Thursday 19 - 07 - 2012
Forgot I still had this, maybe I should make it a hip wordpress site instead of a static html page. Nah.

Monday 15 - 06 - 09
Woohoo. 4 years on since the last post. Testing 2 Solid state drives. A Intel X25-M 160GB and a Corsair P256. I have tested these when accessed from NexentaStor attached via SAS to a Infortrend A24S LUN as a single disk and with Debian 5.0 i386 and a Dell Optiplex GX620 The Test System is a Dell PowerEdge 1950 2 quad cores, 8GB ram, Dell SAS5/E, Infotrend A24S single disk lun writeback. NexentaStor 1.1.7 Opensolaris, ZFS volume 64KB Here is the Corsair P256

root@storage-002:/volumes/ssd# bonnie++ -u0:0 -s 32768
Version  1.03       ------Sequential Output------ --Sequential Input- --Random-
                    -Per Chr- --Block-- -Rewrite- -Per Chr- --Block-- --Seeks--
Machine        Size K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP  /sec %CP
storage-002     32G 78226  32 55709  10 24625   5 165720  85 180427  15  2130  14
                    ------Sequential Create------ --------Random Create--------
                    -Create-- --Read--- -Delete-- -Create-- --Read--- -Delete--
              files  /sec %CP  /sec %CP  /sec %CP  /sec %CP  /sec %CP  /sec %CP
                 16 29307  99 +++++ +++ +++++ +++ 20212  99 +++++ +++ +++++ +++
storage-002,32G,78226,32,55709,10,24625,5,165720,85,180427,15,2129.6,14,16,29307,99,++
+++,+++,+++++,+++,20212,99,+++++,+++,+++++,+++ 

root@storage-002:/volumes/ssd# bonnie++ -u0:0 -s 32768
Version  1.03       ------Sequential Output------ --Sequential Input- --Random-
                    -Per Chr- --Block-- -Rewrite- -Per Chr- --Block-- --Seeks--
Machine        Size K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP  /sec %CP
storage-002     32G 68362  27 65633  11 44718   9 144245  74 154111  13  2174  15
                    ------Sequential Create------ --------Random Create--------
                    -Create-- --Read--- -Delete-- -Create-- --Read--- -Delete--
              files  /sec %CP  /sec %CP  /sec %CP  /sec %CP  /sec %CP  /sec %CP
                 16 29249  99 +++++ +++ +++++ +++ 20271  99 +++++ +++ +++++ +++
storage-002,32G,68362,27,65633,11,44718,9,144245,74,154111,13,2173.7,15,16,29249,99,++
+++,+++,+++++,+++,20271,99,+++++,+++,+++++,+++

root@storage-001:/volumes/ssd# bonnie++ -u0:0 -s 32768
Version  1.03       ------Sequential Output------ --Sequential Input- --Random-
                    -Per Chr- --Block-- -Rewrite- -Per Chr- --Block-- --Seeks--
Machine        Size K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP  /sec %CP
storage-001     32G 65111  26 65349  12 44563  10 138203  71 154154  13  3745  18
                    ------Sequential Create------ --------Random Create--------
                    -Create-- --Read--- -Delete-- -Create-- --Read--- -Delete--
              files  /sec %CP  /sec %CP  /sec %CP  /sec %CP  /sec %CP  /sec %CP
                 16 28717  99 +++++ +++ +++++ +++ 18553  99 +++++ +++ 19006  99
storage-001,32G,65111,26,65349,12,44563,10,138203,71,154154,13,3745.3,18,16,28717,99,
+++++,+++,+++++,+++,18553,99,+++++,+++,19006,99
	

root@storage-001:/volumes/ssd# bonnie++ -u0:0 -s 32768
Version  1.03       ------Sequential Output------ --Sequential Input- --Random-
                    -Per Chr- --Block-- -Rewrite- -Per Chr- --Block-- --Seeks--
Machine        Size K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP  /sec %CP
storage-001     32G 40210  16 32387   6 25620   6 151919  78 181366  16  2897   
9
                    ------Sequential Create------ --------Random Create--------
                    -Create-- --Read--- -Delete-- -Create-- --Read--- -Delete--
              files  /sec %CP  /sec %CP  /sec %CP  /sec %CP  /sec %CP  /sec %CP
                 16 29555  99 +++++ +++ +++++ +++ 20475  99 +++++ +++ +++++ +++
storage-001,32G,40210,16,32387,6,25620,6,151919,78,181366,16,2897.2,9,16,29555,9
9,+++++,+++,+++++,+++,20475,99,+++++,+++,+++++,+++

	

j8tsc2j:~# echo noop > /sys/block/sdb/queue/scheduler
j8tsc2j:/mnt/sdb# bonnie++ -u0:0 -s8192
Version 1.03d       ------Sequential Output------ --Sequential Input---Random-
                      -Per Chr- --Block-- -Rewrite- -Per Chr- --Block----Seeks--
Machine        Size K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP/sec %CP
j8tsc2j          8G 37925  97 163176  60 70501  18 38212  71 18166717  3826   9
                      ------Sequential Create------ --------Random Create--------
                      -Create-- --Read--- -Delete-- -Create-- --Read--- -Delete--
                files  /sec %CP  /sec %CP  /sec %CP  /sec %CP  /sec %CP   /sec %CP
                   16 +++++ +++ +++++ +++ +++++ +++ +++++ +++ +++++ ++++++++ +++
j8tsc2j,8G,37925,97,163176,60,70501,18,38212,71,181667,17,3826.2,9,16,+++++,+++,+++++,+++,+++++,+++,+++++,+++,+++++,+++,+++++,+++
	

j8tsc2j:/mnt/sdb# bonnie++ -u0:0 -s8192
Version 1.03d       ------Sequential Output------ --Sequential Input-  --Random-
                     -Per Chr- --Block-- -Rewrite- -Per Chr- --Block--  --Seeks--
Machine        Size K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP   /sec %CP
j8tsc2j          8G 37644  97 72768  29 51674  13 41996  78 211384  21    3661   7
                     ------Sequential Create------ --------Random  Create--------
                     -Create-- --Read--- -Delete-- -Create-- --Read---  -Delete--
               files  /sec %CP  /sec %CP  /sec %CP  /sec %CP  /sec %CP    /sec %CP
                  16 +++++ +++ +++++ +++ +++++ +++ +++++ +++ +++++ +++  +++++ +++
j8tsc2j,8G,37644,97,72768,29,51674,13,41996,78,211384,21,3661.4,7,16,+++++,+++,+++++,+++,+++++,+++,+++++,+++,+++++,+++,+++++,+++
	

Saturday 26 - 03 - 05
Got mentioned in the local newspaper in a piece about wardriving. It came out well. Let's hope a lot of people take up on the article and put encryption on their wireless access points. All in all the map of Den Helder looks pretty filled by now. I'm planning to go biking this summer with the laptop in the backpack and bicycle the whole city. I think I can manage that in an entire week. Since Den Helder has just about 60.000 residents I figure 1 in 20 might have an accesspoint which would equate to about 3000. We will see what happens, by the numbers, this should be interesting. And if that goes well, I might do Julianadorp (just 7km south) as well, it's smaller, I guess about 10.000 but largely uncharted, I count about 200 now. Which is quite low. I might have been standing in the field then, and I would still receive more. :-)

Sunday 20 - 03 - 05
This should be the new old server in the Xs4all Colo.

Sunday 19 - 12 - 04
I'm leaving for the Ardennes in Luxembourg (Belgium) on monday, some packing to do today. Warm clothes for one, it's just 500m high but they forecast wet snow for tuesday. I have been rewatching Planet ES this weekend (haibane renmei the weekend before) and I still think it's very good. The biggest thing that draws my attention in this anime is that characters are very "normal", unlike some other fairy anime with super secret powers. I wish they made a follow-up for this one, because it's really very good.
On the hardware side, I got a new laptop from work which promptly proved to be broken before I actually got to use it. Then they messed up at Dell support causing the laptop to be fixed on monday when I'm leaving for vacation. They did offer to come out to the Ardennes to fix it. But I refuse to have technical support people coming to me on vacation. So I left it at work. It's really for the best.
I purchased a Asus wl500g router for wardriving and other tinkering purposes then actually using it for a router. I did do some testing with this thing and it's actually very good. It comes recommended. It's actually very similar to the linksys wrt54g v1. hardware but this one has both a printer and a USB port. This made for interesting functionality, hacked firmwares and even asus firmwares now support things like flash disks, hard disks, printers, cameras and with the latest 1.9 from asus even speakers! Internet Radio!. The thing actually runs linux so I use it for a small linux box distro development toolkit. And it works really well. See this site for more information.
Thoughts have been running through my mind for the past few months to design a car. And unlike most other people wanting to design a 4 second 0-100kph car I was rather wondering about a fully plastic/composite, electric, 4wd, 4 passenger familiy transport. I believe that makes most sense in my own sort of way. I always tell people I'm special, although I'm not entirely sure in what respect. I'm taking some sketching material along for the trip an something might some out of it. If there is anything in there fit for the internet I will see if I can put it on the site. I havn't decided on a name for the vehicle yet, which is proving to be, interesting. It's a good workout for the mind once in a while, or maybe I'm just thinking to much.
I added a few links to the web comic section and the art section, new are Alpha Shade (pretty), Bunny (humor), ctrl-alt-del (gaming), RealLife (yeah), Sinfest (humor), Sexy Losers (not for the workplace) and Copper which I hav not read yet.

