Mono

Yay! Got the debugger to work (this is 2.0).

This is a very nice development environment.

One of the guys in my department sent me an xlsx file today - 36MB, of staff with heavy disk space usage.

The shares are all on a Linux box.

du * -sh | sort -an


Produced a file under 5K in size with pretty much the same information in the same order.

So what was in the 36MB file (which, incidentally, crashed my version of Excel)?

The upgrade mess-up

WinZip did the right thing. I emailed them. Within a couple of hours I had my original WinZip9 key and a URL to download it.

Now that's neat. I might have been tempted to download winzip14, but

• There isn't much difference
• 14 is a LOT bigger than 9
• jZip and PeaZip and a lot of others work. And work well.
• 9 does it for me.

So there we are. Decent firm, did the biz.

But how many other utilities and software bits on my PC can't I upgrade? And how many can I? Textpad, a very fine utility, is still allowing me to upgrade and I'm several major versions down the line.

Never upgrade when you're not sure...

I have (had) a registered version of Winzip 11. No problems with it, but thought upgrading was worth it. Not sure whether I was "allowed" to upgrade, so downloaded a copy of the latest version and dropped  it into a different folder.

Then, of course, the new version asks me to register. Not being sure what was what, I tried my old registration code (gleaned from the help screen on the other version of winzip). Didn't work of course.  Do I want to carry on with a trial? Click yes.

Only now my registered version of WinZip is no longer registered.


And, of course, I haven't got a note of the registration key. And neither has WinZip.....

That's the way to do it. Writing a small utility app in C# for work. On Windows, of course, under .NET 3.5. Get the app running nicely and, just for interest, realise it ought to run on Mono (that's the binary, not recompiling the source).

So, copy the app to a Linux box, and, whoa, it runs perfectly under mono. No recompile, no downloads. It just runs. Perfectly.


By the way, I use SharpDevelop. It's neat, small, fast and free.

A wireless bridge using Dlink DWL-2100APs

This doesn't seem to be well documented - I had to do this at home to connect two parts of my home network together.

A bridge connects two parts of the same network together. The ends of the bridge are symmetric, and configured similarly.

You need two Dlink DWL-2100 APs. Put them both into WDS mode (in the wireless config). Put the mac address of the other one in each (obviously, this scales to multiple APs). Set up the same encryption key on each. Plug each one into the cabled ethernet in that part of the network, and restart. You then have one large network made up of the two previous fragments.


That's it!

drbd

drbd sounds like an interesting technology. Essentially, it's RAID 1 over a network. Using it, you can construct two disks which are kept in sync with drbd. Doesn't matter whether the disks are, themselves, RAID.

drbd operates by providing a virtual disk, upon which your filing system mounts. So, instead of mounting at /dev/sda1, for example, you'd enable drbd on /dev/sda1 and then mount your real filing system on /dev/drbd0

Once up and running, it maintains a status in /proc/drbd. Querying this just tells you whether you are on the primary, and whether the two drives are in sync.

When I built a pair (4TB) the biggest issue was formatting. You only format the primary, of course, and the secondary formats by syncing. Syncing 4TB of data takes a long, long time....

BUT - you can't mount the secondary. So you can't use drbd to maintain an identical pair of servers with one of the read only. The second server, the secondary, is missing a mount

Of course, this is used with heartbeat to provide a ha pair with automatic failover.

This all worked really well for me, until d-day. for some unexplained reason, drbd refused to start when the servers were rebooted to go live. I had to strip it off, and that's the end of this particular experiment.

The delights of Karmic Koala

I've just had a nightmare. A large server, built using the server edition of Ubuntu 9.10, out of the box. Actually, I built two, using drbd and heartbeat. They worked nicely on the bench - did an apt-get update/upgrade, shut them down, mounted them in the rack --- and drbd refused to start. Probably something in the upgrade.


Anyway, to cut a long story short, removed drbd, down to one server. Well, ok...except that samba didn't work. The server could be connected to by IP address, but it never managed to get it's name in the WINS server we use.

After a lot of fiddling, I upgraded from 3.4.0 (the 9.10 version) to 3.4.3, building it from scratch, following Jeremy's excellent notes on

http://www.jeremycole.com/blog/2009/12/01/upgrade-samba-3-0-28a-to-3-4-3-on-ubuntu-8-04-lts/

My first stab at this worked perfectly, and is now in heavy use.

