23 Sep 2004
Has anyone else noticed the potential new gadgets seem to have for wreaking havoc upon a geek workspace? I’m really struggling here after the latest toy arrived today. Things are un-cool, but supremely gimmicky.
As you can see, it’s a KVM. Or, if you can’t see, then the description should have informed you. Anyway. That little goody wasted a LOT of my time, this afternoon! Not that this is necessarily a BAD thing, mind, seeing I’m now struggling with the purpose of my existence in a post-exam world. Well, not really. But you get the idea. Hmm.
So, I’d originally decided to get a KVM or three (well, okay… two) because there were computers enough to justify it. I was planning to use two computers, one as a dev machine, and the other as a miscellany/office/timewasting platform, both of which (for the present moment) running Linux. Of course, then the house decided to sell itself, so Josh’s random technology crap flew away to the graveyard in the sky, also known as my garage. This meant that my number of production machines decreased. A time of great sadness, no doubt.
But I digress. Long story short, shoving all nostalgia, eulogies and poeticism aside, the reason I once had for purchasing this equipment had faded somewhat, at least in the interim, until a new place of residence is acquired and I can go back to being messy again (well, it wasn’t even messy… just cluttered. You couldn’t see the floor, but the cases were only one layer deep, so that’s acceptable by my reckoning). This means, of course, that the only other thing I really had to use this darn switchbox on was my trusty router, used for routing IP packets, not reptiles from drains. Yes, there is a story behind that, and no, I don’t care to tell it now.
In an unfortunate turn of events, the aforementioned trusty router is something of an archaic beast, using an old AT power supply (for those to whom that means nothing, let’s just call it analog — you turn it on, you turn it off; there’s no power management special crap), and all the peripheral support that this entails. Well, guess what. Seeing I bought this KVM in the last decade (well, okay, seven to eight years… close enough, AT is dead), there aren’t any AT keyboard ports to be seen on it. Fortunately, I can still use it just for switching VGA, but this just isn’t anywhere near as much fun.
Enter the nightmare.
So, I waltzed out to the garage, negotiated with spiders of all persuasions, drifted between dust and precariously stacked furniture, to the cupboard, at the very back, which I have claimed for myself as the Fortress I.T. at 70 Lenthall Street. There, if you’re an interested thief, you now know where to look. It’s not worth going past the spiders unless you’re desperately in need of some fairly specific hardware, mind. The newest thing in there is a Pentium 3 system, and even that has Alzheimer’s. I emerged with the older of the two Pentium 3 systems (because this one had a nicer case), although I didn’t know which I had chosen at the time — it was a bagged system, in an attempt to keep rat excrement from falling into it. Okay, it’s not quite that bad, but I’d rather the rodents (and, more realistically, spiders webs) had as little to do with my gear as possible.
And what an opportune time for a hard drive failure! The system I’d extracted had a 3200MB hard drive, once hard at work in a BDC server (not mine). Apparently, too hard at work. Graagh!!. That’s the second drive around that size I’ve lost in recent months, and it’s starting to annoy me. I need a new fleet of smallish (hey, largish is good, too) drives, which haven’t been abused in servers without enough memory flogging at swapfiles for years on end (I happen to know, because I was the guy who de-commissioned the machine, that the server that drive came from only had 32MB of RAM, and was used for too many years, with too many users. Die, stupid I.T. departments, die. That’s German for “The, stupid I.T. departments, the.”). So my plans for world domination using an elegant distro and a relatively spacious (considering all the thing would be doing is packet forwarding, and web caching/filtering for five-odd users) were once again foiled. And, unlike Soolie, it was nothing to do with my sleeping patterns.
Those were the causes. These are the effects.
I shutdown my router. You may have noticed a period of a few hours when Josh would normally be online and talking in 3rd person, but wasn’t. This is why. The router (note that I’m talking about a converted desktop PC running a slightly hacked version of Coyote Linux, not a “hardware” router) was then moved into a conveniently located spot of floor, and dismantled. This is a more challenging procedure than it sounds, seeing my weapon of choice for such matters, the blue screwdriver which I would worship religiously, were that not against my real religion, had gone missing in this great shuffle of crap into the garage.
And so, I embarked on a dangerous voyage of case-unscrewing, using only my teeth. Well, okay. My teeth, and the worlds’ bluntest imitation Swiss Army knife. Or maybe just the worlds’ bluntest imitation Swiss Army knife. At any rate, it was far more difficult than it should have been. I ended up using the knife as a lever, to PRY the screws out, simply because I forgot which was I was trying to unscrew (you have no idea… this seriously took me fifteen minutes for six screws). Note that the six screws include hard drive screws, not just the case… honestly, who has six screws on their case that they use?!
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, on topic. So, this hard drive, right. It’s a 420MB Connor beast. They don’t make them like they used to. I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone say a kind thing about Connor drives, so I’ll break the mold. Guess what, folks? This is my most enduring hard drive. Having said that, I’m bracing for it’s imminent death, some time next week, at which point I’ll be completely out of small hard drives, and back to searching for floppy-router distributions. Long live FreeSCO.
Hardware is only ever the first half of any good I.T. geek’s nightmare, though. I hadn’t STARTED on the software aspect of things.
Right. I now have a hard drive, and a Pentium 3 system with PS/2 ports for keyboard and mouse, respectively. I don’t need the mouse, but that’s irrelevant, as I’ve always kind of been a keyboard guy anyway. Goal number one achieved! I can now double-tap “Scroll Lock” and flick between displays! How cool is that?! Not cool enough, I’m thinking.
