New column is up, on the first stage of rebuilding the cabinet system. I'll roll over this week's page in the morning, but right now it's time for sleep. Night, all.

Saturday, April 28 - Piffle

Seems the great cabinet experiment has to wait a bit; I won't even be able to get it home until tomorrow, and I'd imagine the initial cleaning-out, measuring, and staring thoughtfully into the distance and muttering numbers under my breath (critical design step, doncha know) will take the rest of the day. Meanwhile, it's a wonderful Seattle day; mid-fifties, overcast, and occaisional showers, with sunbreaks now and again through the clouds. Consequently, we're heading down to the waterfront with Adrianne and Kevin to wonder and do "Seattle-ish Things", probably including a stroll through the Public Market and possibly a glance at or from the top of the Space Needle.

In the meantime, enjoy your weekend; there'll be more here tomorrow. At the very least, a couple of other pictures of the cabinet pre-modifications (including internal shots) and possibly some other pages I've been working on in my spare time. We'll see. Talk to you later...

Thursday, April 26 - Daily Dose of Musings

Just another day at work... the air conditioning is still broken, but today they brought in large, industrial air movers ("fans" just doesn't cover these things... about a 3 foot diameter) and placed them in the halls. There was quite a wind tunnel effect in the hall with the restrooms, but it was considerably cooler in there. <G>

I've been pondering thoughts of that computer cabinet I mentioned the other day, and possibilities... currently, my plan (if possible) is to custom-fit the case so the components of the three server systems and the router will fit in the cabinet. There should be plenty of cooling, and the space is large enough if I can arrange for suitable mounting. The two biggest problems are the RF shielding, and arranging for access to the systems for drives and such. Some of this is speculative, but here's what I've got so far...

Plan 1: mount the three boards and router in a stacked configuration, with something for RF between them. The machines all run well without interference even side by side with case covers off, so it shouldn't take much. Hard drives will be mounted next to the systems; I have a couple of drive cabinets from old cases that will do nicely to hold them, if I can mount the cabinets in a convenient spot.

Power supplies for the boards will be on the bottom, in back, where the cable ports are now, except for the router power supply. That has a pair of wall-mount screw holes on the transformer brick, which will server nicely to hold the brick above the other power supplies.

CD drives... I'll probably only install one, connected to the web server, and use it for the Perl CD. (Why copy it to the hard drive when there's a convenient medium right there?) The other two don't really need them; when I do installs, I can easily do an NFS mount of the DVD drive of the laptop. All the distributions I use support that installation method (Mandrake, SuSE, and Debian.) Other than installs, I have no need for CD drives in these machines. Floppy drives are another matter, but they don't have to be very convenient - if I have to, they can be accessable from the back or side. I do want to keep them together, for neatness' sake.

The tape drive... if it's usable, I'll connect it to the fileserver board and put it to work. I suspect that it's likely a model that will be of absolutely no use to me, and if that's the case, then I'll replace it (down the road) with a DDS3 or DDS4 drive. (DLTs are too expensive for my needs, by a wide margin.)

The motherboards will be mounted with their rear edges to the front of the cabinet, and for the time being I'll continue switching the keyboard, mouse, and monitor from system to system. Eventually, I'll spend the money on a KVM, but not yet - there are only three systems, and 99.9% of the time I do everything through SSH anyway. That'll also give access to the parallel port and sound card on BRIGID, as well as the console serial port on the router.

Plan 2: Same as Plan 1, with one significant change - I've got a 486-DX4 100 motherboard and processor sitting here, with enough RAM for 16 MB and a small hard drive. What I'm thinking is, mount that system board and drive in the cabinet, along with some old drive controllers I have. I can disable all but one of the IDE controllers, disable all the parallel ports, and have enough IRQs for at least four serial ports - which I can then use as serial console ports to all three servers and the router. Then I can connect the keyboard and video to the 486 and use it as a terminal to the other systems. I could even, if I wanted to get REALLY twisted, use one of the minimalist windowmanagers and XFree86 to have open consoles to all four available at the same time. Now THAT could be interesting. If I have all the necessary parts for it - and I think I do - then I just might have to go with this plan.

