Category: Computers & Networks

Nerd stuff

Picture of my “Serverroom”

Equipped with a digicam and a pocket mirror, I made the second attempt to determine, if i have one of those problematic capacitors. The Nikon Coolpix 775 isn’t really able to take closeup pictures, but i finally succeeded. Unfortunately 3 of the 9 possible Capacitors are RLZ 0333. I have already sent an email to my supplier.
Here is a picture of my “server room”. You can see huckfinn, olga, polly, becky and the Laserprinter (from front to back).
DSCN1872.JPG

Medion–

Today I received a parcel from Medion. It contained the replacement for an external hard disk, I bought in December, that didn’t work. It took a month until they got a replacement from Germany. But guess what happend when I plugged it in. Nothing. The new one is broken too :-(.
I am already hearing the voices: “You get what you pay for”, “Don’t buy hard disks at a supermarket”

System maintainance weekend

This weekend is system maintainance weekend on arved.de network.
I need to make world on all machines because of the recent FreeBSD Security Advisory (40% done), upgrade to KDE 3.2 (66% done). Additional I am migrating cvsup and NFS service from huckfinn to sauna.
And there are various other cleanups that need to be done, since I haven’t done any maintainance the last few months

arved.at

Three and half years after moving to Vienna I have finally decided to register arved.at. Now I just have to find a good drawing application for MacOS X to modify the logo. It has been on the page since ca. 4 years and was drawn with a Windows Shareware that I can’t find anywhere on the web (and I don’t have Windows anymore…).
arved.de will continue its life as a pointer to my webpage for a while, but the MX records will be removed soon, so update your addressbooks

Bounce floods

While I wrote the last blog entry, I noticed that my blog wasn’t running smooth.
The load on huckfinn was up to 60!!! My Maillog scrolled too fast to read. I spent an hour on trying to blacklist the most busy hosts, but it didn’t reduce the load.
Now I have changed my Firewall rules for a whitelist system. So if you want to email me and you are not using univie/tuwien/FreeBSD MXes, don’t use the arved.de address. After Chrismas I have to fix this, by either switching to a different domain or further improvement of my firewall rules.
Spam and Viruses suck 🙁

New machine on arved.de network

I forgot to publish the news, that since saturday there is a new machine on my network. My first AMD64, see dmesg for details. It is also the first machine with a Gigabit NIC.
Installing FreeBSD-amd64 did work without major problems, after I figured out, that I need to force the NIC to use 100Mbit, because Autonegotion with my El-cheapo 100Mbit Switch did not work. Also the ATAPI CDROM is not recognized after the boot although I booted from it during Installation.
Ports mostly work, next weekend I will probably have installed everything to make it my workstation. Only Problems so far: No Java, because the linux JDK is i386 only and no video, since mplayer configure check failed and xine failed because of the usual PIC problems in djbfft, which should be fixable.

Using 4 Channels in a Multi-Accesspoint Environment

Found this paper: “Channel Overlap Calculations for 802.11b Networks” by Mitchell Burton from Cirond Technologies Inc. (It was on slashdot last year, but I must have missed it)
Popular opinion states that you can use only 3 non-overlapping Channels for your WLAN: 1, 6, 11. This paper concludes that the interference by overlapping channels is less affecting than the problems with modeling a 3D building with only 3 channels.