Just updated this blog to WordPress 2.5 and the latest K2 nightly. Everything looks good so far. It’s annoying to update a lot of blogs, one at a time, though, when all of them require changes to a bunch of files in the theme… but I endure; this is the third of my blogs to be upgraded, and most of my wrinkles were ironed with the first.

Meanwhile, I don’t want to give details here, but I’m officially on my last week on yet another job. I may stay here for some days afterwards, as the boss has asked me that, since they don’t have a replacement yet, nor I have a place to go right now (though I’m contacting a couple of my contacts). Another attempt at working at home is also an option.

In this job, I had no problems with anyone, and the company isn’t actually “going downhill” like some others I’ve worked at (no, I didn’t cause that! ), but I really didn’t enjoy the work itself, which isn’t anyone’s fault. After 10 years as a sysadmin, I’ve gotten used to a couple of things, such as:

1. almost every repeating task can be automated
2. needs intelligence and creativity, not patience
3. free time, if you’re a fast, efficient worker.

None of these exist in a job like the one I have now. I realize that I may sound “spoiled” (though that’s not my intention), but the idea of having repeating, non-automatable hard work is alien to me (at least since my helpdesk days, last century), and I don’t cope with it very well. I may have been lucky in my past jobs, in fact. A sysadmin can automate almost everything, and any new work is an interesting challenge (no matter how hard), one where you stay at it until late night because, well, it’s a challenge, because “the mountain is there”. A programmer, for instance, has to create and invent. Even an artist (which I’ve never been, but I’ve worked with some) or a writer has to use his or her creativity most of the time, instead of just doing the same old (but tough) things over and over. But many jobs aren’t like this… most of them, in fact, if you don’t restrict yourself to IT. I sometimes wonder how my life would be if I had been born a century ago or so. Well, there would always be science…

Meanwhile, I’m thinking of buying my first laptop. I’ve “had” a couple (including the one I’m typing this in right now), but they were always company-owned ones, and indeed I’ll have to return this one soon. A €600 would be more than enough for “serious” stuff (web browsing, email, blogging, writing, listening to music, watching movies, etc.), but there’s always that little thing called games… so the one I have in mind will cost twice as much. Crazy, I know…

From reading other blogs and sites, especially (but not only) those related to technology, I am increasingly feeling like a dinosaur, for a reason: I don’t have a laptop. I just have two desktops and a server.

And sometimes I feel like I’m almost the only one in the world.

Don’t believe me? Read an aggregator of tech blogs like Planeta Asterisco at any time — either now, 3 months ago, 6 months ago, and probably 6 months from now as well — and you’ll find many people posting about their new laptop, the laptop they’re considering buying, the compatibility problems they had between a particular Linux distro and their laptop, how their new MacBook looks so good , and so on. This is not just a couple of people, either, but a lot of them.

I virtually never see anyone posting about a desktop system. When someone does, it’s invariably about an old one, bought several years ago; when they buy a new system, it’ll obviously be a laptop.

Am I a dinosaur? Or an alien from Mars? I don’t have a laptop. I don’t prefer laptops.

I’ve had laptops during several periods of my life, always company ones, and since I now work at home I don’t have one. I wouldn’t mind having one, but it’s not a priority at all; I’d buy one, perhaps, if I was lighting cigars with €500 notes. It’s useful if you travel a lot (which I don’t), but as a primary work machine? To me, no way.

You see, the thing is this: no matter how technologically advanced laptops become, they’ll always have a problem: size. No, I don’t mean that they’re too big (or small). I mean that they have conflicting goals. On one hand, they must be portable, meaning as small and light as possible — after all, that’s the point, isn’t it? On the other hand, if they go below a certain size, the screen will be too small to show a decent amount of stuff at a readable size, the keys will be to small for your fingers, the keyboard will have to “sacrifice” several (independent, on desktops) keys, joining them together (with the use of an extra key, “Fn”) so that it fits. That’s why most laptops (there are exceptions, of course), these days, have very similar sizes: it’s the best thing they could come up with. Bigger than that, they’re less easy to carry; smaller than that, they become more difficult — and unpleasant — to use.

Which is why I far prefer a good desktop. No more compromises. Decent keyboard, decent screen, and, guess what, it’s also a lot cheaper, and with virtually no hardware incompatibilities (I haven’t had to install or configure a hardware driver manually in years, on several versions of Suse and OpenBSD)!

As I said, I wouldn’t mind having a laptop, though I’d still use my desktop 99% of the time (I don’t travel much). It’s simply a lot more pleasant to use, I can type faster, have a 19″ screen, and so on. A laptop, to me, is simply not worth buying, unless I simply didn’t know what to do with my money. For both work and games, give me a desktop any day.

So I really don’t understand all this obsession with laptops. Sure, if you travel all the time, or need one for your job, it’s understandable. But, other than that… I don’t see how people can give up a decent keyboard and screen. Is it a “status symbol”? Is it because everyone has a laptop, these days?

Really, I’m curious.