Pictures and write-up of the adventures as they happen. Also, if I do this this weekend, there will probably be (hopefully brief) outages while I disassemble and reassemble systems. If so, the web server will be done last, and done as quickly as possible - but there will still be brief periods when the server or the router will have to be down.

Now, Adriane is arriving in two hours to an airport across the city from here. Which means I'd best wrap this up and get ready to go pick her up. Hasta...

Wednesday, April 25 - One of Those Days

You know the ones. Long, hot, nothing of interest going on, where all you can do is wait for it to be over. The thermostat in the office was on the blink, so it was well over 85 in there; the number of computers per cubicle is somewhere around 3, and even with a significant number of them being Sun boxes, they generate a lot of heat. The other end of the building was fine, so either the admin staff get better cooling than we do or the computers really do generate a lot of heat.

Outside, the weather was beautiful; 70 or so, bright sunshine (only bad point on the day) and a light breeze. The trees have finished dropping their biological warfare for the moment, the grass is green, the flowers are up... yep, it was a beautiful day for those not trapped in cubicles... Of course, being a geek, I complained about hte sunlight (hurts my eyes) and only really enjoyed the temperatures because they were so much cooler than what I got at my desk. <G> Ah well, that's life. Complain when it rains, complain when the sun shines...

I did play with Mandrake 8.0 some more. There are a couple of minor quirks, not all of which I have fully evaluated. I hear that you have to make some manual changes to the default configurations for Apache and a couple of the other pieces of server software, but I've not installed Mandrake as a web server yet. Mandrake persists in their annoying attempts to force me to install XWindows on a server system, but I can forgive them that as long as I can still outsmart the installation process. Let's see, what else...

Oh yes, the graphical software installer. Excellent work. I created a new source (5 clicks) pointing to a directory on my hard drive, then downloaded rpm files to that folder. Re-opened the software installer, and the packages were listed. Clicked on them, told it to install... and that's it; the packager actually installed the software just fine. It warned me about failed dependencies, which I then had to go and fetch, but hey, it's a start. There are only a couple of improvements it could use...

1. Allow me to select my sources individually, instead of showing all the packages available from all registered sources.
2. Fetch dependencies automatically. (I know, I know, install Debian. Yeah yeah...) 3. By default, register as a source the download directories rather than the install CDs, or at least make that an option.

Other than that, I was happy with it. And now, it's time to go to bed; it's officially Thursday now. Talk to you later.

Tuesday, April 24 - A Clarification or Two

Plenty of discussion about the column for the week. Some people agree, some people don't. But before we go there, I need to clarify something. I commented at the beginning of the article that Bob Thompson's statement on Spam influenced my decision to go with the Spam article this week. It did, but what I did wrong was including Bob in the same statement as MAPS and the RBL. I shouldn't have done that, because that's not what I was thinking. Bob's statement is one of the things that prompted me to write this article this week only because it brought it to the front of my mind, not because I object to what he's doing.

My objection to the MAPS RBL and other systems like it has to do with the fact that they're denying the transmission of email wholesale. Bob is making a decision on what email he personally will and will not read and accept. As I mentioned in an email earlier today, I don't care what individuals do with their email - read it, delete it, add the author to a killfile, or print it out and frame it. It's an entirely different story when an organization systematically prevents the reception or transmission of email in the first place. That, for all the reasons I listed in my column, I strongly disagree with whether the organization is a regulatory body, a government, or a volunteer "opt-in" organization.

I also forgot to mention an organization that is as bad or worse - for my money, worse, but I'm not impartial - than the MPAS RBL. ORBS. ORBS has an even more cavalier attitude towards their actions than MAPS, but doesn't seem to be as popular as MAPS. The one saving grace about these two organizations is that they hate each other as much as they hate spammers; their squabbling probably keeps them from being even more effective than they already are. Thanks to Brian Bilbrey for reminding me of their existence. I'm not sure how I managed to forget about them.

