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suggestions to:
Christopher 'Vulpine' Kalley,
vulpine@cyberfox.org

Copyright © 1998-2006

"Better Vulpines through Technology."


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Cable AccessJanuary 26th 2001
Well, I finally got @home working last night. No more ISDN service, now on the magic road of broadband Internet. Well, after a small hardware nightmare...seems @home does some weird things to keep everyone honest, and since I'm not being honest...I had to get inventive. But now I've got Urocyon running as a temp proxy server/firewall until I can build a dedicated firewall box. But for now, this works quite nicely. 130k + downloads from kernel.org, Napster just screams... I miss having reverse DNS and dedicated IP's, but I'll live without them. Cost and speed win over little things. Plus I can add firewall configuration to my list of skills. Well, as soon as I make ipchains do a few fun things. :)

Bored NoteJanuary 24th 2001
Got a new keyboard today, a Microsloth Natural Keyboard. Only thing that Microsoft produces that I like seems to be the hardware. This is a fairly nice keyboard. I'd prefer a Logitech one, but they don't make the simple frills free keyboard I prefer. So does this mean I'm going to hell for using a Microsoft Project within Linux ? Oh probably, the way my life is going. Oh well.

Cyberfox BroadbandJanuary 24th 2001
Well, I'm finally jumping on the @Home bandwagon. I've got cable internet access coming in, to replace my ISDN service. It's a trade off, cost and speed verses stability (?) and dedicated IP's. But I can't justify what I pay in Internet fees with my lack of income. So on to broadband. I've got Vulpes mostly setup to run as a firewall/proxy server. I just need to add the 2nd nic and do some tweaking. Unless I decide to reinstall SuSE from scratch...which I'm tempted to do, maybe add a few things. We'll see. Then I get to renumber my network one last time (I hope). Oh well. It should be worth the work. I'll let everyone know how it goes, if I can get online that is :)

Seti@CyberfoxJanuary 18th 2001
Just a quick bit of news, as of today I have completed 2550 packets of Seti@home information. Which places me in the top .6% of the community. Also I'm ranked #24 within Team UserFriendly. I'm a happy fox. :) Now if I can just find someone with a small server farm, who doesn't mind me using about 100 machines for seti@home...then I can catch up with the big boys.

Back on the Job HuntJanuary 15th 2001
Well, my contract with Clearwire ended today. The MRTG project is over, so no need for a Linux admin in an NT shop. This isn't unexpected, thought the timing is a little less then wonderful. Oh well, half of life's fun is the new stuff that it throws you. And this ain't that bad a curveball. So back to job hunting.

Emails, emails, emailsJanuary 15th 2001
Well, I got bored a while back, and while surfing came up with this great idea. Actually I didn't come up with it, I stole it from Trae McComb's website. Seems he collects email aliases, this sounded like fun. So after pointing x@cyberfox.org his way, I started my own list. I don't have quite as many as he does, but I like my start.

Go take a look here.

Old NewsJanuary 10th 2001
Well, I've gone ahead and converted all of the old archive pages to a single page in the 'new' format. Damn was that alot of coding. Probably an easier way to do this via php or cgi, but I don't know it...so there ;) So, any news pre December 2000 can be found at http://www.cyberfox.org/oldnews.shtml. Enjoy a trip down memory lane...I sure did. :)

Contract Hell RantJanuary 10th 2001
You know that old curse, 'May you live in intresting times' ? Well I want to find the guy who said it to me, and kick his little head in. For those who've been keeping up with adventures, you know that I work for Clearwire Technologies as a contract MRTG admin. Not fun work, but it's been intresting. Well, until a couple of weeks ago I thought I was doing ok, with a mild frustration about not having a clue what to work on next. Well, I came in after the new year to find that noone in the company has a clue of A. what I do, B. who I report to, C. or what my goals/projects are. This was vaguely disturbing. It became very disturbing when talk was mentioned of me being assigned under the NOC manager (a man I do not like), or just the ending of my contract. But no one knew who I was suppost to talk to about this. Finally my 'supervisor' said that we needed to talk, and we'd meet in the AM. Three days later I cornered him in his office, and got yet more run around. But I got run around with at least a vague plan of action. So I spent 3 days this week fixing assorted crap that I didn't know existed on MRTG, and documented everything I've done and how I did it. Which if you know me, you know that I rather have dental surgury than write documentation. It's just evil, especially when half of what I've done were seat-of-the-pants fixes. *sigh* Today was deadline for getting things done...got done early this afternoon. Now I'm back to waiting. MRTG is done, all that's left is maintainence crap, which the NOC analysts are suppost to be able to handle. (Hope someone teaches them Vim or vi.

So now I'm back to not knowing crap. I'd be worried about being fired except I think it would be a good thing. We've had employees leaving in droves...if I wasn't so poor, I'd be one of them now. So back to job hunting. Anyone want an opinionated sysadmin with a fox fetish ? If so PLEASE Email me !!!!

Backgrounds and ScreenshotJanuary 3rd 2001
In the meantime, I've been busy with Gimp. So far I've created 5 backgrounds in the last 2 days. Three of them are for Cyberfox while two of them are for Linuxwench.net. These are wallpapers. Two of the Cyberfox ones are for Xinerama setups (what can I say I wanted a nice big background.) Go download them at the usual place.. The blonde chick is stolen happily from a wallpaper I downloaded from Boris' website. And the fox images are from my archives. The linuxfox is from Al Mackey's website, and I don't know where I found the line fox drawing.

I also mentioned a screenshot...well, here it is. My new xinerama background, licq, gaim, bitchx, pine, Lin Neighborhood, and gnapster...plus the usual term windows and Netscape. I like this background. :) Maybe someday I'll do a Tara Monroe one.

Happy Y2k +1January 3rd 2001
Well, we survived another year. I had a good NYE, even if Dallas decided to freeze solid. I went and saw a very fun, very energetic band called the Old 97's. Kinda country rock type music, with a good sense of humor. If you get a chance to see them, I really recommend it. Special thanks to Ash for convincing me to go to the concert...I owe you one ;) Normally I'd include the website for the band, but the 'offical' one (www.old97s.com) seems to be down. As soon as I can find a URL of some kind, I'll let you know.

Kitsune DowntimeJanuary 3rd 2001
On to Cyberfox News...Kitsune decided this weekend that she no longer wanted to work well. She keeps locking up, like she's overheating. After some experimentation, I think I've elimiated heat from the problem list...the bad news is, that means it's probably a bad dimm. I hate memory issues... hell I hate hardware issues. At least with software, you occasionally get real understandable error messages. Oh well, time to start pulling chips and see what's causing what. Please $deity, let it not be the 256 dimm, I don't want to replace that one. Of course, this mess has me pondering combining parts from Kitsune and Nogitsune, and making a nice linux box out of both of them. This still depends on if Debian stays stable under X. (which SuSE did not while Nogitsune ran under it). I'm really impressed with Debian so far. I may convert Fennec or Vulpes over to Debian this weekend, and see how it runs in a more active server enviroment.

Late note: Fixed the problem with Kitsune, it appears that the cheap 128 meg dimm I bought some time ago. So what did the fox learn, cheap memory is bad. So currently I'm running 256 megs instead of 512, I haven't put the other good 128 meg dimm in. I'll do that tomorrow, maybe. Or maybe I'll just wait until I can afford another 256 meg dimm. Decisions decisions...