Two news concerning AMD I’ve just seen on Slashdot:

1. AMD buys ATI. What will it mean? As far as I know, ATI has been doing pretty well, especially after it managed to to the graphics components for both the Xbox 360 and the Nintendo Wii…
2. AMD is slashing CPU prices by about 50%. Apparently, the new Conroe processors from Intel are so good that AMD has to do this to stay competitive…

Things mostly went well, though it certainly took much longer than I expected.

The OpenBSD 3.9 installation, itself, went quickly and perfectly. Copying configs from the old HD, and adapting them, took a bit longer.

One of the initial problems was that, while OpenBSD 3.7 had no problem using Ultra DMA 5 on my VIA VT82C571 controller, 3.9 “downgraded” it to non-Ultra DMA mode 2. Copying stuff between drives was noticeably slower. A quick Googling found the workaround, and everything was fine (and faster) afterwards.

MySQL 5.x (and 4.x) still has the bug where the client utilities link to -l../.libs/libmysqlclient.so.15.0 instead of -L../.libs -lmysqlclient. It has been reported often, but the MySQL guys, apparently, can’t seem to be bothered to fix it – it seems that, to them, free Unixes mean just Linux. It compiled fine (after working around that bug), but then Apache couldn’t start with PHP (which was compiled to use MySQL) enabled. This had happened to me before, so I knew MySQL was the problem; I looked around in ports (which maybe I should have done from the beginning, but I didn’t expect the MySQL port to be so up to date), and there it was, a working MySQL 5 + PHP + Apache.

eaccelerator stopped working, however, It compiles and installs, but the httpd children began to segfault all the time. Since PHP is the same as before, I’m guessing it’s Apache – OpenBSD still uses a heavily patched version of 1.3.29, the last one before the licence changes. I’ll have to look into it later. Still, the server is certainly quick enough .

Everything else seems to be fine, and it’s great to have more than 100 gigs of free disk space (I also added a new drive), too.

This server will be down tomorrow, for about an hour or so. I’m going to add a new hard drive and some more RAM, and will upgrade OpenBSD 3.7 to 3.9.

It’s not that the server actually needs need more power right now, as it’s more than enough for what it does (blogs, mini-sites, proxy, email gateway, firewall/router, and some other stuff). But I have a few plans…

Tomorrow evening (always say that with a Bela Lugosi accent, as in “ve shall be leeving… tomorrrow eeeeeevening!”), a team from Netcabo will go to my place to change my modem (which is working perfectly well), because (translated by me):

due to an upgrade action of the NetCabo network, your Cable Modem will no longer be compatible with our network.

With this upgrade, we intend to improve the security of your access, and to incorporate new features which we’ll announce soon.

I have no idea of what “new features” they are talking about, as as for “increasing security”, I really hope that they don’t start blocking ports, or other idiocies like that, which might even force me to move my server elsewhere (and, believe me, I wouldn’t stay with Netcabo). Contrary to what they might believe, not everyone uses Windows, nor is everyone a complete “noob” in terms of securing systems. Hopefully, they just mention that because they have to convince people that they stand to “win” something with this change, and “security” is a fashionable subject…

One other thing that came to mind (which I hope is true) is this: I have a 4 Mbit connection, and I know that my modem (a 3Com sharkfin) can only do 6 Mbit or something like that. Maybe they’re going to do what they did some time ago: increase everyone’s bandwidth, without raising prices, so they can be competitive with ADSL again. If it’s that, then it explains the need for a new modem… and having 8 Mbit at home would be nice.

Unfortunately, because of this, my sites will be down tomorrow, from 6 PM GMT until a couple of hours later. I hope everything goes well…

Das Keyboard: not only is it incredibly cool, and great to impress cow-orkers (have you orked a cow today?), but, supposedly, it’s great for people who still have to look at the keys when typing, to wean them out of doing so.

Caveat: $80 is kind of expensive…

Source: NullBlogException

New developments here, and not all of them are good.

To begin with, in the first part, I made a mistake (I was at work when writing it, just like now): my OpenBSD box isn’t connected to the “Internet” port in the Linksys, but to one of the “normal” ports. If I connect it to the former, it doesn’t work

Second, it still isn’t working perfectly. I’m still trying out stuff; however, it’s like this: if I haven’t gone online with the DS for a while, and I try to do so, it doesn’t work. I simply have to go to the OpenBSD server and ping the router’s internal address… and it works afterwards. It’s as if the server “forgets” that the DS is behind the router (as they’re in the same network – otherwise, the router would have to do NAT), and has to find it for itself first – if it’s “forgotten” about it, then connections from the DS go out, but the return packets aren’t routed to it.

I’m going to try a static ARP for it later tonight. I really, really don’t want to use a crontab to ping the router every 5 minutes.

I’ve also tried another possibility, which was to connect the switch’s “Internet” port to the server, and connect one of the ports to the switch for my old network, 192.168.0.0/24. I have to enable NAT in the Linksys between the 192.168.0 and 192.168.1. This way allows the router to update its clock using NTP, which it does every time it’s turned on, but then the DS can only connect while I’m pinging it from the server (!).

