Advogato blog for strlen

30 Dec 2000

Sat, 30 Dec 2000 21:56:35 GMT

Obtained a hardware firewall, moved web, DNS and mail to the Sparc Station 2. More can be found at http://strlen.net/sysinfo. Had a ram problem with the SS2 and discovered a serial port problem. Corrected the ram problem by pulling all the SIMMS out and putting them back in place (also OpenBoot is awesome, it even tells which SIMM is corrupt!). Moving farther up in my strlen.net infrastructure project. Going to Fry's in few hours, hardware I am going purchase: 8 port switch, some power strips, 20GB 7200RPM disk. May be not all of that hardware.

4 Dec 2000

Mon, 4 Dec 2000 06:07:51 GMT

davej: NetBSD or OpenBSD runs better on sun4c architecture (IPX, SS1, SS2, IPC, probably some others), due to the fact they use a different memory management model (see on NetBSD's sparc port page for more information). I wasn't even able to get Debian install floppy to boot on an SS2 (it ran NetBSD for a year, now runs OpenBSD).

4 Dec 2000

Mon, 4 Dec 2000 02:51:07 GMT

4 Dec 2000

Mon, 4 Dec 2000 02:48:20 GMT

Sun needs a bit of a clue about user interfaces. Default pink and blue color schemes along with giant bold sized fonts are not aesthetically pleasing. Thogh it's probably not a problem, very easy to change. What's the deal with Sun releasing Sol 8 source?

20 Nov 2000

Mon, 20 Nov 2000 05:54:25 GMT

Got a new job. It's great. Getting paid for doing what I do as a hobby.

aaronl: Don't rant about the obvious. Better yet get hacking on Open NAP, you have the skills obviously.

10 Nov 2000

Fri, 10 Nov 2000 06:47:10 GMT

NetBSD 1.5_Beta2: Greatly done. Open SSH is awesome, disklabel sifts out the faint of hearted and everthing else plain rocks. Currently running on a half broken packard-bell (ugh!) machine as a file server. Got a sys admin job :-)

16 Oct 2000

Mon, 16 Oct 2000 22:25:18 GMT

Please ignore my idea on kupsd. I can probably read the voltage difference (I believe that's how UPS transmits its data) using the /dev/interface already there, and there's no need to put something into the kernel space twice. Perhaps some sort of a daemon, which keeps the UPS informative in a /var/upstat file? Or may be even a small ups manager device, which allows you to control the UPS through SNMP? These are just thoughts. Any present projects which deal with APC UPS's?

Yes, I decided to move my main diary here to advogato, so I can keep it more development focused and perhaps post any other news directly on the strlen.net site.

31 Aug 2000

Thu, 31 Aug 2000 02:29:02 GMT

mettw: Koenigsburg is now in Russian control (since the end of the World War II) and is called Kaliningrad.

3 Aug 2000

Thu, 3 Aug 2000 16:45:47 GMT

Moved my diary to strlen.net/news. Now written using some modified PHP code, I took from Torfinn Nome. Ask me if you want my modified source, although source Torfinn provided is readable and easy to modify.

16 Jul 2000

Sun, 16 Jul 2000 19:08:09 GMT

Played a bit with Linux kernel modules. Found out that writing modules for the kernel-space is not hard at all. Wrote a module which creates /proc/foo. Source at strlen.net/foo.c. Thinking of getting more information on how my UPS works and writing a loadable module for that also. kupsd would certainly sound nice. I tried getting data from my UPS (which is connected via a serial port) using minicom, on what is sent to the systems when power is out for example, but no such luck. It's an APC Smart-UPS 420.

Installed OpenBSD on my Sparc. Works well, openssh is very usable. Played a little bit with OpenSSL as well. CVSUP works well under SunOS emulation, with which I've played a while too.