Wednesday night I skipped down to Philly for an amazing pollo y papas burrito at MexiCali Cafe and then over to PLUG for Kyle Burton‘s Intro to Git talk (slides are on his talks page). Great presentation, and in an interesting twist of fate, while sitting at the meeting I received an email from my co-maintainer on webcalendar saying that he’d like to switch our repository from svn to git. I really need to buckle down and learn Git now!
After the presentation we went out for the standard after-meeting hanging out at the Best House down the street. Unfortunately the sky opened up and rain poured out of the sky in buckets shortly after we arrived. By 11 it hadn’t let up and we decided to wander back to our cars, resigned to getting soaked. And getting soaked we did! The drive home in that was a bit slow and I didn’t get back until after midnight, by which time Pottstown at least was only suffering from a bit of drizzle. There was too much rain this week.
Last night I was able to snag an IMAX ticket for the new Star Trek movie, woo! It’s been a long time since I’ve gone to an opening of a Star Trek movie. It was a fun opening night audience, and the movie itself was a lot of fun. I love the characters from the original series, so seeing them re-imagined was a treat, and Simon Pegg as Scotty? Hilarious, brilliant!
I came home shortly after midnight and sat down at my desk to check IRC and email before bed, no internet connection. Lights? Check. Wires? Check. Log into firewall server to see what the deal is? Fail. I snagged a keyboard and plugged the firewall into my monitor – nothing on the screen, no response when I hit keys. I did a hard reboot and halfway through the filesystem check the screen filled with harddrive errors and timeouts. Sigh. I should have expected this, the drive made some clicking noises earlier in the week but they went away and I was busy worrying about other things. Yes, I was helpfully reminded this morning that “denial is not a good hardware maintenance plan” :)
So it’s almost 1AM and I have computer parts all over my living room as I’m scheming a way to get a working firewall without a spare IDE harddrive. I ended up popping the NIC out of the machine with the bad harddrive and putting it in my Sparc Ultra10. The plan had been to retire the sparc this summer because it was becoming more of a power-drain liability than an asset (“yay a sparc!” has been fun, but ultimately it just ran my IRC bots and did some backups). Why not turn it into a firewall? It took me an hour or so to get the machine up with the second NIC and the same bare-bones configuration restored from backups so I had DNS and dhcp. This morning I was able to finish up the configuration to get ipsec back up, and it’s all restored with the exception of bind for internal addressing, I still need to rewrite my zone file (backups of /etc? of course! backups of /var/cache/bind? oh bother!). I’ll rewrite that in the morning. It’s working great so far, I’m pleased with the result, even if I’m now starting to worry about the reliability of the sparc’s harddrives.
I mentioned in my last entry that I might bring my sister Annette down for a few days around Memorial Day. I spoke with my mother yesterday to confirm the dates and times when she would be would be available for driving Annette down to the Portland, Maine airport. When I finally got around to buying the tickets today I was disappointed to discover the prices for flights less than 2 weeks in the future had jumped significantly (oops, this seems normal, next time I’ll know better). So I adjusted the dates a bit and bought the tickets. She’ll be flying from Portland on the evening of Friday the 22nd, spending the long Memorial Day weekend here, and going home Wednesday morning. I’m excited, it’s been far too long since we’ve seen each other. I figure we’ll head down to Philly one day (museums? south street?). I’ll take her to the giant KoP mall one day, perhaps take her out to New Hope. We’ll see based on the weather.
And now since I was up half the night last night restoring my firewall and then worked all day, I’m beat. Going to call it an early night.
Saturday, May 9th, 2009 at 9:47
Watch Stargate, damnit! :)
Saturday, May 9th, 2009 at 18:03
LucidFox – Just read your timetravel piece about Stargate….. have you ever tried reading “the Time Ships” by Stephen Baxter? (It is the official sequel to HG Wells the Time Machine)
Pleia – have you considered getting a dedicated router/firewall instead of using a PC/Sparc solution? It would give less hassle maybe?
Sunday, May 10th, 2009 at 2:12
I didn’t even read the original The Time Machine, let alone sequels.
Monday, May 25th, 2009 at 9:44
I was happily surprised by the new Star Trek.
You were always my favorite geek girl. *hug*
Mark