Continuation

So, a whole day spent on watching movies, First went Rambo 4, then Jumper, after that 27 Dresses and finished with The Golden Compass. What a marathon! Rambo took a while to start some actual action, jumper was too teenagy, 27 Dresses was actually funny and the golden compass was average.

Hey, I’ve just watched the latest Rambo, and I’ve found a nice camera.

on Included picture.

I’ve spent most of the long weekend playing games and working.

Finally, after around 4 years of having the AA Account ( AAA I’ve finished Special Forces training! This gave me access to some neat weaponry in the game. Also unlocked SF exclusive deployments. Most of the time i was playing SF Hospital, but now SF Snakeplains is my favourite. The only training which I didn’t finish is for becoming a Medic.

I have also lost about 1.5 days over the weekend replacing old Monowall FIrewall with a state of art CIsco ASA 5510 Security Plus. I have some suspicion that current SysOp has a bug in regard to Port Speed. When, you boot the box, ports, which are connected to gigabit start, to glow orange, as they should to indicate 1Gbps connection, but after the system has finished booting, they are back to green, telling me that they are 100Mbps. After disconnecting and connecting back the cables, they are back to orange .. 1Gbps.

Oh, also replacing the firewall and extended period of time of dis-connectivity caused Windows 2003 DNS server on AD controller to crash in a way that it wasn’t serving any queries any more… that is MS for you.

F1 is back this weekend! Hurray!

Watched Saturday qualifications, live, what involved being awake between 2 and 4 am. It was surprising, I didn’t expect the computer switch off ( no TC and LC this season) will have so much effect on the race. From what I have seen at the quali, BMW is really up for some GP winning this season. Ferrari is not reliable, yet, they may even be in a position where BMW will be better on points.

Favourites this season are … Hamilton and Kubica. Hamilton, hmm … Kubica, hmm hmm – he was a big surprise for me getting 2nd position on the grid. Maybe the potential which they were talking about for a whole 2007 is starting to show up.

I am really looking forward to the race!  It looks to become more exciting than 2007.

PS.

If you didn’t know, I have started following F1 in 2007( before the Hamilton hype started and he wasn’t the reason for me) , it’s the only sport which I follow.  I know little about F1 history, only what I heard from my uncle, now from time to time I am getting to read some wikipedia articles on it.I am also trying to follow all technicalities which are associated with F1, rules and constructions.

I have downloaded Foresight Linux 2 with a hope to see some really cool and up to date Linux distribution.

Yes, it has GNOME 2.22 which just came out ( was it yesterday ? ) and yes, this is cool. But if you are matured computer user, you have your favourite tools. Naming a few for me: gkrellm and unison(this one is new for me). Now, gkrellm is longer on the marked than most of the current cool distributions, Unison is not a toddler as well. They are both missing from Foresight Linux … not only standard installation but also the software repository … c’mon!

I have also learned that Foresight is based on rPath as well as Asterisk Now…

I am worried that I will have to ditch it , like I have done with Asterisk Now, rPath and conary is not really production mature! – at least for me.

Didn’t intended to do any shopping today, but I ended up buying a few things.

Headphones from Sennheiser , the HD 415 which are replacing my ancient Phillips HP140. This is because old ones started to leave pieces of some black coating on my head … and they were shit from the beginning. HD 415 didn’t break the bank and still feel and sound good.

Another item on the list is Microsoft Comfort Curve Keyboard 2000. Since I have started to use my desktop not only for gaming, I was really hating the standard Dell Keyboard, which it was delivered with – feel on the keys is just plain wrong and many times you have to use a lot of force to push a key down. I have some wireless Belkin keyboard, but it is shit as well – eats(doesn’t transmit)  letters and doesn’t have the responsiveness. So, now I have a nice low profile MS keyboard, I am still getting used to curved line of keys. The new keyboard has some multimedia keys present, I have been successful to map couple of them to the right functionality. But I still have problems with getting Back and Forward to actually work in FF – they have their own key codes so it is not Just Works (c) like with IBM keyboards ( they map them as alt+left and alt+right ). Also Banshee is refusing to react to Play/Pause button mapping.

I have finally bought a remote controlled mains socket switch. It’s just 5 quid and saves me diving behind a sofa to switch off my kit for the night. Yes, I have started to switch off all my equipment at the wall socket, this crap is using about 55W while on standby!!!!

I have just discovered a XRDP , which is a RDPv4 server for Linux/Unix.

I am well impressed! Especially that it saves your session  between connections.  Time to incorporate it into my systems.

Recently I have decided to try out well regarded Asterisk Now distribution. I’ve used 1.0.1 version. I was thinking that it will be well integrated, user friendly Linux distribution for getting your PBX up.

Initially I was happy with what I have found. It’s Asterisk part was just working. Then I have actually started to customize it, so it would fit in to my systems. This is where I started to notice that it ain’t what I expected.

First  what I have found annoying what that Asterisk web interface was not working too good with Firefox 3 and Konqueror. It was alright with Firefox 2. Oh and it was blood slow.

Then the whole backend, I have learned that it’s using rPath as a base system. I could not find any documentation on rPath websites which would be useful for Sys Admins. How do I use it? After a while I have found a link on Asterisk web interface which took me to some RAA interface…. which I couldn’t logon to with my Admin credentials … had do go down the shell and dig out defaults from some file in /etc/raa.

Now was time to get dhcp and tftp to work. Dhcp was installed in form of udhcpd , which I have configured and …. it wasn’t working. First, no integration between firewall management and service management. Second, even when configured properly, it was refusing to give out IPs. TFTP , I have used search facility in the RAA interface, but clicking on a ‘+’ button did nothing to install it. How do I install software in rPath ?

At that point I was no longer happy about Astreisk Now and I’ve decided to install some real world Linux. I can live with Asterisk not having pretty interface by default, but I can’t live without a working system underneath  it.