If you’ve been following my blog you’ll know that I’ve been working on a new filestore project at work for a while now. After getting things working nicely on our Solaris machines, and finally moving my home directory over, I decided to tackle our Debian server. It quickly became apparent that I’d need to upgrade the machine, which was running …
Its been months in the making, but it’s finally done. We have our new filestore ready to go. There’s still plenty to do, like rolling it out for the teaching machines and web filestore, but at least we’ve got the main part done. So why has it taken so long? I spent a long time researching and testing the technologies …
It looks like the BT Exact IPv6 tunnel broker is finally back up and running after being offline for a week. It seems they had a hardware failure of some kind which knocked out their whole TB operation. I appreciate this is a free service, but it’s still a pain not having it available. That said, I was reluctant to change to another …
If there’s one thing that drives me completely insane in the modern world of computing it’s spam. It consumes my time, day after day, and devours the resources of our mail systems. In my own mailbox I get a few hundred spam messages a day, most of which I’ll never even see, let alone read. Thankfully most of these are …
We’ve finally done another libstatgrab release. It’s been the best part of 8 months since the last release. Given the length of time you might be mistaken for thinking we’ve made lots of changes, but we haven’t. All this release really includes is some mostly untested Windows support, and handful of bugfixes. I guess the problem is that we’ve hit a bit …
So recently my router decided it didn’t want to whir its fans anymore and consequently gave up on life. It’s a dual CPU machine and both CPU fans had managed to wedge. After fixing them and getting things running again I heard klunking noises coming from the front of the case; one of the disks in the mirror had failed. …
I’ve always been fascinated by computer generated art, in particular the landscape work. Over the past few years they seem to be getting so good that it’s often hard to tell the difference between them and real scenery photographs. The main site I visit is digitalblasphemy.com, and I pay the small subscription fee to get access to the latest images. …
I recently found a neat little tool whilst looking for applications that link against libstatgrab. It’s called bwm-ng and is written by a guy called Volker Gropp. The tool itself isn’t anything revolutionary (it’s influenced by the original bwm tool), it’s just a handy way of displaying current bandwidth usage across multiple interfaces. This screenshot shows bwm-ng in action on my FreeBSD router. It has …
Over the past year or so the space usage on our research and web filesystems has pretty much doubled to the point where we’re dangerously close to running out of space. There’s currently about 1TiB of filestore available of which less than 10% remains unused. Teaching filestore, however, has barely grown at all during the last year. I attribute this …
At some point towards the end of last week I had the idea of writing a blog. I spent a while looking around for a decent online blogging tool, and, as I suspect most people do, I landed on blogger.com. It looked fairly swish, and had plenty of useful features. Except one. Where is the support for categories? So, moving …