The Treehouse Blog

I finally got around to taking care of the lannic images/graphs, and they’re available here. I had to regenerate all of the graph images, as my nemesis tmpwatch ate the first ones. If only the tetex package didn’t require it…

This has been a really busy week, and it’s only Wednesday. The rest of the week doesn’t hold much of chance of calming down either.

The laptop is in! The Thinkpad R40 arrived Friday (after ordering on Wednesday night, pretty good… about worth the $45 in shipping). I visited both Ian and Ship to acquire media and networking resources required to bring it up to speed. It still hasn’t replaced spruce (no files have moved), so it probably won’t be seen outside of my house much until it does. First three thoughts about the laptop: fast, big, quiet. The first and third are obviously completely good… the second is a mixed blessing. Complete article to come at some point….

Other stuff is happening too. We had a family picnic on Saturday. VBS is this week (Sunday-Thursday) and I’m running the sound/lights for the program as I’ve done for a number of years now. Friday night Isaac and his SO are planning a CTF get-together. Saturday and Sunday are ARRL Field Day. (Need to drag Doug to the last two.) Sunday is the conculding VBS program, as well as a more major family reunion at Doubling Gap, during which Chris and I can hopefully uncover a large quantity of geocaches.

So, not much NetMRG is getting done. My uncle who works for the navy base said that he had come across NetMRG while doing some RRDTOOL searching… might order a T-Shirt ;). This week is work, VBS, and a few hours of DS9 watched on the new laptop to gauge battery performance (as a primary objective, anyway). Some interpersonal stuff, too. Evil ambiguity. And… Blazer doesn’t seem well this week, and Katelyn’s at field hockey camp, and Ship is getting a 24TB SAN, and… well, you get the picture. Busy.

Yeah… so that’s why there isn’t a lannic photo/graph archive yet, nor have I logged the last geocache find…

Chris and I hiked up to a grave on top of a Perry County mountain yesterday in search of a geocache, which we did manage to find. We walked part of a trail in the Hemlocks Natural Area, a very beautiful place indeed. We then trekked up the side of a mountain, walked along its top, and then, about half a mile from our target, we realized that it was on the next mountain over. We had to go through the very narrow valley between, then met up with a trail on the other side. Chris says one mountain per hike is now a requirement.

I’ve been playing with ISC DHCPD a good bit recently. Today I became more aware of the limitations in OMAPI, especially the lack of useful parameters that can be specified for host objects in this manner. This was completely offset by the coolness of dhcp-eval, however.

Many of my CTI coworkers have long held the opinion that NFS is to be avoided, based on their own observations and the horror stories of others. Those who have used it recently seem to find it less unstable, but more of a pain to firewall. Today my file server locked up while I was playing an AVI from it. The AVI hung on my desktop, but as soon as the file server had rebooted, the file began playing again on its own… no intervention. I was impressed.

Some Big Springians have got their RSVPs for the picnic in under (or a little over 😉 the wire. I was beginning to wonder if they were still around…

The GPS gradually recovered over the past week, but not before getting worse. On Wednesday the display was totally unusable, but this morning it was readable, this afternoon it only had 5-6 vertical lines missing, and this evening it is working perfectly. I’m not overly thrilled at the thought of this becoming a recurring situation, but at least no hasty replacement is needed. The research into the Meridian Platinum was interesting, although having to recalibrate the electronic compass every time you replace the batteries would be a bit of a pain.

Other things are going pretty well. I have the trails in the woods trimmed acceptably, and I took the push mower down there to keep the weeds, brush, and poison in check. I also cleared off the workbench downstairs which will probably play host to people’s machines at the upcoming LAN picnic.

The cold-war-comms mailing list had an interesting link to photos and articles regarding the 1961 dynamiting of some Long Lines facilities, the defense of other sites that followed, and the amazing emergency restoration efforts.