I then repeated the procedure on the identical twin machine. This builds without error, and installs without error. It even starts without error. But no-one can connect to it.

The samba log file just shows

smbd_open_once_socket: open_socket_in: Address already in use

There are a number of blog posts mentioning this problem in conjunction with upgrades on 9.10

I purged the install, removing all the config and .TDB files. Exactly the same, Built it with and without LDAP.

If anyone has any inklings on this I would be very interested. My faith in the quality control here is lower than it was...

Jodrell Bank

What a mess. And isn't this just classic The-Way-Britain-Is-Run-Today. Bureaucrats who can't even add up land real science with an £80M shortfall, then decode to close one of the premier facilities in the UK. They've clearly made a mistake, and no-one will actually put their hand up and say "it was me", and no-one will step in and sort out the mess.

Third-rate administration.

So why hasn't the UK appealed ISO/IEC DIS 29500 - the attempt to get OOXML, Microsoft's 6000 page "open" document format through ISO?

The Norwegian story, in summary at


here
or

Steve's own blog account


Is, quite frankly, shockingly disgusting.

I wonder how many sysadmins spend some time looking at the logs on their internet-connected machines. I have several such machines and I can guarantee someone is knocking at the door whenever I choose to look at the log.

The other night, a nice Chinese machine was running through a script of silly login names, getting rejected. The day before, a Japanese machine was doing the same thing. They're all wasting their time, because the machines are well locked down, and run only what they need to.

Do you know what ports are open on your net facing kit?

Seven builds on Vista's "solid foundation?"

Well, shucks. Windows, it seems to me, has at least two problems. The first is that it won't scale - either up or down. It runs on chunky AMDtel hardware, and that's it. My HP iPAC (WindowsCE) never ran windows (and, incidentally, is confined to the WPB now - it won't run WPA encryption)

Boys, it has to scale. And to get that to work, you probably have to rewrite things in a modular way from the bottom.

http://wubi-installer.org/

The easiest way to experience Ubuntu Linux.

Dropped it on my laptop. Installed, added itself as a boot, and even my WPA wireless worked.

It was a flashy looking Fujitsu-Siemens Server, with LSI Megaraid and other tasty bits of hardware. I couldn't be bothered to rootle through the manuals.

Within 20 minutes I'd configured the 4 mini-160GB drives into a RAID array with one hot spare, installed Ubuntu Server 8.04 in an LVM Virtual Volume, installed MySQL server and rebooted.

The whole thing just worked. Another 10 mins and it was populated with data.

Fabulous.

I have to say that I think splashtop ( http://www.splashtop.com/index.phpis about the most exciting idea I've read about for many years. An instant-booting "desktop" mini-os that provides you with a browser which works.

Don't bother booting your OS - just start this one.

Well, here's a way to post something, even when I haven't written it.

http://www.google.com/reader/shared/12444054231136344423


Newsy stuff from the RSS feeds I read.

Not that I was about to upgrade to Vista, or anything (the 2710, a film/slide scanner doesn't work on Vista) but the installation process, even on XP, was hard work. The ASPI layer had to be there, which meant a genuine "Adaptec" SCSI card, and it always reported itself as an unrecognised device.
I've just moved over to Ubuntu Gutsy for my main workstation setup. I spent a happy hour installing an Acer flatbed, which worked perfectly in xsane - indeed, even better than before on XP.
I put the SCSI card in. I plugged the FS2710 in. I downloaded vuescan from www.hamrick.com - and, lo and behold, it just worked. And the software is far better than Canon's own. I get real, archive quality scans

Cunning photo-filch

Nice email on my flickr account arrived this morning, from a firm setting up an online guide, like, I guess the Rough Planet ones. They were after photographs.

It sounded as if I was about to win a competition. The small print, however, proffered what looked like a contract - I signed away my rights to my image, world-wide, indeed, whether or not I "won".

But they weren't paying.

I withdrew the image from the "competition" which I hadn't entered in the first place.

Harrumph!

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The Stile

The Stile
Originally uploaded by Mark_Twells

Caer Caradoc. An HDR (High Dynamic Range) image, a composite of five bracketed shots.

tops

tops
Originally uploaded by Mark_Twells

More Wild Shropshire.

Stiperstones.