My What Big Hardware You Have

Weeee! Spending week! As of Wednesday, I have been the proud owner of a racing wheel for my ps2. It makes the racing games super-sexcellent. Driving the A class cars and Special/Super cars is smokin unlike with digital or even thumb-thing control. Turns go around, accelleration happens in grades, and its all so much butter.

I *also* picked up a 100 Mbps switch. Full duplex == hot shit. Fuck that thing is nice. Well, let me meander back to tuesday night where for the later half of my network admin class, ex, mdk, and i went to the pub. The problem was raised that my xmms freaking halts fairly frequently playing songs off the NFS mount. I complained about software and ex pointed out that in this case, maybe i really should blame the hardware.

So out with the 10-half hub and in with the 100-full switch. xmms has yet to halt. In fact, I have yet to see a collision light (thought that's expected). It is totaly saweet. I think I should have gotten the wireless access point though... Mmmm so delicious.

I go play with hardwares now.

iMac - The 'i' is for 'I'diot

This may seem a little strange to some, but I have some interesting Mac news today (and some leftover from yesterday). For the first item, as some know, I use an iMac at work. Its a nice little Mac that Bob put OS X on and is all great. So today I was playing around with iTunes on there to discover the coolest option box ever. It reads:

On CD Insert: Import Songs and Eject.

And that's really what it does. I inserted my new Coal Chamber CD and the iMac ripped it, encoded it to mp3, and ejected it. All quietly in the background. Totaly bitchin.

In more mac news, my sis has a dysfunctional iBook that she wants to use for school. However, its been fdisked so many times with erratic software sources that it doesn't do anything she needs it to (eg do full word processing and printing). So what we may do is arrange an exchange. I'll setup a computer of mine that she can take to Uni and take the iBook in exchange.

Then, that's right, hands-free ripping for me. Mac's are so cool.

Nikita is Home and Dulcea is Safer

So having done some more hard time, I've become a changed man. I've become more assertive, more knowledgable, more full of shit, and definately more bitter. So many people in my network admin course are going to drop or fail and its only because they know nothing and haven't the brains to learn simple things fast enough to catch up.

Anyhow, Nikita is home. I took another stab at installing NetBSD on her. Not so good. Better. She did pull down packages via ftp and I did learn a few things, but for some reason she refused to handle DNS. It didn't matter if Dulcea gave her the DNS server info via DHCP (Nikita ignored that flat-out) or if I manually entered the DNS server address. Nikita just gave us "No, Annie.". So I installed RH 7.2 Enigma for now and I'll stick another drive in and try building LFS or something, I spose.

As for stuff I actually learned (or rather learned not to avoid) from school includes apache's user authentication facilities. Rather then have my personal site admin be handled based on client IP address, I actually have it now set to require a login. Ooo ah. So this is my first actual remote post even though I'm doing it sitting at home :P I'm using Galeon from my workstation at work through ssh to submit this post. So everything is remote except my lazy ass.

That about sums up the amount of time I want to spend waiting for my typing to go from Vancouver to New Westminster and back so I'll see you all later.

Reupdate the Plan

So below is the actual body of my current plan. I haven't really said boo as to what I've got planned per se so I tried adding a .project file much to the chagrin of Dante's webfinger. So I'm moving that content here and he's fixing webfinger to handle simple .project files.


Active Projects

Get a bachelors' degree
Step 1 - Take some classes
Step 3 - Graduate

Install BSD on Nikita
The current plan I have for Nikita is to turn her into a tight little network server. I would like to set her up with a strong firewall that will handle the routing and NAT for the LAN here in the Interface and then adding the LAN-only services (being SAMBA and possibly FTP) leaving all the public stuff on Dulcea.

Currently I am trying to install BSD on Nikita. This isn't going so well largely due to the fact that I brought Nikita to work and I just don't have idle time there anymore. She's gotta come home before I can spend any time on that. So this week I will bring her back home to the Ice Palace on wednesday and thursday.

Add webmail to Dulcea
Tried installing NOCC and hacking it. No dice. Dante's actually putting a simple pop3-based webmail thing together. Thinking about just giving up and using mail2web.com

He's ... Running Out of Time

Haven't gotten anything done this week between the addition of school and going out a couple nights. If it weren't for the flaring-up of bitterness toward school, I'd say it's ben a fairly cood week.

One point I've decided on but haven't had a chance to act on is to bring Nikita back to the ice palace. At work these days there's too much to do. I didn't even boot her this week. So all told, I'm going to bring her home during the week and actually get on with installing BSD.

School's Back

So school is back in session. Yay. Just finished the first class for both my courses. Sounds like... school. My software engineering teacher even has it as a buller on one of the firt lectures slides that he doesn't know why I have to take that course. *shrug* What are you going to do when you've been reemed but only have 60 credits to go if you stick to the program you're on?

Network Admin will be fun though. I have most of the knowledge but it will be fun working with this group and prof (even if it is largely laughing at the pain of others). I've sortof got hack experience with most of the topics so the more formalized instruction should be very good for helping me handle planning and security a lot better. Or at least no worse.

Anyhow, that's two nights a week up at 6am and home around 10pm with homework added on top so I'm going to sleep now. Ciao.

Why You Gotta Play Me Like That?

My post from the URO forums:

Can be read here

"So this week has been fucking fun. First off I discovered that on Dulcea (which I also login to for my workstation these days) the ctrl+alt+backspace combo which is supposed to just close my x session actually puts the computer into sleep mode. fucking lame. killed my cacheing nameserver, fine restarted that and comps on the lan can get online again (mostly just wendawg's)

that's fine. i usualy fuck up my computers and such on a regular basis. its what i do. i have been getting better, but i still do it every now and again

then, fucking power outage thursday. some fucking drunk hit a fucking pole or some stupid fucking shit. common, fuckwad! why you gotta bust my balls like that? you can go fuckyourself very fucking much, asshole.

so when comp gets booted, something with networking is fucking (the violent shutdown and all) and wendawg can't get an ip from dulcea. fuckass. i re-run the firewall and reload the nic and all is well. stupid fucking idiot. THE POLE WASN'T MOVING!

so fine. a fuckup by me and a power outage. i can hack it, no wait, Hand of God fucking smokes my ass. lightning strike right outside my fucking house. hits the damn transformer in the fucking back alley. jesus a christ! what the fuck is that? this is fucking vancouver, not Tahsis. i'm just sitting here checkin da emails when *FLASH* *BANG* everything goes off. common, why you gotta play me like that?

so we got the transformer replaced or whatever the shit was with its stupid shit and now again no lan. fuck ass! tried everything. restarting the network subsystem, re-running the firewall, restarting services individually, reloading the nic, doing everything again, pulling the nic out, booting and removing all traces of it, reinserting it and installing it from scratch, and doing everything again, still fuckall coming over the network.

fuck this shit. dropped second hub in and so chevette and pyhrrus can have a fucking open connection to the pornterweb.

dammit all, i'm tired. i'm going to fucking bed."

Hear Dvorak's Latest...

So its official. Tonight was the night I first tried Dvorak. Already I like it. Initial typing speed: 5 wpm. We'll clock progress as I go. Should be interesting. I'll try to use Dvorak primarily at home and we'll see how quick I pick up the pace.

Ugh. Tomorrow back to work.