Saturday 30 - 10 - 04
Aquired a new hobby, wardriving, suprisingly easy, low cost, and free internet!
Well the free internet part is mostly proof of concept. I have plenty of internet at home. So that's not it, what is more surprising, or rather more frightening, is that more then half of all the accesspoints are free internet terminals. If you see a green dot on the map, that equals internet. I even spotted a number of company's that have wide open access points. One of the more amusing ones was "My Wireless Network B" Ack! There's a microsoft wizard for that?.
Well, here is the map of where I live.

Sunday 10 - 10 - 04
Howto upgrade your server from NT4 with just a Windows 2003 OEM install disc and the OEM product key from the case.

• Copy the I386 directory to some place local like c:\install
• edit I386/setupp.ini and change the OEM string from the Pid= row to 270
• Score a Volume license key
• Start the upgrade (after making a backup ofcourse)
• Change I386/setupp.ini back to the OEM version
• Boot the linux offline registry editor from here
• Keep entering using the defaults untill you reach the actual change password menu, use option 9 for the registry editor
• Open the system hive using 'hive 1'
• Go to WPA/Key-longhexadecimalstring
• Change the ProductId back to the OEM version (you will see the 270 from before here)
• Activate windows again using the activation wizard using the legal OEM product key from the sticker on the side of the case

Monday 19 - 07 - 04
bonnie++ scores for a 4 disk raid 10 on a 3ware 9508 sata controller with 128MB cache, writeback, 4 Hitachi 400GB 7200rpm disks. XFS filesystem with 128MB log. Server, 66Mhz 64 bit pci slot, PIII 733, 768 MB ram. Not too shabby if I say so myself.

Version 1.01d       ------Sequential Output------ --Sequential Input- --Random-
                    -Per Chr- --Block-- -Rewrite- -Per Chr- --Block-- --Seeks--
Machine        Size K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP  /sec %CP
localtoast	2G 10214  97 102784  57 44217  35  9486  98 150137  66 292.7  1
                    ------Sequential Create------ --------Random Create--------
                    -Create-- --Read--- -Delete-- -Create-- --Read--- -Delete--
              files  /sec %CP  /sec %CP  /sec %CP  /sec %CP  /sec %CP  /sec %CP
                 16  3814  93 +++++ +++  5108  83  3646  91 +++++ +++  4542  81

Tuesday 12 - 02 - 04
Oh dear, it seems I got an idea while standing under the shower. Bear with me for a second, ok?
Someone somewhere probably already thought of this, but the theory is quite simple. I probably watched one too many anime episodes.
There is probably a huge flaw somewhere of something I didin't think of right now. I don't have a physics degree but I think the theory is sound. I don't have the skills or resources to create one either. If someone where to build one of these I want 1% of the profit and like to know where it is used.

Storage brick idea using colors and glass cube and knots
- take a glass cube (size doesn't mater for the moment, just take 1 cubic centimer)
- 3 sides have a 512x512 square light emitter (high quality leds or pinpoint laser should do, must do multiple wavelenghts, 2 would be nice)
- the 3 opposite faces of the cube have light receivers which can decipher 3^2(8bits, a byte how convient) wavelenghts (eg. decipher the color where the 3 beams cross, think CCD)
- Using this you get effectively 3D storage, 512x512x512 is 128Mi possible knots of which contain 1 byte each thus creating a 128MiB storage cube.
- Storage can be multiplied by an order of magnitude by using another form instead of the cube with more faces. Using 4 faces would create a 64GiB storage brick. Sweet.
- It doesn't have moving parts and can probably be run from batteries or similar to maintain it's information. The transmitters must be powered permanently in order to maintain it's information, the receivers can be switched of untill the address is read to save power. Permanently powering the receivers would reduce the access times.
- Substitute the glass brick for a yet to determine substance that is transparent but can have the knots become transparent or a color grade. Using this the storage becomes permanent but would have have phase change times instead of access times. Speed would be reduced but could easily replace disk storage. The advantage would also be a low power consumption when the devices is not accessed, the leds and lasers would need to be more powerfull to create the phase change but it would be bursty. Disadvantage would be that the cube would degrade over time because of the phase changes.
- Use more colors to multiply the amount that can be stored. Again multiples of the 3D "grid".

There must be errors somewhere or other obvious glaring omissions. I'm typing this over a laggy SSH session so pardon the typo's please. I need to let this sink in for now. I think it should work, I think it can work. If somebody wants to discuss this, the contact address is on the left.

Tuesday 10 - 02 - 04
Took op playing squash as a new hobby sport sort of thing. It's really good, I get to walk around with sore muscles for at least 3 days.
If Windows NT 4 says you don't have privileges to install a new graphics driver then I suggest this MS KB document.

Monday 09 - 02 - 04
Errr...uhm..yeah.

I think I need a new PC, then again, I am also leaving for wintersport on the 28th to come back on march 6th. And it looks like it will involve alcohol. For which I need money ofcourse. If I were to find about 800 Euro somewhere the PC would probably look something like this, and I would have it within 3 days.

• Athlon 64 3000+
• Asus SK8V motherboard
• 1GB Memory, 4 will do nicely
• Lian Li PC-6070
• Zalman CPU cooler
• 4 disks of something larger then 100GB with a 3ware raid controller

Wednesday 17 - 09 - 03
Long time no updating. Sorry 'bout that. Short summary: went on vacation to Australia, Portugal and Croatia.

Australia: Watched the Australian F1 GP, Crocodile Steve wasn't there in the ZOO when we went. Sightseeing in Brisbane and Melbourne and almost got used to driving left on  the road. I made the "wrong side of the road mistake" just once (Yay!). I got honked at by other drivers 2 times (sorry!). I ver much like the climate although the sandflies were horrible at the place we were staying.
Location: Outskirts of Brisbane at a friends house.

Portugal:  Not quite what I expected. Me an my brother went there to deliver a BMW X5 from The Netherlands which is a 2700km drive. He made a silly promise when he sold the car. It was ok though since we got to stay there for a week. Weather was a mixed bag. Lot's of rain in the first few days and sun thereafter. It took me just half a day to get fried in the sun. I walked around funny with sunburn the few days after. We took the airplane back which was just a 2,5 hour flight. Much more suitable. I like the take off and landings. Although not everybody onboard seemed to enjoy those moments. :-)
Location: Algarve 5 km from the coast in a small rented house for 5 people.

Croatia: Fun! Hot! I like it there. The food is very good and the country side is similar to Portugal although I like croatia better since i can speak to the (young)people in either some form of english or german or a mix thereof. Talking to older people > ~35 results in something resembling sorry. Which makes it a bitmore interesting to get your point across like determining how long a boat trip was :-)
The waitresses/service people at our campsite were nice, friendly and helpful. Everything was clean and looked very well maintained at the campsite like toiltes etc. Recommended.
Location: Outskirts of Pula at the Indije campingsite.

Venice: As a side tour of the Croatia vacation we went there by fastboat which wasn't so fast on the way back since it broke down halfway. It was an italian boat. Figures. So much should be expected from an Italian crafted transport. Fast and break down often. It's very overcrowded and undermaintained and I suspect that touching the water will result in something resembling  a biolab experiment going wrong.
Location Downtown Venice.

On further note it seems that the Peugeot 206 still has a few annoying quirks in it. It now has 25000 kilometers on it and so far the score is:
- Ripped driveshaft rubber on the left side (faulty part?) 10.000km. Warranty.
- At least once every 3 months the dashboard goes beserk and all dials drop to zero (temp, oil, speedo, rpms) and all the leds start blinking. They have updated the software once which didn't help and they connected the roof power cord to a different terminal. it didn't help. Software update round 2 is in the works. Although the last power cord switch changes the way it fails. It's now small dips instead of a blinkng dashboard for 5 seconds. Searching some other websites revealed that both the 206 and 307 are struggling with software stability problems. What I heard from the tech is that the software is provided by siemens germany. Still unresolved. Warranty so far.
- The right door strip is damaged. When the door was opened the strip got stuck behind a tree and when we stepped out of the car it ripped the strip from the door. No paint damage but the strip is now already more then a month in backorder at the dealer and still no planned delivery date. This is silly. Cost Eur 16,-
- The electric roof motor broke, it was replaced. 20.000km. Warranty.
- The dent/curve created in the roof when they built in the roof was removed. 10.000km. Warranty.
- 3 dents in the left hand side of the car were removed. The front fender dent is a mystery as to how it got there. The 2 others were a direct result of parking in the underground garage in front of the Opera in Munchen for 1 hour(!). Crap. 20.000km Cost Eur 450,-
- 1 Punctured tire by a screw, plugged it at Kwik-Fit. Real spare tires instead of small one is a huge relief. 15.000km. Cost Eur 7,-

Driving the car itself is still very nice and even the long 1600km drive to croatia and 1600 back was very doable. Next one needs to have a airconditioning though. The diesel is still a joy to drive. I occasionally drive a petrol car and getting used to the very sensitive throttle response compared to the diesel is annoying. The diesel is _not_ slow, it just drives different. and the 80-120 accelleration is very good. The engine always feels "willing and able" and drives effortlessly.

Saturday 01 - 03 - 03
Panic attack

Friday 28 - 02 - 03
The ericsson P800 is the phone to have for reasons which will become obvious. Think chatboard as well.

I'm on vacation tommorow for the next 2 weeks to australia, bathing in the sunshine to relieve my rsi pain.

