by srhuston

A Tale Of Two Outbacks

No, really, that’s the site name.  My friend and co-worker (okay, technically “employee”, though I do very little bossing around I think) setup a website to track his and our other friend’s new car stories.  Especially timely since they both bought their cars within a week of each other, and they’re identical.  Not perfectly identical, though – Keith had the pinstripe removed from his.  Yes, that’s the only difference.  For now anyway – Leigh is a performance monger, and doing things to get a few more HP out of the engine wouldn’t surprise me.

No, that doesn’t mean “hit points” either.

by srhuston

Big Red Check Screws Up Again – Nobody Surprised

Seems my ISP has once again screwed up my PTR record.. not that long ago, it pointed to the proper hostname for my IP address, and I discovered today that it’s back to pointing to some crappy “static-123-456-78-90” type of hostname.  And of course, there’s no place to email to get it fixed, so I have to dig out the phone number that someone gave me to call them back and try to get it fixed again.  Though at that point I might just demand that I get some kind of email address so I can deal with this on my terms in the future.

C’mon Speakeasy…

by srhuston

Backup? Sure, Where’s Reverse?

This evening marks another landmark in my home computer network setup – I’ve dug out my old tape drives, and am running a backup right now in fact. Been .. hmm, well, we moved to Ewing in October of 2003, so I guess that was my last backup. Never unpacked and hooked up the drives there, ’cause I didn’t have the room. So this evening I crawled behind the desk, again, and hooked up the cables to get the old DLT2000 plugged in. Grabbed one of my tapes and started a backup. Now I have to figure out a backup schedule, since there’s not nearly as much on the home computer anymore to worry about backing it up nightly. Though I could do other funny things, like running monthly and incremental dumps from the laptop over the network, but I’ll worry about that once I figure out what I’m doing with the desktop (Ideally I could backup the laptop to the desktop’s drive, but I don’t know that I have the room on – or faith in – this drive.) Also dug out and plugged in the DDS drive, but I need to tear that one apart like I did the DLT and get the dust out of it. Also hope to leave the drives off when I don’t need them, unlike before when they were on all the time and constantly sucking dust through. Which might explain the strange noises from the DLT right now, but I hope not since I think I got all the dust out of it. And finally I hope to bring home a couple other tape drives that were slated for trash, one of which is a DLT autoloader that holds 5 tapes at once. In theory, I can write a nice live-ish backup script that can shuffle tapes around as needed, and do everything on there.

Oh, and insight to my humor if you don’t know it already – the title of this post?  Old BBS tagline.  The name of my overkill backup script?  /usr/local/sbin/reverse.sh

by srhuston

FileVault Evil

Since my Macbook Pro was giving me some problems a little while ago, I had decided to turn on FileVault for my home directory. This basically takes your entire home directory, and encrypts it to your login password. So if someone gets ahold of the laptop, and they try to access the files in my home directory, they would all be encrypted (it actually does it by making your home directory an encrypted disk image which must be mounted when you login). Since I’d thought I may have to send it in for repair, I figured this was easier than going through and removing SSH keys, sensitive documents, and all things like that which I wouldn’t want someone else to see. Sounds good, right? Well, it was until around Friday night sometime.

Continue reading →

by srhuston

One-Click Easyness

So Stephanie wanted to setup some new stuff on her site for her school.  Hey, now that I’m not hosting stuff on my desktop PC anymore, this should be simple.  And boy was it.  Create a new domain, install WordPress on it, and just now created another domain and will setup a calendar there.  As Cartman might say, “that was hella easy.”

Yesterday in general, however, was not.  Stephanie ran out to a couple teacher stores, and I decided to try to tackle some of the yard work.  Succeeded in taking down a few of the small trees that had taken root in various places where they shouldn’t be, including the one semi-large one in front of the gas meter.  I’ll have to call the gas company to figure out how we’re going to get that one out – its roots could be close to the pipe, and I don’t want to chance it since it’s on the “hot side” of the shutoff valve.  Not worth the whoops.  Got most of the ivy from the front of the house out, but not all of it yet.  That shit is massively entangled in there, and not coming out easily.  Started digging cylindrical holes in the ground around it, and then pulling up bits and shaking off the dirt from the roots.  If I’d started that way, I might have got all of it done instead of how I was pulling it out.  Oh well.  When Stephanie got home, we got all the stuff into trash bags and cans, and ready for Tuesday’s pickup.  And some time this week, she might try to finish getting the ivy out.  We seem to have killed the most of the spiders, and I even dug out the tree stump that was in the ground there.