In other news, I finally got around to trying Mandrake 8.0 today. I'm quite impressed. The installation is smooth, as we've come to expect from Mandrake, and the new software update interface is excellent as well. I'm going to experiment with the Software Update applet a bit more, but I'm pretty impressed already - if I'm right, it'll be possible to install any software with a little tweaking, all from the GUI. Sound interesting, JHR? <G> I'll write it up tomorrow, if it works. Everything else is pretty standard... KDE 2.1.1, kernel 2.4.3, all the usual goodies. I might change the laptop back over, but I'm not sure yet; there are some interesting possibilities in the goodies pile, but on the other hand I like SuSE's management style a little better... decisions, decisions...

Almost forgot - Keri's uncle Jon found me a new toy. <G> No, not a thunder car; they haven't convinced me on that one yet. Besides, Mom would kill me.

No, this is a useful toy. A toy that could reduce the number of noisy boxes in the computer room. Gee, Keri just sat up straighter - almost like she knows what I just typed. <G> This toy is an old cash-register/store accounting system, circa 1985. It has a couple of registers, a line printer, and a couple of receipt printers - but what I'm interested in is the CPU cabinet.

The cabinet is a box, about two feet wide, four feet high, and looks to be about three feet deep. That box has a power distribution system, cooling fans, a UPS, a tape drive, and a rudimentary network hub (albeit designed for RJ11 cables) built-in. I intend to strip out the guts of the unit and replace them with the three servers and the router from our home network - the Netopia 7200R router, plus PUCK, THOR, and BRIGID. I might even pull the systems from their cases and really do it right; we'll have to see what the inside of the box looks like. Full reports on the construction, with pictures, thanks to our nifty little digital camera - if I can ever pry Keri's hands off of it, of course. <G> Anyway, it should be a fun little geek project; we'll have to see how it turns out. Pictures of the exterior of the cabinet are here: Front - Side - Back

Don't forget to join the Conestoga discussion list if you're interested; yes, there's one already on Sourceforge, but the problem with it is I don't have the management tools on there that I do on my mail server. This is more convenient for me, since I can react to problems faster by using my own mail server software; I can also access the mailing list from work, which would require registering an extra address to do so with SourceForge. See you all tomorrow.

Monday, April 23 - Change of Plans

The weekly column is up; this week it's Spam, Open Relays, and You", about Open Relays, spam prevention, and other things. It's not what I'd planned to do this week, which is why there's a delay. Sorry about that, but I felt it needed to go this week. More in the column itself.

My allergies are much better, thank you, aside from a stuffy nose at the moment I think I'm about back to normal. So just cranky, irritable, and stubborn, then, instead of truly hellish. <G> I spent much of the weekend watching movies; most of the Sharpe's Series (Keri has a link to some information about them, I believe) about the Peninsula Wars. Excellent series, I think I'm going to have to both look up the books and possibly find the movies on real videotape or even DVD. History, particularly the Napoleanic wars, is another of my interests, although previously mostly concerned with the Navy of the time. Cornwell's books - and from what he said, most of the movies - are excellently researched, and show things of interest from all sides. Not just the human interest story, nor just the tactics in use, nor just the technology of the rifles and other weapons - but all of the above, wrapped around believable plots (with a few notable exceptions). Even a love story suitable to keep Keri sniffling, while still enough explosions and such to keep males interested. <G>

The conversations about Conestoga are getting interesting; I've decided it's time to open them up a bit. Anyone who's interested is free to join the Conestoga mailing list by emailing conestoga-subscribe@rearviewmirror.org. Right now I'm adding people manually, but that'll change later on. Eventually, the whole list will move to the Conestoga domain, which will be registered as soon as I have some content for it.

The purpose of the list is general discussion, of the napkin sketch, of an idea you've had kicking around your head, of what the heck I was thinking when I named it Conestoga - whatever.