I’ve been running my blog since late 2005 as such my archives had been getting a little bit unwieldy in the sidebar and stretching the page to extraordinary heights. I’ve reduced this clutter with some very small changes. First I dug around only to find out that Wordpress doesn’t support fetching the monthly archives for one year, so I had to apply some filter foomongery. I discovered somebody else has done something similar, not quite as nice personally but it works.
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Archive for the ‘Network’ Category
Wordpress archives
Tuesday, March 3rd, 2009New Year Server Crash
Thursday, January 1st, 2009My server for some reason unknown to me crashed last night, in the middle of new year festivities. Extracts from my logs show the, hopefully, coincidental timing of it.
Dec 31 23:56:15 sandman rsnapshot[11655]: /usr/bin/rsnapshot -c /etc/rsnapshot.d/mail.cs278.org hourly: completed successfully
Jan 1 01:15:30 sandman syslogd 1.5.0#5: restart.
Happy New Year to all! 
Three Years Old
Sunday, December 7th, 2008I know I started this blog in December 2005 but I wasn’t quite sure when, so I took a nose and it turns out it was December 7th which means this blog is three years old today. In three years I have written 316 entries (including this one) which is an average of 8 a month which is pretty good, and I’ve never missed a month. 
New Home
Sunday, November 30th, 2008My blog has a new home on a VPS hosted by Host Europe shared between me and a friend. It has a nice lean installation of Debian Lenny, running a variety of low profile or tuned applications to provide various services. We also have another 50MiB of free memory to play with.
October Desktop
Monday, October 6th, 2008Another month, finally another desktop. I had been using the default one in Hardy for such a long time.
June 2008 Desktop
Saturday, June 7th, 2008
NSLU2 – beast Fixed
Saturday, June 7th, 2008One of my NSLU2’s went up the swanny two weeks back. Typically it was the one 80 miles away at home, that not only is my primary mail exchanger but also the DHCP server for my home network, chances are somebody might notice. Thankfully I have the ability to fail over DHCP onto sandman with a one line configuration change and a restart of dnsmasq, which I did.
Whilst I was at home this past week I got to work trying to work out what was up. The documentation in Debian about the LED sequences told me that it was getting stuck at the initramfs stage of boot. Basically it couldn’t load the actual operating system off the discs. This meant I would have to delve deep and play with the contents of the flash memory.
I mounted the USB sticks that I use as its discs on my server and extracted a copy of the current kernels and initramfs images that were on it. I also found the Debian installation flash firmware and set about hacking the two. I found some instructions on how to modify an existing image which is what I did. I swapped out the kernel and initramfs in the firmware for the latest ones on my discs and flashed the NSLU2. Same thing happened! So I then set about using the previous kernel version which worked like a charm. For now I have removed the new kernel from it and forced it to keep the old version. I will look into updating it when I have a little more time.
May 2008 Desktop
Sunday, May 11th, 2008A new month a new desktop wallpaper:
I forgot…
Monday, April 28th, 2008… about this. Well more likely is I am just being too lazy. But it has been quite a while since I wrote anything of much substance up here, currently I am unable to sleep which sucks somewhat. I’ve been very busy as of late, I’ve finished my quite frankly ludicrous 5 week “Easter” “break” where I did not much but work, bum around, and drove places. So I am back at the grindstone that is university, ploughing through coursework at such a rate I guess I could describe as “relaxed” but that maybe pushing definition boundaries. I’m looking forward to next week when the last of my coursework is handed in and I am free to revise for exams, oh heck!
I’ve had a new desktop for the latter part of April inspired by a trip to Weston’s Cider of Much Marcle, Herefordshire over me holiday.
I am moving towards a landmark on last.fm, 100 000 tracks played. Not decided what will be my 100 000th track hopefully I don’t go over it by mistake with something non-worthy.
I leave you with the thought, why would a dairy company write “Allergy information: contains milk” on the side of a bottle of milk? Surely that is the whole idea? Or maybe I am missing something…
Wordpress Upgrade
Sunday, March 30th, 2008I am currently enjoying the visual refresh Wordpress has been given in version 2.5. Its quite cool.