As for now, I think I’m going to plug this in to charge, and go setup the Buddipole in the back yard.  Time to get on the air methinks – especially since I haven’t done that since we moved here yet :>

by srhuston

All I Have To Do Is Dream

Well, as of right about now, my wife’s website is also being hosted by Dreamhost after having its registration information transferred to them as well.  The registrar I was using before was fine in the past, but these last couple times I’d tried to do simple changes (like updating the IP address of an authoritative name server) nothing happened in what I’d call a reasonable amount of time, so I decided to move the registrations over too.  Costs less in the long run, since Dreamhost gives me one free registration, and the others are $9.95/year (before I was paying something like $15.00/year for two years at a shot).

So in the next day or so, my home computer will return to being a router, caching DNS server, and IRC server (You do know IRC, right?  Good… irc.srhuston.net 6667 (normal) or 9999 (SSL) to visit).  Still contemplating either building a new desktop, or replacing joshua’s routing capabilities with a separate box so I can take it down and play with it without killing my Internet connection.  Though the idea of leaving it as a server sounds better, since there’s other things I wouldn’t want to have to kill any time I decide to upgrade it.

by srhuston

Flashback

Since it’s been a few days since the last post, a quick re-cap of what’s gone on since then.  We fired up the new gas grill, and cooked a rotisserie chicken on it the other night.  As Stephanie said, “I’ll never again pick up one at the store if I can cook it at home just as easily (and it’s even better tasting).”  We love it.  Well, Stephanie loves it.  I still like my charcoal and hardwoods :>

We got office furniture, and got it assembled.  I like my new desk – now I need a nice comfy chair to put there.  But I need a nice comfy chair for the shack too, so I’ll be in need of a couple chairs.  Got blinds hung in the master bedroom, and Stephanie got the room painted (just a few touch ups here and there to do).  Soon we can move in the dressers and have a fully functional bedroom again.  I’m most concerned about moving the bed back against the wall; twice now I’ve lost pillows overboard since there’s no headboard either.

Haven’t done anything with the antenna at home yet, still waiting on Leon to have free time enough to swing by and drop it off.  But he’s been pretty busy lately, and I also haven’t bugged him about it – when he’s got the time, I’ll worry about it.  Not going to be a pest.

As for why it’s been a little while since posting, my web provider (Dreamhost) has had one problem after another for just about the whole weekend.  File servers crashing, network switches melting.. they’ve had a rough few days.  So I’ve had some trouble getting on here to post things (and anyone who might be reading this has had trouble getting on to read it too).  I’m also having some issues with DNS – apparently, since my home computer was formerly the authoritative name server for two domains, its A record has been (or is being) cached by some of the root nameservers.  So although I changed its IP with Dreamhost’s DNS editor, and it propagated out just fine for a couple days, it’s now being overridden by other root servers.  Hopefully that’ll either sort itself out after the second domain is transferred, or Dreamhost can help me sort it out with the roots.  In the mean time, I’m starting to learn my home IP address, ’cause anything I want to do to connect there I need to use it.

Last, but not least, I’ve been away from Second Life for quite a while now.  I hop on now and then and try to spend a few minutes catching up with things that have happened, but I’ve found it difficult to get on after work like I used to (and while at work, I’ve actually had work to do).  A lot of things have changed with the university where I work there, and a couple friends of mine have left the university due to some of those changes.  I hope to see them around somewhere, even if they come and hang out in the lounge (formerly the lobby) like how I met them.  But I guess time will tell – as well will it tell if I can even get back in there and back to what I was doing, or if I too will have to depart the university and just visit on occasion.

by srhuston

Now We’re Cooking With Gas

Got our delivery yesterday, which was an upright freezer that was to go in the basement (didn’t fit there, now it’s in the office since we’re tired of measuring things that will fit and having delivery drivers say it won’t), and our gas grill.  Yes, I already have a charcoal grill.  I like charcoal.  Stephanie likes gas.  She appreciates the flavor of charcoal, but prefers the ease of use of a gas grill.  So we got both.  Tonight’s project will include assembling the grill, and figuring out what size mini-patio we want to create to put them both on – right now, the charcoal grill sits on the grass in the back yard.  With a little luck, and a little patience, we might even be cooking on the gas grill tonight – already have the natural gas hookup out the back of the house, and just need to assemble things and perform the “burn in” (run each thing for like 20 minutes at high).  Since it’s a stainless exterior, there’s no need to set the paint like with the charcoal grill before.