This is weird. This Linksys model isn’t exactly great – for instance, it basically “reboots” itself for every configuration change, unlike the Linux models (which I’ve seen at my father’s place).

I know, I know – I could have avoided all of this by just connecting the Linksys to the Internet, doing NAT there, and redirecting ports 22, 80 and 443 to the OpenBSD server. But I’m stubborn, and I trust OpenBSD to be “in the front lines” much more than I do the Linksys. Besides, pf (the OpenBSD firewall) is great.

Continuing from the previous post, Nintendo DS: First Impressions, here’s a more technical bit. Still to come is a post more related to actual gaming – more precisely, Mario Kart DS, the only DS game I own.

As I said, since Mario Kart DS is the first DS game playable online (instead of simply using the DS’s normal wi-fi, which requries players to be near each other), using a normal Internet connection, to access NintendoWiFi. It doesn’t use a cable, though, but connects to a wi-fi access point.

So far, so good. However, since I’m not one of those filthy rich people who own laptops , my home network was (and is) based on that highly advanced and incredibly modern technology called “ethernet cables”.

Now, Nintendo sells a wi-fi dongle, and you can use any other one as long as it supports WEP encryption. So I thought about buying a dongle. However, I also figured out that, eventually, I’ll have some more hardware, such as a laptop, which will need a wi-fi connection. Therefore, to avoid wasting money, I bought a router, the Linksys WRK54G, which was the cheapest one I could find.

So far, so good, right? Not so fast. Those routers expect – indeed, they’re made for exactly such a purpose – to be directly connected to the Internet, and then to “give” access to other boxes – it can do NAT, port redirection, firewalling and also serves as a DHCP server.

But I already have one firewall, my OpenBSD box, which is also the server where all my blogs and sites reside. And I had no intention of putting it behind the Linksys.

After many tries and changes, what worked was the following:

• I added a third NIC to the OpenBSD box, and created a new network (192.168.1.0/24, the already active one is 192.168.0.0/24), to be used for wireless stuff. The new card has the IP address 192.168.1.1.
• The Linksys’s “Internet” port was connected to that new port.
• The “Internet” port in the Linksys got a new address in that new network, 192.168.1.2. It also has an “internal” address, 192.168.1.3. No other (ethernet) ports on the Linksys are used.
• I disabled NAT in the Linksys, and enabled it for the new network in the OpenBSD box.
• I activated a new dnscache process to listen on 192.168.1.1 in OpenBSD.
• In the Linksys, the default Internet gateway is, of course, 192.168.1.1.
• I configured the DS to have a static IP, 192.168.1.4, and the gateway is 192.168.1.3. The DNS server is 192.168.1.1. (I think I tried using 192.168.1.1 as the gateway in the DS, but it didn’t work)
• I activated WEP encryption in the router, generated a key, and typed it on the DS.
• “Connection test successful”… yes!
• I also configured OpenBSD to do NAT between the two internal networks, so I can use a browser in my desktop (192.168.0.3) to administer the Linksys (at 192.168.1.3).

Most users wouldn’t be in this situation, they’d just use the Linksys to connect to the Internet. But I didn’t want to, so…

EDIT: the above isn’t 100% correct. See Part 2.

My gaming PC at home, which runs Windows XP, had been having random crashes for months. Not a lot of them, but at least one a week, and always at the worst time. What was weird was that, seconds before it crashed, both my mouse and keyboard (both USB) would stop working, and XP would play the common “device disconnected” sound.

Since I have a lot of stuff connected to that PC, and only a “puny” 300W supply, which, besides, was guilty of making an increasing amount of noise, I thought that maybe the power supply didn’t have enough power for so many devices. I don’t know whether that was it or not…

So, yesterday, I bought a new 400W “silent” power supply, and replaced the old one with it. Several things happened as a result of that.

First, I cut myself under a nail. Quite painful, trust me.

Second, my 3Com 905B network card, for some reason, stopped working. Really. Weird thing: on first boot, it didn’t even recognize what it was, just identified it as a “network card” for which it didn’t have drivers, and was unable to configure it. On next boot, it was recognized, but had no connectivity at all. Removed it, booted, inserted it again, booted, and same symptoms: “unknown network card” on first boot, then correctly identified (but not working) on the second one.

Luckily, I had a couple of other network cards in a drawer…

Third, while the power supply’s fan was the noisiest one, now that I replaced it, I discovered that the CPU fan is making almost as much noise. I had stopped each fan by hand to find out which one was making all that noise, and came to the conclusion that it was the power supply’s fan, which I couldn’t stop since there’s a grid in front of it (all right, technically I could open it, but…). It was the worst, sure, but the CPU fan is still bothersome. I have to buy a new one.

Well, so far, it hasn’t crashed. Let’s see what the future brings.

Which one will win? HD DVD has the support of Microsoft and Intel. On other fields, that’s probably enough to win… but not here. Blu-ray has Sony, and, apparently, virtually all the major movie studios.

Apparently, Bill Gates himself feels that he’s losing, and is throwing a tantrum. Will he throw a chair, too?