Monday 06 - 01 - 03
Fun and busy month. Lot's of scrouning on all sorts of nice food. Met my promise to buy stuff from the MegaTokyo.com store. (I'm a sucker for these kind a things). I bought A blanket (it's not exactly warm in the Netherlands), a mug (for the warm liquids), t-shirt (gotta keep warm with some clothes and a Capture the bear poster (gotta feel warm and fuzzy inside ass well :-). You can find their site in the Comics link section on the left.
I made a few wallpapers that I use on my desktop machines and notebook. You can find these here. Watch out though. There are a couple of 3.8MB bmp versions of the wallpapers in there as well. I personally like the piro-large-blur, kimiko-piro-cover-large-blur and the 220-large-blur. These are made from material available on fredart.com and and the megatokyo.com site and are copyright by Fred Gallagher.
I promised myself for this year to learn japanese, which should be a fun experience. It's not useful for anything but there is not much fun in doing just what you need to do. Most things which have no obvious purpose whatsoever can be a lot of fun to do. It's not because I must but because I can! There!
And now I will have to suffer the consequences for this sentence for the next few months, years.. whatever.

My friend and I already agreed that I am the closest thing to "The prince of f*king darkness" since I make lights go out on a regular basis and generally break things. Which involves dark rituals with machines which are to be placed on a altar and typing arcane commands on a amber 80x24 display in a corner. And that's when things go wrong, miserably.

Got my first 5000Km on the car and it still seems to be in working order. (insert cynical quote here). It's a twitchy car though. The easiest way to show this is under heavy braking. I got the feeling that in the last part the steering assist kicks in which makes it very twitchy and it reacts to the steering wheel very lightly.
I also found a bug in the onboard computer software (I really can't help it that stuff breaks when I touch it). If the windscreen wipers (front or rear) are on the interval setting when you switch off the car. They will not start wiping when you come back and start the car! This is very peculiar behaviour to say the least. Switching it from interval to normal or off and to interval again gets it going but it's bothersome. Since instead of turning the rear wiper on (which has the switch still set to interval but isn't working) it will spray the windows and start wiping instead. And spraying the rear windows in heavy run is pretty much useless anyways.
The frost is also being mean to the sunroof and it's starting to make all sorts of scary cracking and rattling noises. When it's warm these are gone though. But getting the roof to defrost when it's -2 Celsius is a bit of pain without reaching sauna temperatures inside.

I finished the entire (tv) series of Rurouni Kenshin by now and it was a long haul. The last 30 episodes or so are still fun to watch but it lost it's edge after episode 60-70 or so. It's not a shame though. There are not many series that span 95 episodes without some fatigue. The OAV series are excellent though and are a "must watch". I enjoyed watching Slayers Next as well as Mahoromatic. Mahoromatic is nice and light which makes it easy to watch. Watched some Boogiepop Phantom, didn't get it. Samurai Deeper Kyo, I get it. Ninja with swords, big battles, shallow plot, girls in kimono. I like it.

Sunday 03 - 11 - 02
Great, I didn't have my car more then a week yet and I already have a speeding ticket ;-)
I drives great though. On a saturday morning at 6:30AM I managed to make it from Den Helder to Heerhugowaard in a bit less then 25 minutes. It's about 40 kilometers, you do the math. It's 2 minutes faster then my previous friday night 1:30AM record with my 106. Average speed above 96km/h. I only do this when I am either pissed off or in a hurry, which are both a seldom occurrence. At least with respect to driving in a car. Yes, I speed a lot, but I only do that sort of thing on the freeway when it's quiet and on the outer roads when it's possible. And remember if I am overtaking you that means something bugs me which can be for a number of reasons including: driving too slow, not keeping a constant speed, someone else driving too close behind me.

I have been watching a lot of Rurouni Kenshin lately (95 episodes in all) including the OAV's and the movie. THIS IS A MASTERPIECE. I shed a few tears watching the final 2 OAV's because it became too much. I always "life in" to the movies I am watching and I don't care if it's animated or plain acting. I am just a soft peasant that loves a good story. The story is solid, the movies are good, it has acting and a guy that says "Oro!". What more could you wish for. This ranks in with the best anime I have seen with a better reality grip then Neon Genesis Evangelion or Lain. You really need to watch this series.
I also notice myself using the word "Oro!" in situations that would normally require a "Huh?". I like it. Then again I also use the word (if it can be described as such) "Hoeba" which is the sound a Marsipulami makes in it's natural habitat.

I have also watched some Candidate for Goddess (I really have too much spare time) and can conclude that it is an average series that only has a beginning and no end. It looks like the first part of the season, and there was never a 2nd part. *sizzle*

Enough jabbering for now, stuff needs fixing and I need sleep.

P.S. A friend of mine agreed on the part that I have a poor grip on reality :-)

Monday 14 - 10 - 02
DVD has finally arrived but was not quite what I expected, the animation is done nicely but the story is a bit thin. Also watched the end of Full Metal Panic! and concluded that story wise the series is OK. The only mishap being that they ran out of budget for the last 5 episodes or so. Lot's of bad CGI <-> animation integration.
Those who hunt Elves is a nice series with a good sens of humor ;-). Stripping Elves can't be that bad can it...
Love Hina and Love Hina Again. Extremly addictive. Watch this if you can get it. I'm sure I am gonna get my DVD's when they are finally available.
Cowboy Bebop DVD disc 1 is mine, the others are still not available for ordering. What are they doing over there. C'mon ship those DVD discs. You know I want them.

Just a few more days untill I get my new car. Which looks like this, side and inside. Stolen links, I know :-)
Ok, his page is actually here.
It's already here and the sunroof is already fitted. It looks really sway compared to my small 106.
Speaking of my 106, it needed to go to the yearly required checkup (APK, in the Netherlands). And I was not exactly thrilled to do so. There were some problems which I knew needed to be fixed and one of them is the forward exhaust pipe that goes down from the engine to the actual exhaust. A slight crack had formed over the years, however the engine test that needs to measures the amount of carbon that comes out can not be done in this state. The car drives ok though but the test is required. This is a very rare failure, and the part needs to be ordered from france. But that wasn't all though. The front discs will probably need replacing (again, 3rd time in 2 years :-), the right front and left rear tires need to be replaced because of wear, the distribution belt needs replacing (this belt is now 130.000 km old!!) and fixing the blower is a costly thing as well.
All in all this is a €700, -fixup. Ouch!

Wednesday 17 - 09 - 02
Accidentally deleted the index.html. Oops!
Thank goodness we have backups.

The Free Record Shop sent my DVD to wrong shop. At least they think so. They aren't even sure themselves... Ehm...okay.

Thursday 12 - 09 - 02
Hmmm, suddenly lot's of people around me starting asking if I was sick since I was riding my bike. "Yes" was ofcourse the only valid response :)
Last saturday I went biking home from Alex late at night and it rained slightly. Ofcourse I didn't have the fenders mounted on my ATB and I wasn't wearing some form of coat either. And it stopped raining slowly halfway home (a 5 minute bike ride). I might might as well could have jumped in a pond when I finally came home. *Making sagging sounds whilst walking upstairs* ;)
I had a good week though, the DVD burner and lots of presents ended up being deliverd at work on monday morning. Despite the DOA IBM disk (80GB 120GXP) it was a good day nonetheless.

Met a nice lady at Demon internet by mail and phone which was just about the first woman I ever spoke that I understood, and she understood what I said as well! SCARY!. The sales people at Demon Internet are not the brightest at first appearance but the technical people make up for this big time. Their techinical skills are good and that is on of the more important parts in a ISP.
The SHDSL line they offer is also of good quality and they deliver a good quality router with it as well. A Cisco SOHO 78 to be precise. Not exactly your cheap run of the mill router. We got the 2Mbps line at work and set up a VPN from our PR office in amsterdam. The upstream bandwidth is much appreciated. VPN's are good. We use a Firebox III 1000 (yes it is *cough* overrated for the connection) on our end of the line and a rather cheap well working Draytek Vigor 2300 on the other end. Performance is rather good for a EUR 150,- router (170KB/sec 3DES) and it builds VPN tunnels too!. The 2.2 firmware works with the Firebox, the 2.1i does not. The printer port on this thing works well from the LAN but you can't reach from the other end of the VPN tunnel (aaargh!). So much for remote printing. It looks like the vigor is silently dropping packets on the other end of the tunnel.

Picked up Full Metal Panic. Nice action, although the story is not really deep yet. They are trying though and the scenes are at least not repeating that much. Good Enough.
Couldn't help myself since there is absolutely zilch on TV right now except season 4 of "Big Brother". Ugh, somebody shoot me. Watching FLCL was a lot better though and for more enjoyable.

The Movie I orderd online at the Free Record Shop went somewhat missing. They sent out a mail that "Your order is available for pickup in the designated store". It was not, me dissapointed. And I don't want to watch TV. It's really that bad. Celion Dion bad even. Suffer. Radio is _slightly_ better allthough that is a close call as well.
Grumble ...
Just a few more weeks and my new car will arrive. I am really looking forward to it. I am currently driving a 1994 Peugeot 106 1.4 Diesel in the most basic (xnd) version available. It has "Manual Everything"(tm) though apart from the motor. Which might be considered a plus since it is near impossible to make it fail. So far the failures have been limited to:

• Broken driver seat adjustment
• Fan speed 1 and 2 failed working, full tilt still works. If you can reach the dashboard to switch if off with that fan speed that is.
• Replaced the front brakes 3 times (discs and pads) and the rear pads once. Something tells me it had something to do with the way I tend to stop the car.
• Broken fuel filter, the "bleeding" cap that is on the bottom of the filter decided it was time to snap and come off.