Next up, pick a software package of choice. Yeah, well. Dale seems to always be ranting about “his smoothie“, so I figured I’d give that a shot. Why not — it was also the first router-related ISO I found sitting in my downloads directory. This computer even has a CD drive in it now! I know, ridiculous for such a device, but hey, you get that when it’s haphazardly built from spares dug out from amidst the spiders webs three inches thick in Josh’s garage after storage for one week. Hyperbole rocks.
Install, take one. Looking good, looking good. I figure out how you’re meant to setup PPPoE on these things, after a few goes. I discover I’ve got an Intel 10/100 Pro NIC in there (the genuine PCI article, not one of those crappy integrated things! ;-)), which is always cool… I remember when they used to cost $80.00! Oh, the nostalgia. I discover I can’t remember my DynDNS password for the life of me. And that I’m equally struggling when it comes to recalling my username. But that’s okay. The software is working, isn’t it?
Bzzzzzzzzt.
Well, it was working fine until I patched it! Hmm. Four patches, apparently not cumulative, and not to be installed simultaneously. Maybe I’m just a stupid user, or maybe I got lucky… maybe it’s Maybelline.
So, take 1 with software. Once I (manually, at command line, seeing I couldn’t guess the interface correctly — I’ve since figured out that the Realtek cheapie looks cheap on the backplane, and the Intel Pro NIC has an impressive array of no fewer than FOUR flashing LED’s! That made life easier, but I’m wishing I’d noticed sooner…) managed to get interfaces up, it worked great, until I patched it. At which point, I had a system refusing to boot. In retrospect, trying to simultaneously upgrade FOUR kernels probably wasn’t the best of ideas. Learning experience. *cough*
Take 2, it’s going okay. I haven’t had to reboot yet, so I’m a tad nervous about what it’ll do to me tomorrow morning… I’ve been sporadic enough in answering email lately, due to Exchange server being stupid with my work account (heh, a switch back to IMAP fixed everything… telling, no?), and further downtime certainly won’t help matters! I still haven’t patched this version, so if you know some l33t exploits to let you get an über root-kit on my b0xen, now’s the time. Oh yeah, is now the time. Because I’m locking this sucker down tomorrow morning, assuming it comes back up at all.
This KVM is very cool, but I’m currently hating it for making me do what I just did to my network!
22 Sep 2004
I’ve been looking for a nice, standalone feed reader for Linux recently, and I think I’ve finally found one that fits the bill.
Spoiler: I’m using Liferea. Read on for why.
There’s the staple applications, as always, which people seem to leap at almost on impulse, are feed readers such as Straw, Syndigator or RSSOwl. And, for some reason, I’ve chosen none of these.
Straw looked good, but for the whole GNOME and Py*insert extension here* dependence thing… I’m currently running KDE on the desktop, and whilst it would have run fine, I’d rather not be tied down. That, and I’m uncertain as to how it would render content. The main thing was my dislike of Python extensions, though.
This, I glanced at fairly seriously, but the dependency monsters overran my utopian world, and as such it was left in the pile of refuse that is my application downloads folder (2.9GB, not including various operating system images which also reside on my hard drive, since about the start of this year). I think it was whinging about Perl or something, so I slammed the door on it before it had even finished speaking. Doo bee doo.
This is an interesting kettle of fish. It looks most excellent, but, again for platform reasons, I chose not to use it. I’m pretty terrible in this regard, actually. If a product is coded in Java, I’m sorry, but I can’t afford to use it. Not because of any financial cost, or because of anything against the software itself — it’s just that the Java VM seems to swallow RAM like four-wheel drive cars from Sydney’s North Shore swallow fossil fuels… and I can’t afford that much RAM.
I’d be interested to explore this one at some point in the future, however.
So, why did I chose to go with Liferea?
It’s easiest just to quote their own website to introduce this reader, so that’s what I’ll do.
Liferea is an abbreviation for Linux Feed Reader. It is a news aggregator for online news feeds. It supports a number of different feed formats including RSS/RDF, CDF, Atom, OCS, and OPML. There are many other news readers available, but these others are not available for Linux or require many extra libraries to be installed. Liferea tries to fill this gap by creating a fast, easy to use, easy to install news aggregator for GTK/GNOME.
Cool. I think it scores well on all those scores. The source archive gave me grief, but started co-operating after I installed some development libraries… that said, the — I’ll say “interesting” — file structuring system employed by SuSE 9.1 made errors crop up from various places during the actual build. Which sucked. So, I got lazy, and went off to grab a nice shiny pre-packaged SuSE RPM files from their SourceForge project page. Snazzy, hey?
And then it installed. Sexy. Easy to use. Familiar interface (akin to Ximian/Novell Evolution). Searching. Folders. Can use Mozilla, Firefox, Opera, Netscape and Konqueror out of the box, as well as supporting opening links in a new tab (yes, I know it’s a fairly simple command switch… that doesn’t mean many products USE it!). Choice of Mozilla or GtkHTML as internal rendering engine. Docking in the KDE toolbar… and this is a GTK/GNOME product! It’s very cool. Thumbs up to the developers, who suggest that those
interested in mature RDF/RSS feed client projects for GNU/Linux
should consider the other products I’ve mentioned above… pfft! This is great, for me.
If you’re running Linux, BSD or Mac OS X, I’d recommend you check it out… there are people maintaining packages for Debian, RedHat/Fedora, SuSE, Gentoo, Slackware, FreeBSD and MacOS, links to which are available on their Installation page.