss. (I didn't realize how neccesary those filters were.) Got Jenn offline and set everything up: the modem and router are now in her room, wireless seems to reach all over the house, wires reaching to kristan and jenn's computers. still have to work out something for zeus and hermes, but that'll be okay later, and I'm set for now.

So, the commune has internet! I plan on leaving the wireless open for the neighborhood (barring abuse), thanks to Speakeasy's TOS which supports the idea of sharing the internet. I'll probably set up a website that will advertise itself or something too. Maybe set up 192.168.1.1 and move the router: smart people will try that. I dunno, what would people suggest to try and set up a community site based around people who connect to a wireless router? Is there a way to send people to a captive page when they first show up? Is there some sveasoft firmware option for things like that?

I'd really like to be able to build a free wireless "neighborhood" around our hub, so people who stop by and grab access know who's providing it, and why, rather than just thinking I'm a moron who doesn't know how to set things up. I could provide things like local copies of software using zeus, or a local wiki... hrm.

Anyone have any experience setting up non-captive portals?

If a table cell is created, but has no content, is it really there?

If a rendering engine doesn't display a border, but no one can tell, does it really matter?