Sunday 01 - 09 - 02
Time to change my Life, anytime is a good time to start. I'll be getting of my lazy bum now and be a more active on the sports front. Fix my bike and start biking more (I love too, kamikaze style, it's a shame I let it slip). Learn a foreign language that not everyone knows. Japanese infact, my nephew speaks, writes, reads japanese fluently and I want to do that to. Go see more of the world. After getting my car this october it is time to start traveling more around the world. I'll see if I can get some contact with the foreign offices from work to come over there for admining their network if there is a problem. This wil also involve, turkish, portugese, Indonesia and Chinese cultures but if you are not trying to pronounce something wrong every once in a while people find you dull. I'll need to start picking up on a some sort of a sport, although I have not really decided yet I am thinking of a martial arts sport.

...
Be a brighter more cheerful person. You think you are tired, are you really? Think Emiel Ratelband(for the dutch) or Tony Little for the americans (IIRC).

Lot's of stuff and there will no doubt be a follow-up to this message. More later.
Although I may not achieve al I want there will be no one blaming me for not trying. Stuff I like in no particular order

• Anime: Cowboy Bebop, Neon Genesis Evangelion, Vandread, The grave of the fireflies, Martian Successor Nadesico, Gasaraki, Ninja Scroll, Bubblegum Crisis Tokyo, Serial Experiments Lain and some more. When I have some more money to spend I rather enjoy the thought of purchasing more of the stuff I like. Last purchase "X" with delivery at the local Free Record Shop. Unable to find this on Kazaa (except for lot's of porn of which I have enough already *switches tv on*
• Nice looking cars: Peugeot 206 (my next car coming half october), Peugeot 406 coupe, Ferrari 550, Shelby Cobra (replica or not), Lotus Super Seven, Ferrari 250 GTO. Older cars always look better for some reason I can not explain. New cars I fancy is Peugeot RC or a Mini, a Alfa Romeo 147 perhaps?
• Music: Tori Amos, Joe jackson, Bjork, Shea Seger, Des'ree, Carleen Anderson and filmmusic in general. There is a lot more to mention but I can't possibly sum up all the records and MP3's I have. If it's good I probably have it on CD. Most stuff I have as MP3's is mainstream music that is ahem. bad. The timespan the average song can actually fascinate me if at all is rather short and thus money spent better somewhere else.
• Computers: Anything that floats the boat, currently an Athlon 1.4Ghz. Fast no too expensive. Getting myself a Hammer system when they get available sometime next year. You don't need the fastest you can get although it might seem like it. I have used multiple AMD systems over the years with 1 Intel system over that time and I don't consider one better over the other. I use Windows and Linux, I am not preaching one over the other. Like I said earlier if ti works for you it needs no changing.
• Still single over the last 24 years and hoping a change of lifestyle will change that for the better as well. Staying the same myself will not change the world around me.

Wednesday 01 - 05 - 02
Replaced a failed IBM 75GXP disk in this server (30GB) and put in a Maxtor drive instead. I have seen to many people lose IBM drives that I don't trust them anymore. We use raid 1 on this server though so no data was lost and we were done in about 30 minutes of maintenance. Linux software raid is really, really good. More people should use it. And it's faster then most hardware raid controllers out there anyways.

On a entirely different note (and not such a good one either) is the Dell notebook support desk. Frustrating is the word that best describes it actually. The Dell Lattitude C800 is a nice notebook with mediocre quality and most of the problems only show up after using it thouroughly. Hold on, I'll tell you.
The thing was purchased in January after the LCD of the former notebook cracked (Inspiron 7500). All was fine but after one month the CD player fell out, screws were loose and some just fell out. Now that was the reason for 4 months(!) of pain and agony.
After another month I started noticing that sometimes access to the IDE disk inside was painfully slow. Some quick investigation showed this occured mostly when I was using the laptop resting on my legs in free air. The problem was solved by gently pressing the underside of the notebook, or pressing against the CD player, or pushing against the HD drive bay, or holding the laptop with 2 hands and gently twisting it!
So I started contacting technical support and explained the issue to them. Responses varied from "you need to install a newer driver", "you need a newer bios", "you have a problem with your os install". Those are all bullshit. I do not know of any PC out there that knows that somebody is pushing the case and then just speeds up. AFAIK there is no organic computer yet.
So in the last 4 months the notebook has been sent away 2 times (not including the screws fiasco) and it took 2 field engineers to fix it. The first field engineer didn't follow TS instructions and replace the parts he got with him so the problem persisted. The second I met personally, which was bright and was asthonished by the freak problem on my machine. He replaced the mainboard in the laptop and I figured the problems were over and I could now use the laptop like most others out there. WRONG!. The mainboard that the engineer put in my laptop fixed the problems with the IDE drive. YAY! But I soon noticed something was Fscked up when I starting encountering blue screens with vague stop errors, losing network connectivity at random moments and complete system freezes (no BSOD, no mouse). The bios kept giving "press F1 to continue" messages at bootup for no apparent reason.
So when I got back on the phone Dell TS they said that there was a problem in the system image and I should reinstall. I already knew this was crap. I transferred my notebook image (You gotta love Ghost) to a new Dell Optiplex Gx240 desktop and in the week I have used that machine I had 0 freezes, 0 BSODs and 0 Bios messages. I did make a clean install on the notebook with windows 2000, when trying to install service pack 2 it froze on the licensing screen. Crash 1. I started installing Red Hat 7.2 to see if it was any different. I wiped the entire disk and started. Halfway there it froze. Crap Crash 2.
I now had enough of this piece of shot that they call a notebook and I am sending it to my account manager if they don't come to pick it up first.

Sorry about the rant though, Dell technical support is by no means bad. I have had good results with both the optiplex and the poweredge helpdesk. It's the notebook helpdesk that seems to be lacking. They seem utterly unable to communicate with tech savy people. Maybe they should have a 2nd line they could transfer you to if you have a certain company support contract.

We also got our first Gigabit Ethernet Copper switch at work. It's a 3Com baseline 10/100/1000 6 port switch. It's unmanaged and it's cheap so it will make a great low cost server backbone switch. I have tried some quick performance tests with it and it seems that you need Samba to take advantage of the extra bandwidth. NT4 levels at about 7MB/s read and 14MB/s write. Doing the same test to a Samba server resulted in a 17MB/s read and 27MB/s write speed. All servers are using a Broadcom BCM 5700 card (The 3Com 996-T is about the same card/chip) except one which is a BCM 5701 NIC. There is more potential left in the linux machine. I am looking forward to using the newly created "tg3" driver that the linux developers came up with which claims to be faster (untested) is a lot cleaner and will be integrated in 2.4.19 if I am correct. I will do some more performance tests between 2 Linux machines with a gigabit card over the switch and drop a note about the succes. It seems that only windows 2000 and Linux are the ones that are able to drive more then 100Mbps with ease. NT4 doesn't like pusihing data that fast (the age shows), and you can hear everything crumbling while it is working at it.
One note on the gigabit front I am still exploring is that the GigE uplink from the 6 port switch to the client switches never seems to pass the 100Mbps ceiling which is rather awkward for a GigE link. More on that later.

That's all for today, I'll drop a note when I know more.

Saturday 01 - 03 - 02
Ping

Saturday 03 - 11 - 01
Windows 2000 suicide counter == 1
Windows 2000 commited suicide last night. I powered off the laptop using the normal shutdown procedure only to be faced with a "unable to load <%systemroot%> \system32\ntoskrnl.exe" message when I booted it up at home. There was a 1 hour interval between this and I didn't do anything else with it then packing it in my bag. After checking the system there was indeed no ntoskrnl.exe file. Better yet, there was no \Winnt folder there anymore either!. Crap a diskcheck did not help and only generated 6000 recovered files (FILE002.CHK). So my notebook is officially declared dead. Luckily I made a ghost image before I went on vacation so I have something to restore on monday.
In case anybody has some doubts. Windows is bad for your health and state of mind. I have seen funky chickens fly under linux but it never went as far as to kill itself without any user action. (I did kill a linuxbox or 2 but that were human mistakes and not software screwups.

Have a good one. I've had enough for today.

