The Treehouse Blog

My sister and I went down to Chincoteague, VA for a few days last week, staying with our grandparents, since they had rented a condo for the week. The weather was decent (only raining Tuesday evening), but the mosquitoes were oppressive on Wednesday morning while we were biking the trails on southern Assateague. There was good food, and a brief break from pace of work.

Unfortunately, it seems that anything requiring cooperation and coordination is hard to do. I spent the day investigating a likely impossible solution to a problem that doesn’t end up needing solved. While at the same time still not having the ability to work on the problem that really needs solved. And no documentation or plan has been given to me other than 3rd party verbal snippets to the overarching project responsible for the whole situation. Sigh.

Luckily, other than this blog, I’ve been pretty successful at not letting the day ruin my evening. I got to visit with Chris a bit, following his trip to Illinois.

And one more note… recent kernel upgrades for FC5 require a new firmware image for the ipw2200 wireless driver, so remember that.

My great-grandfather’s family typically has a reunion on the 4th of July, but for the last few years it has been held on a weekend near that day, and this year it was as well. So, on the 4th, my (less extended) family had a food at my place. We scheduled it for lunchtime, figuring we’d beat the storms predicted, but instead hit them directly. Oh well. I did get to see Discovery launch live on TV, something I’ve never before had the opportunity to witness. Pretty neat.

This past Saturday we visited with friends of the family over near Shade Gap. Their neighbors put on a professional fireworks show that would put most municipalities to shame (ok, so I’m comparing them to Shippensburg). But it was really quite impressive, and we had front row seats.

That’s what’s happening. Not Much. I’ve been moving pieces of dead trees around the house, and have a large stack of wood that needs burned as soon as the County, in its infinite wisdom, ends the burn ban. Also trying to get the shed into a usable condition (which will involve burning a large amount of cardboard at some point).

Other than that, I’ve been doing some irritating travel for my employer, and it seems that has not ended. And, as Doug mentioned, we won the CVARC fox hunt the other weekend.

No structure here… just some random goings-on:

For the last several kernel updates for FC4, my DVD sharing using GNBD hasn’t worked. I guess those special ioctl()s aren’t getting translated over or something. And NFS or SMB sharing an encrypted DVD just doesn’t do anything good at all (ignoring the fact that NFS seems really sucky with the latest FC4 updates). So, after months of not being able to watch DVDs, I gave up, and bought a USB drive cage to attach a DVD drive to Oak. Works perfectly. Despite performance issues and cabling evilness, I still can’t completely rule out a stack of USB drives RAIDed as a bulk storage solution, especially with all of the device mapper coolness in Linux. Too early to be thinking of that, though, as the computer storage fund hasn’t matured yet, despite the fact that Oak is at 99% capacity.

As Doug has mentioned, Asterisk and VoIP is still pretty neat. I’ve setup a teliax account, since they have pricing like nufone with a whole lot of rate centers worth of DIDs (they’re essentially a Level3 reseller). So, we just need to get some VPN’ing set up. I’m in desperate need of some UT, and I think VPN might be a useful substitute for a LAN party this winter.

My grandfather (on my Dad’s side) has been in the hospital on and off for more than a month now. Currently he has pneumonia, is very weak, and not entirely coherent. Your prayers would be appreciated for what could be a difficult Christmas season for the family.

Things at Ship are going fairly well. I did shoot myself in the foot with the “ip arp inspection” feature of the Sup720 this week though. Does 15 pps of ARP traffic seem like a good default threshold for shutting down trunk ports to you? Me neither. Of course, I asked that question after two ports had been err-disabled. Hopefully Tim and I will get to do a real test of some VMPS soon, too.