Friday 02 - 11 - 01
Back from Spain. Lot's of fun in the pool and sunshine to go with it. Still catching up with stuff. More then 500 unread emails when I got back. Ordered a new 160GB Maxtor IDE disk for raw storage which I am/was running out off. Got some new benchmarks after testing some cache settings on the megaraid and using the logbufs=8 mount option with the XFS filesystem. I also include the old server in the benchmark to give you some impression how slow the old server really is :-)

Coltex-1 local disk (NCR SVR4 MP-RAS 5x9GB RAID5 on DAC960 PG dual PII 400 512MB ram)
              -------Sequential Output-------- ---Sequential Input-- --Random--
              -Per Char- --Block--- -Rewrite-- -Per Char- --Block--- --Seeks---
Machine    MB K/sec %CPU K/sec %CPU K/sec %CPU K/sec %CPU K/sec %CPU  /sec %CPU
          100 16650 98.5 62060 100.0 36183 99.6 20078 99.8 91428 100.0 7272.7 167.3
         1000   881  6.0   892  2.2  1172  5.4  1616 10.2  7947 21.5 125.9  7.8

Coltex-2 local disk (RH Linux 7.1+XFS 6x72GB RAID 10 on AMI MegaRaid (493) dual 1.13Ghz 2Gb ram)
              -------Sequential Output-------- ---Sequential Input-- --Random--
              -Per Char- --Block--- -Rewrite-- -Per Char- --Block--- --Seeks---
Machine    MB K/sec %CPU K/sec %CPU K/sec %CPU K/sec %CPU K/sec %CPU  /sec %CPU
          100 15556 100.4 228125 100.3 145527 78.2 15176 100.0 611460 101.5 35207.9 193.6
         1000 15484 99.9 51861 25.5 52285 30.0 15267 100.0 625110 100.1 36195.2 199.1
         2000 15548 99.9 38757 19.9 24765 14.2 12950 85.7 54835 16.0 2604.9 11.7

mounted with logbufs=8
              -------Sequential Output-------- ---Sequential Input-- --Random--
              -Per Char- --Block--- -Rewrite-- -Per Char- --Block--- --Seeks---
Machine    MB K/sec %CPU K/sec %CPU K/sec %CPU K/sec %CPU K/sec %CPU  /sec %CPU
          100 15705 100.0 241314 99.0 188255 101.1 15289 100.2 618428 102.7 35701.5 196.4
         1000 15571 100.0 95519 45.2 65443 41.2 15245 100.0 617224 99.5 35520.5 186.5
         2000 15572 100.0 38092 19.1 24619 16.0 12786 84.9 58874 14.7 7541.5 26.4

Friday 19 - 10 - 01
Don't bother mailing me for the next week. I am off to spain. The warmth is good for my RSI.
A promised the results of the new database box at work.
Dell PowerEdge 2500, 2GB ram, 210GB raid 10(6x10K RPM 72GB disks), dual 1.13Ghz.

2.4.13-pre3-xfs
Version  1.02       ------Sequential Output------ --Sequential Input- --Random-
                    -Per Chr- --Block-- -Rewrite- -Per Chr- --Block-- --Seeks--
Machine        Size K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP  /sec %CP
coltex-2      4G 15120  95 32377  19 18147  14 12335  82 52344  17 558.5   3
                    ------Sequential Create------ --------Random Create--------
                    -Create-- --Read--- -Delete-- -Create-- --Read--- -Delete--
              files  /sec %CP  /sec %CP  /sec %CP  /sec %CP  /sec %CP  /sec %CP
                 16  4563  66 +++++ +++  4962  58  4529  63 +++++ +++  3129  44

2.4.8-mdk-xfs
Version  1.02       ------Sequential Output------ --Sequential Input- --Random-
                    -Per Chr- --Block-- -Rewrite- -Per Chr- --Block-- --Seeks--
Machine        Size K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP  /sec %CP
coltex-2      4G 15920  99 30269  26 15825  12 10242  69 34218  15 544.6   2
                    ------Sequential Create------ --------Random Create--------
                    -Create-- --Read--- -Delete-- -Create-- --Read--- -Delete--
              files  /sec %CP  /sec %CP  /sec %CP  /sec %CP  /sec %CP  /sec %CP
                 16  4496  63 +++++ +++  4979  58  4506  66 +++++ +++  3130  41

Wednesday 12 - 09 - 01
A black day for the USA. Comprehending the scale of this disaster is difficult.

Tuesday 28 - 08 - 01
The new CPU cooler has arived and is bolted onto the motherboard which is somewhat involving because you will need to remove the motherboard to be able to mount the cooler. The performance is good and for some reason I have no lockups anymore which might mean that the Aluminium coolermaster cooler that came with it was not up to the task of cooling a 1.4Ghz CPU.
The new cooler is running in "low noise" mode which actually means that it has a 56 Ohm resistor in the powerline for the fan. This means that the fan is spinning at 3000RPM.

Because of a screw up at the shop that delivered me the cooler I only received the CPU cooler so I don't have the VGA and chipset cooler yet. If they were not going to deliver me the VGA and chipset cooler they should not say "yes" when they meant "no". I really need the VGA cooler so I can bolt on a "normal" cooling device on the VGA card instead of a ripped off chipset cooler. This means confronting the store with this fact and reordering the VGA cooler.
I will just skip a chipset cooler this time around, heck I'll just use thermal glue and build a old cpu cooler heatsink on the motherboard chipset instead of the flimsy piece of aluminium which is on it now. If I do that I will not have to use a fan at all since there is already enough air moving through the case which keeps the ventilation going. And ofcourse it saves me a few euros.
The fan project is on hold for the moment since it already seems sufficient for now.

There are 2 new sites in the iserv.nl domain which are Kernel Traffic which participates in the kt.zork.net round robin DNS and Linux Documentation Project which is listed as a mirror. The kt.iserv.nl is new but the LDP pages were already available from this machine but using another URL. You can find the stats here 1 2.

Tuesday 21 - 08 - 01
These newer high speed athlons sure get hot during these summer days. No crashes yet or pointing towards the motherboard and processor. I also purchased a Powercolor Geforce 2 GTS with 64MB of DDR ram which makes playing Quake 3 and Unreal Tournament look all pretty without making it chug along and keep the gameplay swift.

However all these heat producing devices make it neccesary to keep air flowing through the case and good fans (quiet! ones) help a lot. The fan on the Geforce 2 started humming just 1 month after purchase which was solved by using the fan that normally sits on the motherboard chipset. I think this shouldn't be too much of a problem because the heatsink from the processor directs the airflow to the chipset.

I have also orderd a couple of new coolers. 2 coolers from Zalman which not only look cool but are also very quiet. I ordered both the Zalman 5000 copper CPU cooler and the ZM17-cu which is a VGA cooler that doesn't need a fan. Along with this will come a Thermaltake Blue Orb to replace the now void place where the other chipset cooler was.

I still need to find some good quality and quiet fans though. I was looking for 2 Papst 12cm fans which will run at 5V or 7V depending on the noise they generate. These fans are really high quality and the spec sheats rate them at 27dBa (!). The 12cm fans that I have in my case now have a high cfm value but make a lot of noise. One of the fans which makes a whiring sound which is weird since I never really used them at all while the other one is quiet. These will at least get a lot of "fresh" air into the case which makes the temperature drop quite drastically. The rear of the case has 2 fans, a 9 and a 12cm so the heat is also pulled out of the case. Read the post below for the link to the case.

Update will folow as soon as I actually receive the fans and coolers. Oh and for the Dutch people out there Space Promotion has the Zalman Coolers and other cooling hardware. For the fans you should check with your local electronics hobby shop where they can be ordered for about 50,- to a 100,- a piece ( - ).

Saturday 07 - 07 - 01
A link to the case I use for my home machine. Big Case. Lot's of cooling and space in it which is very nice. It means that there are enough holes to get the heat out.

Saturday 07 - 07 - 01
Found a great way to make a musquito masacre by placing a fan in the window hole. Most of them were not smart enough to avoid hitting the fan :-). After the late night hacking at my friends place was over we collected about 50 musquito's and one moth that went through the mangling machine.
I also tried getting php sessions going without compiling it first with --enable-track-vars. Well Duh!. Worked much better afterwards. Also got Ximian gnome 1.4 on my home desktop machine which looks really pretty. Me like.
Linux seems to work dandy for a desktop system these days. Ximian Gnome makes it look nice and the linux 2.4 kernels make it workable. Currently burning a cdrom on my scsi burner, listening to mp3's, compiling yet another kernel with XFS support :-) and updating this page in my ssh session on the console. Text consoles often seem nicer for standard ssh sessions so I just switch between X and the console.

Saturday 23 - 06 - 01
New system has arrived. I now have a AMD Athlon 1.4GHz on a Asus A7M266 motherboard with 256MB DDR ram. It compiles kernels a lot faster now. :-)
It does have some weird things like the bios saying it is a 1333Mhz processor but after booting Linux it finds a 1400. It works and I have seen worse occasions like the other way around.
The sloppy router floppy page is now also working again which should please a lot of people.

Friday 18 - 06 - 01
Flashing a newer BIOS into a Abit BX6 resulted in a dead mobo. Crap. I needed to replace the mobo because it was in a production machine at my friends house. I lent my Athlon 500 + mobo to him so the bussines continues. for the mean time it means that the sloppy configurator is down for the moment untill my machine gets a new BIOS or a new mobo.
I have to setup zwelgje (my old P75) to work for me in the mean time. No playing quake anymore.
Can't wait till there is a full-size nforce motherboard on the market. I want one.

Friday 08 - 06 - 01
Windows 2000 BSOD counter == 1
What just a loose USB cable to my ISDN adapter caused. Amazing. USB is supposed to be plug and play, not plug and crash. sigh. I expected this a long time ago. Avoid using Teles AG telecom hardware because it is sucking in your general direction.

Linux 2.4.6-pre1-xfs works very well as a NFS server. It took me half a day to find out why the performance was so incredibly crappy. After running a tcpdump on the server I noticed that only 4 udp packets were coming in per second. This disturbed me slightly. After finding out that a bad UTP cable was making my packets dissapear it was quickly resolved. A PIII 450 with 256MB ram and a 40GB IDE disk drove our 3Com 3300 100Mbit switch up the proverbial wall. Performance counters are not supposed to read 99 or 100 procent in use ;-)
Very cool indeed. This was with a 2.4.4-xfs linux client with 256MB ram. If I'm lucky we will purchase a gigabit ethernet switch to build a separate network for the servers to communicate with each other. This will mean I can finally see where the performance stops using something faster. Bonnie output below.

              -------Sequential Output-------- ---Sequential Input-- --Random--
              -Per Char- --Block--- -Rewrite-- -Per Char- --Block--- --Seeks---
Machine    MB K/sec %CPU K/sec %CPU K/sec %CPU K/sec %CPU K/sec %CPU  /sec %CPU
          256  7574 98.7 11100  8.4  5402  6.9  8011 92.5 11029  7.7 344.6  4.4
         2000  7461 96.7 11115  8.2  5054  6.5  8026 97.9 10065  7.1 100.6  1.4

              -------Sequential Output-------- ---Sequential Input-- --Random--
              -Per Char- --Block--- -Rewrite-- -Per Char- --Block--- --Seeks---
Machine    MB K/sec %CPU K/sec %CPU K/sec %CPU K/sec %CPU K/sec %CPU  /sec %CPU
          100  8677 73.5  8386 27.4  9817 35.3 22555 99.8 102400 100.0 3305.8 139.7

Monday 04 - 06 - 01
Fixed up the 0.93 sloppy release, it now produces floppy's with more then one file on it ;-)
I should remind myself to actually make the script copy things out of the right directory the next time I am slapping a new version in.
Oh well, it works now. Most people should like it. You can also select a sshd for the floppy so you can configure it over the network.

ADSL via Xs4all networks seems pretty decent. It is their "fast" variant and it is actually _very_ good. They have their own 500GB download and ftp server. I even reach the 1Mbit downstream (100-105KB/s) that they advertise. I am trully impressed. I have suffered from crappy cable connections for the last year or so and I can't wait untill I can get it at home.

Cheers

Friday 24 - 05 - 01
I added some information and example scripts on setting up iptables and policy based routing for the linux 2.4 kernel. I also included the configuration of using the policy based routing to make some clients on your internal lan route over one connection or the other. I also included a bit of simple netfilter script to block some ports. More advanced examples are available at other locations. You can find the example right here. That should make easier for people to start routing their traffic in funny ways.
Everything on the XFS front is still going strong and in the right direction. The mailing list has certainly got more traffic since the 1.0 version went public. It's the first .0 release that I have not been scared of. Then again some people say that there are some wires in my head which were left unconnected at make time. They say that fear was one of them ;-)

Soldier of Fortune is actually a nice game to play under linux. Despite the high gore factor. It filled some late night hours for me. If there were only more fun games to play under linux.

The sloppy linux router floppy isn't doing to well. The 0.93 gives you a floppy image with just one file on it. So avoid that version and use the 0.91 instead. It's older but that one works. I still need to fix that one but I have been a bit reluctant. I have also taken notice of that fact that the people over at Coyote linux have been having a hard time.

Cheers.

Monday 02 - 04 - 01
Phew, suffered a small burnout, gone to wintersport in Austria and came back more tired then when I went over there. Snowboarding is a lot of fun but it sucks up your energy.

I considered it would be nice for other people out there to include a link to my sloppy linux router floppy configurator. This will please people out there that want to connect a LAN to their cable modem or DSL line that are configured by DHCP or have a static IP. Just get yourself a old machine with 2 networkcards and a floppy drive and at least 16MB of ram. No Hard disk required. I use a 486DX-133 with 32MB of ram and 2 networkcards as my router. I have even used a 486sx25 with 24MB of ram in the past which worked OK untill I needed support for a PCI slot for one of my networkcards.

This floppy is based on the free version distributed by the people of Coyote Linux. The version that is available there has a windows configuration utility that will also provide you with the possibility to build a floppy with PPP or PPPoE support. The free version also has these options but my floppy configuration page does and will not support this (too much work for now). This floppy also does double duty for a quick an dirty solution to shield of a network. It is also relatively easy to figure out by windows people I guess :-)

Uhm, I probably forgot lot's, ooh here is another one. Try out the XFS journaling filesystem for linux by SGI. You can find the info at their project page. I have been running this fs on my system for more then 4 months already and I have not lost data yet. It proves to be fairly stable and will be put in production on 2 linux machines at work. One is a multifunctional machine hosting all sorts of internet stuff like a webserver and a proxy. The other one is a logging faxing and printing server. The journaling functionality proved to be extremely useful on my home system with my 60GB HD. I used to have 2 15GB disk but those took close to 20 minutes to check using ext2. It now is closer to 5 seconds mount time (including recovery).
I recommend this fs to anyone. It seems that most stuff works normally. More testers needed, including other architectures. They have a redhat based installer for the fs available. No word yet on debian install disks, although the xfs-progs can already be found in unstable.

All for now it's 03-04-01 by now ;-), more later... Zzzz...

Monday 30 - 12 - 00
Discovered the finer quality's of crontab and why it ignored my entry's
They were all valid entry's really! hmmz

Got Quake 3 running with the nvidia OpenGL drivers. They really work as good as the windows drivers. The only thing is they suck at installing. no RPM is going to fix that. Tar balls worked much better. Getting the kernel driver working OK was the easy part. However the GLX part for XFree 4.0.2 was not that easy to install. It was a tragedy.

But that's OK now, I can play Quake 3 under linux. All is forgiven. The first Manufacturer that actually ships any form of driver is fine with me.
Now to get nvidia to ship GPL/BSD drivers so everyone has hardware accelerated X from the moment they install or compile XFree 4.0.x

Bye

Monday 29 - 12 - 00
2 AM, it snows. Automatic export and then import seems to work. I'm amazed. I never thought I could. Why are shells so slow?
I will need to learn C fast if I want to speed some of those scripts up.
Not that it matters much. I'm stressing the export box over there with 65% system doing the xport. I guess it isn't that bad.

Bought a Logitech Cordless mouse + KB and found patches for Xfree 4.03 to use thed iTouch keys. Try Google.

Monday 4 - 12 - 00
The server needs more tuning, stille some mime type issues.
At least IMP webmail seems to work OK after much fiddling.

Sunday 3 - 12 - 00
Updated some links, edited this page with pico, f*cked up the server config :-(
I'm halfway there restoring various crappy things including my first ever perl mucking. Too much stuff has passed too long. And this notebook keyboard isn't really good too type one, it keeps triggering my touchpad.. grrr...
Stuff needs to be moved from my home machine to this server, nuff said.

Wheeee

Thursday 19 - 10 - 00
Feel sick, must sleep
More dead then alive but I have moved to another server yet again.
*koff*

No comments

Monday 14 - 2 - 00
A bit more news, the friend I helped clean up his attic was furious because he claimed there's at least 4 square meters of space on the floor. How ungreatful, but true :-)
NT really stinks, I had an argument last friday with one wich has cost me 2 days so far. Installed it about 5 times that day and rebooted about 20 times but the blue screens just kept comming and never went away. Today it seems the disk image has been corrupted and restoring the machine results in an machine wich you can't log into anymore (very secure!). But neither can we :-(
I just wish I could boot single user or something that comes close. That would greatly help me. How to get a machine in such a distress? Just install PC anywhere 8. That will do nice thank you.
I installed an Redhat Box on the other side and that is the first time rst time I saw Unicenter TNG working after just installing it :-). It seems really nice but you better have 128 MB or more ram in it or it stinks. Way to big.
Of to leftover work....

Thursday 11 - 2 - 00
Moved my site to this new domain .... yay. I got sponsored for this one :-).
The news on this page is currently of my box at home. More to follow later.
Needed to get used to the WN webserver that this hosting provider uses.
And I still need to find out where mysql is at..... the client is installed on the machine but I can't find the deamon yet ;-)

Bye.

Sunday 6 - 2 - 00
up 50 days, new record. Now to find another good cause to reboot the box. Maybe installing redhat 6.1 would do. Something needs to be repartitioned anyways or I need to scrap a lot unneeded binary's. Just humming along. I have not found the answer yet to the things humming through my head, although ik keep telling myself that's normal.
New domain is online but I'm still waiting for the login to upload some pages. Oh well.
I have helped a friend clearing and sorting out a lot of stuff left from his moving. Saw lot's of old stuff passing by, 30 pin memory, 386 SX manuals, MFM harddrive and numerous 5.25 inch floppy drives. Al together we managed to get 2 square meters of space on the floor cleared and one big thick garbage bag full of trash. Hung the 10/100 Mbit switch from netgear upside down under the desk and managed to black out the house and scare has kid in bed. I must admit, it was pretty dark. I'm glad the UPS is already ordered ;-)
If all goes well I should be having an AMD Athlon K7 500 soon. Maybe I _am_ getting addicted to computers. Also going to try an server case to see if that fit's all my stuff in one enclosure. (lack of space means the CD-burner is sticking outside the front of the PC because the Mainboard is in the way. In other words: The case is not deep enough.)
That's all, Bye.

Wednesday 2 - 2 - 00
Fixed some spelling errors because I hardly check the things I am typing. Oh well, I like Corel's OS although I miss lot's of goodies that are included with Mandrake. And compiling al that from source takes me a bit too long. Mozilla M13 is another thing passing by. I like it a lot, it also works excellent on Linux, renders nice. Try it out. You can find the animal on mozilla.org
Still not feeling very OK. Probably no work untill the end of the week.

Sunday 30 - 1 - 00
OK it's 4 am and I cant't sleep. I swapped the 8 port switch to a friend for a 8 port 100Mbit hub. Seems to do okay, not very special. It's of the infamous "el cheapo" sort. At least this one connects wires. That's more than I could say of a HP procurve 2222.
Got my blank cdr's in so it's of to burning the corel ISO on disk and trying their "Desktop OS". Still need to bake 3 Mandrake 7.0 disks for friends so it will be a busy day. 42 days of uptime, I'm impressed. No I only have to wait for a power failure. The old record stands on 47 untill a powerfailure struck.

Saturday 29 - 1 - 00
Much has gone by over this period. I've got an new laptop these days,and not an crappy on either. It's an Dell Inpsirion 7500 with an 6.4GB disk, celeron 433, 64 MB ram and a decent ATI rage mobility graphics card. The card is even decent enough to play Quake 3 on (wich I bought the official windows version of) and still beat the college's at work 20 to 10 in 5 minutes of playing. It's a good thing they invented the handicap stuff. (although it doesn't help them if I am holding a rail gun ;-) The laptop is dual boot with the new Mandrake 7.0. It features 2.2.14 wich in coincidentaly also happens to support the Maestro 2E. The stock Xfree 3.3.6 still stinks in getting the ATI card on track. So off to the Linux for laptops homepage that has an link to a patched server that works OK with the card.
BTW I also noticed that ctrl+alt+esc means that you want apmd to put to the system in suspend. How to figure this out? Try to boot anything under VMware and escape the window :-) VMWare doesn't seem to like suspends btw ;-)
Server is still doing fine, no problems yet. Diskspace on the 13 GB disk has gone down to about 1 GB free. At work there were some glitches of PC's that had to be "pushed" in to 2000. It were some older Dell Optiplex machines. The frame relay line has been delivered but the Telco at the other side seems to have forgotten to stick the other end of the line an something described as a router. It kind of remembers you of wich telco has a monopoly on the dutch market. Stuck two NT servers together on one box. Everything went fine untill about 8:30 in the morning and we tried to start Exchange. (Bloody hell broke loose). That took us through the and about 3PM it was solved at last. We forgot however to re-apply the service pack in all the confusion. that was noticed when the server was rebooted 5 days later...... and the proxy stopped working.... aargh.
I had luck and wasn't there to share the fun. I've had a little operation last friday, so I'm partially enjoying a week of recouping from that.
Anyways having an lot of fun trying to get the Cisco 1601 going but find this to be quite arcane, the command line that is. And then people say linux is bad, they probably never tried IOS :-(. BTW the faststep software is nice except you can never do with it what you want to do. GUI'S why _did_ they invent these things..... Ofcourse for Quake 3 you silly :-) almost forgot.
I have a new domain coming active soon wich I think will stuff full with Linux related Stuff. Most are links to software and or documentation. I am at least thinking of setting up dutch translation of things like Kernel traffic or the LDP. Just stuff humming through my head. Or is my head humming through things. I'll answer that question later.

Bye, your operator

Sunday 19 - 12 - 99
Last week was an absolute drama. I have been very sick wich caused me to throw up in the middle of the night. From yesterday till this afternoon the connection was lost due to a failing HF filter of the cable modem network to wich this machine is connected. This also showed me how addicted I am to an internet connection and preferably an permanent one.
I placed an new 27Gb disk in the swarte.multiweb.nl server and took the liberty of installing redhat again because the disk got corrupted in an power failure this week. If you are really curious I lost /usr/bin in the crash. The server kept running but sucks not even having things like "telnet" or "ssh". I am falling over by now. I am just going to stop doing anything untill it's officially monday.

Sunday 5 - 12 - 99
IS there life after quake 3 ? Tough question. I dubt there is :-)
I havn't got the game yet and it will take some time before it is available over here. My big system got an extra scsi harddisk (4.3GB barracuda) and a spiffy Viper 770 riva TNT2 videocard. This was almost exclusively bought fore the aformentioned game.
I think i'll wait for the linux version since that one is also OpenGL supported under X. Installed linux on the new scsi harddisk. I can't help i need al those toys ;-). Reorganized my mp3 collection and weeding out some crap. Converted some cd's to mp3 for easy listening. 4GB of the 13GB disk to go :-).
Also bought half-life, this is really a great game. Incredible story and very nice scenery along the way.

The network now consists of an Netgear FS108 8 ports 10/100Mb switch. This a really good product i must say. It is delivered very complete with attachment screws and a "normal" separate ac adapter wich uses an euro cable plug. This means you can plug it into into a normal outlet without losing 2 connectors because of some obscenely large transformer attached to the powerplug. :-)
Further is included a very sparse although satisfactory manual wich even lists how to make a cross cable in case of emergency. The switch itself has a lot of pretty light but it can be disturbing when using it in your bedroom ;-) The price is the best part of this switch, which is about 225 - 250$ (roughly 500 guilders). Speed with a few clients if fo course good but a test to see if I can overload the switch has yet to occur ;-).
There is a new user added on this machine located here :-)
That's all for now. Over and out

Sunday 14 - 11 - 99
Great stuff!! New server!! The box is now an K6-200 with 64 Megs and a working DMA enabled IDE controller!!! Disk throughput has increased from 1MB/s with the crappy controller to 4.3MB/s now.... That _IS_ a major difference.
So now I am starting to profit from the 100Mbit network cards. (I still havn't found out why it makes the harddisk light stay on continously ;-)
So there is some more megahertz in it wich helps a bit. But the decent MOBO seems to have helped most.
It hasn't taken a few months but just a few days. I am happy now.

Tuesday 9 - 11 - 99
Some lame script kiddie decided he didn't like me or something like that. He probably thought it was funny throwing 2Mbits against the cable network of my provider. In this case my machine.
I am _NOT_ amused with behaviour like that. Using university computers for those kind of things is even more lame.

With that out of the way. Other stuff passed by this week.
I forgot to put the "apachectl start" in the rc.local. so apache was down for half a day. I need to get reiserfs or something like that going. The fsck times on the 13GB disk are irritating me endlessly.
100mbit cards are finally in the machine. In the end I used the rtl8139 cards. Not the best but they seem to work OK. Currently the disk is more or less limiting the speed so It isn't my biggest problem yet. It is an pentium 75 afterall and it's got just 48 megs of ram. Maybe al buy an dell poweredge 1300 or something like that :-). (I will probably build it myself. It gotta be speedy though if I want to profit from the 100Mbit network cards. and uhm yes a scsi disk I think.... or a decent IDE controller that does support dma access on the second channel (sigh). It i'll be another few months. Maybe I should swap in the celeron for this job. It should do fine....

Saturday 30 - 10 - 99
Back from course, learned a lot. Laughed a lot. Much to do.
Expect some downtime tonight. I am going to add a new network card (2 of those fancy 3com 100Mbit cards) so to have at least 100mbit for the PC I work on. It really does get boring when waiting for copying to finish.
Gotta go, bye

Sunday 24 - 10 - 99
I am gone for a week in a course to learn progress(tm). All mail sent will be read after that week. Those that need me know where to buzz me or find me.
For the rest, nothing happend last 29 days or so. Been to me ex work place to find my machine called anouk near silent humming away. This was the machine that had just another of those big harddisks in it and an 7 cdrom tower attached on a very shaky scsi card. It was humming for 61 days without interruption. Cool stuff. I never knew it would even exist that long. I would have figured they converted it to an NT machine. But I wass wrong :-) (Damn Life is good) Once installed and it is never going back.
Kick ASS. Oh by the wat it happend to be the machine I worked on for about 3 months or so.
Something else. People that want to get into the apache + mysql + php stuff. (database driven sites and stuff like that). Can get the tarbal for my version here.
Copy or move this tarbal to /usr/src
tar -xvzf apache*.gz
cd apache*
make install (although not quite as you want it but what the heck)

You have now installed an apache binary with php and mysql support. Don't forget to adjust the configuration file. This one is redhat compatible (think paths here) and it has been compiled on a redhat 6.1 machine but should run on most glibc systems. Don't forget to fetch the mysql rpm or tarbal (as you wish) from http://www.mysql.com. You should be al set now.
Another gotcha: uninstall the rpm version that comes with your red hat if you have it installed, it will probably complain about some other dependencies. Uninstall those too.
Start it up and good luck.

I will give no guarantees whatsoever to anyone in using this thing. It _should_ work fine though.
You will want to check this out also, www.phpwizard.net
Warning to those that I meet: If there is an server near you prepare to be assimilated ;-)

Saturday 26 - 9 - 99
Hmmmz tried to get ip_nat under 2.3.18ac6 to work.... it crashed the server in the process with an nice stack dump... :-(
At least now i know how long it takes for fsck to do the 13GB disk thingy ;-)
Cant wait till XFS comes around.... sigh.
Also added an modem and an ISDN card a few days back. Needed it for work. It used be stuck in my 486 box wich is called "beast" it probably suits it actually. I just about put all the leftover parts in it including VLB cards a scsi controller and 4GB disk and a 3com networkcard. It works quite well for an sort of extreme Xterminal. The box wasn't fast but it worked OK. The prob was that I couldn't use it if it was switched off (duh!) but you can't switch it on if your somewhere else. So I decided to put in the internet box since most of the people where I visit do have an internet connection.
So I'm back to 2.2.12 for now since I can't IP masq yet under the 2.3.18 kernel. I'll try it on my fast box over here using a spare network card and my laptop to test it.
Nevermind the downtime then ;-)

Saturday 12 - 9 - 99
Wheeeeeeeeeee to much to handle. He updated his page (the horror). Hacked out most of the crap on this page that was 2 years old or something like that.
I have been very busy. I've got an job these days wich has been quite busy already. I am also getting more and more in the linux stuff.
I don't regret switching to linux for an moment. It feels and works special. I am also allowed to use at my work where they are also starting to use it. And ofcourse I can help them in the process.
I have added Links on the right for some stuff that should be fairly straightforward. Most of it is done at the server level.
This was just an small update in between. As I said it's busy when you also have to work for an living.

There has been happening some stuff behind the scene though. I have added an 13GB harddisk to the server (since I also use this machine as an server for my LAN). I have added 8 extra MB RAM so it now has 48MB total. The machine is still an P75 at the moment and I don't really need anything faster. It does everything at ease, a bit like me :-)
I have added some scripts to the machine over time for accounting traffic and such. I have had some downtime the past few months.

• There has been a power failure in the whole region for an few hours a while back.
• My server went out of memory last friday (don't exactly know why but it could have been cron) First official crash!!
• Had to exchange the CPU fan two times (they don't make them like they used to... :-(
• Upgraded loads of stuff on my server to new versions and the standard snmpd from redhat 6 sucks btw. It tends to bom out after a week or so.
• Finally installed some log parsers, sniffing, scanning tools, IRC clients and such on my machine to test my own security.
• Stuff that happend but I can't remember ;-)

Saturday 12 - 9 - 99
The dutch getright translation DLL is underway for getright 4.0. However I have been quite busy this weekend so excuse me for not having it translated yet. Expect it soon however. I'll do more stuff on it before my work begins. (I am always 45 minutes early at work.)
Greets from stimpy.

Saturday 17 - 4 - 99
Just letting everyone know that I am still alive
site was hacked in the past month. A friend stopped by to say something on my page. (as if an user account isn't enough :-)
No desasturous stuff anyway, just the html page kicked over. Can live with that. :-)
I thought I'd add a link to the uptime of this thingymadjingy here. Also fixed the few broken freebie links down there (read on).
Enough bullocks for today I think.
I was wondering however, since I'm relieved from school this summer (huray) I will be going to work somewhere.
However I havn't really found an interresting job for after school, some have passed around in my mind. But I am not quite sure where I want to go, somewhere something with an internet connection, maybe an ISP, freelance, or just an small company? or a very BIG one?.
So many questions, so little answers. Some things I don't want to do: wear a suit, sit in an officechair for the complete day, write memos to the people upstairs. I want to do something, .
Already have a drivers licence and some experience maintaining network (novell 3.12, NT, Linux, 95, 98).
I am not going to work there (company is doomed anyways ;-) And the challenges are few.
Want to know more? Just send some junk mail.

Sunday 7 - 3 - 99
What a day today. The server is upgraded to an P75 now with more ram (40MB) and is running _much_ faster now =)
I upgraded some stuff on it and X is also working now. (I sometimes just use this machine) and in the proces of the new PC there is an extra harddisk also (1.2GB). So by now it holds about 4.5GB of stuff. Also exchanged an network card because the internal lan network card (ne2000) had an broken connector. That meant i wasn't able to reach the internet for a while with the machines behind it. The machine also has an color monitor now wich is slightly bigger (14 inch instead of 13 inch b&w). My opinion till now is that Linux is very cool. Anything I wanna do and linux can do it.
I am gonna add some pages for using linux and getting started (in dutch that is) that can be found gater io.
Have fun everyone.

Friday 19 - 2 - 99
Okay the server is still running. There was some downtime this evening because I needed to exchange an network card, and ISA cards are not exactly hot plugable :-)
All is having it's way over here. I created a few graphs about the state of the machine.
stimpy.multiweb.nl/load/The Load on the machine currently
stimpy.multiweb.nl/traffic/The Traffic generated
You can also see the amount of diskspace used and the like..... all just by outputting to an text file. Isn't it GREAT!!! =)

The harddisk is upgraded to 3.2GB, the ram is still 8 MB and it's also still an 486 dx 66. However an old pentium 75 is on it's way and should arive in a few weeks. Then I will finally be able to add some ram to the beast. (not exactly an beast, but then again who will notice ;-)
Greets from the webmaster aka Stimpy.

Friday 22 - 1 - 99
The server has been upgraded to an 486 DX 66 with 8MB ram and an 124 MB harddisk. Because my NT system keeps giving back error messages for the while. So now this server is running RedHatlinux 5.0 wich has been upgraded somewhat with an newer kernel and things like that.
The new 3.2GB harddisk for this machine should arrive today or maybe monday, then all the stuff can be transferd to the new server. It's hard to find 30 pins ram larger than 1MB large.
If you encounter problems you can mail me. Otherwise enjoy.

Sunday 3 - 1 - 99
Well here you go with an lot of things to do for the new year.
Need to make an scription for school about my end project there needs to be finished this week (sigh).
The there's an new version of getright out (huray :-) and I need to translate the new update for it (ouch ;-)
I need to translate the thing in my spare time and my dutch isn't exactly prefect but I will do my best to get it done.
I am currently running an RedHat Linux 5.2 server on my old 486 with 16 MB ram and it suits me well. The server is in use for the Swarte family un http://swarte.multiweb.nl.
I must say it runs fine and the uptime is good an stable. I must also thank Alex swarte for al the moneytary support for the server and Heide Kosze for the coffee and mental support (and a lot of talking btw)
It also looks to be a busy year this year, very busy in deed. It will seem that there will be nothing completely done this year.

Sunday 24 - 10 - 98
Since applying service pack 4 explorer (not IE, I don't use that one) crashes quite often. I don't know what they changed in this but my PC doesn't like it :-(
Oh there is a little bit adapted gate io credit card this week for the dutch getright users.
As you might have noticed the urls on all pages have been changed to http://stimpy.multiweb.nl/ That is probably the biggest difference this week. I did some work on some pages and hope to make this an weekly update from now on. Some freebies for you.
www.multiweb.nl/~stimpy/nmpro.zip Netmedic pro 1.2
api gate.io Glide to D3D engine make your glide games work with out an voodoo card.

Thursday 22 - 10 - 98
The fuse of the voltage protection blew out today so luckily nothing was harmedbut some downtime generated. Sorry this is one of those unpredictable things... so no real crasyh today.
Service pack 4 was applied last evening and i hope that the blue screens of this week are gone for a while. I hope.?!

Tuesday 20 - 10 - 98
Damnit NT had a BOSD today while I was out for the day..... This means that for the largest part of the day no one could reach me. or atleast not my server. :(
Maybe I should put down my linux box instead even if it isn't finished yet.
Quote for the day: "There are users connected, do you want to restart NT now?"

Sunday 18 - 10 - 98
NT had a spontaneous reboot this evening at 10:40local time. I don't know what caused it. It was really a sneaky one, nothing to be found in the logfiles.

Sunday 4 - 10 - 98
OK I took way too long again to update this page with something. So I am at it again.......
I got in beta 2 of NT5 and it looks nice feels nice but it still misses something. Don't know exactly what :-), oh yeah stability... Whatever doesn't matter.
My server continues to run on NT4 server and rather buggy though. I have setup a Root DNS server for myself wich is working rather nicely my friends are also benefiting for it So hey finally something usefull eh.

In the past months I had some ups and downs but all is going well now... Atleast the webserver is as is the ftp server.

Saturday 3 - 10 - 98
I feel that the time is right now to announce the little tucows archive I have build myself. 200Megs of popular software for the people at my ISP. Have a lookie. I included the most neccesary software to enjoy the web. Read the readme.txt for what's on it. I confess the readme is a) dutch and b) very general. oopsie.
I have been experimenting with some real audio and that kind of stuff, but nothing really has came out of it yet (who want's to hear me anyway ;P ).
So I wasn't dead or missing just a little busy. The linux box isn't there yet because I still have some things to solve before I can really use it. However the first impression is that it will serve it's task well and FAST, and not just any fast but blazing fast. It handles web and ftp and all the other stuff so much faster than now. just to compare it reacts faster and gives a higher througput on my 486-160Mhz with 16MB of ram than where My NT server runs on (K6 200 with 64 Mb ram).
However enough of this nonsense I need to finish those GetRight NL pages just like the project for school wich is an Hexfet Amplifier. Maybe I will tell some more on that later.
Have a nice day.

Thursday 3 - 9 - 98
DNS is still not working and it is starting to annoy me. The people at Monolith are working hard to get their main server back online. The problems that they are having results in the fact that they can't update the DNS entry for stimpy.multiweb.nl (as with all people that subscribed to the FreeDNS project.
So I will be waiting that there Server is back online to update the name. In the meanwhile I have moved to a new IP adress and will receive (or hope to) the final IP adress for my server this afternoon. Whom would have thought that things could go so wrong.
O well, I believe that they invented the law of murphy for that.

Tuesday 1 - 9 - 98
I have trouble with my DNS entry for this server and hope to have it solved somewhere around 2-9 wich is next wednesday.
That is not all that has been bugging on the moment but this is the biggest problem (well it is for me and you because you can't view any pages.) So I hope that my provider Multiweb makes a good job of it and the problem will be solved tommorow.

Tuesday 1 - 9 - 98
The GetRight Dll for the dutch people has just been improved and we are now at version 1.52 (still no final yet :-(
You can fetch it here Or just go to the criar conta gate.io