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Christopher 'Vulpine' Kalley,
vulpine@cyberfox.org

"Better Vulpines through Technology."

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Update to Network Page	November 28th 2000
Well, I finally updated the Network page. The old page was from the good old days when Kitsune was my webserver. Check out the new stuff. It's still under construction, but I'm too tired to do more.

Return of Dental Foo	November 27th 2000
Ok...getting a crown hurts, and this is just a temp crown until they make my new one. curses Nothing horrific, other than my jaw feels like it was beaten silly. Now I have abig chunk of metal where my poor little tooth was. Oh well, on the way to real food again ;)

Mozilla	November 27th 2000
Well, I'm finally running Mozilla on Kitsune. So far, not many major differences between it and Netscape, besides chromes (mozilla skins). I actually want to get Galeon running, but one thing a time. Oh well, at least I got mozilla running. I'll post a screenshot of it later.

MRTG and NTOP	November 27th 2000
Back to having MRTG and Ntop running as well. MRTG is a traffic analysis program, which is also what I work on at work. Except mine is less fancy for now. Ntop is another analysis program, showing some detail on what packets my network is sending around. Oh the things I do when I'm bored.

My Kind of Holiday Cheer	November 27th 2000
If there were more Holiday songs like these...I'd be a happier fox. Download away

More Dental Foo

November 26th 2000

When it rains, it pours. When last we met, I had a rootcanal done on an abcessed tooth. Well, I was still in pain as of last wednesday. So I went back to the dentist, and guess what, the tooth behind the original culprit was infected as well. So I had a wisdom tooth pulled the day before Thanksgiving. Not fun at all. But it hurt less than I though, and now 4 days later, it doesn't hurt at all. Amazing. Of course, I also had car problems between the two tooth episodes...so this week has sucked over all. Thanksgiving dinner was Hamburger Helper and drugs ;) But it's getting better day by day. Tommorrow is my last dentist visit for a while, getting a crown put in. Then back to work, I wonder if they remember what I look like, since I only worked about 1/2 of one day last week. Of course, I hope I still have a job... but from what I hear, I've got plenty of work to do.

DVD's	November 26th 2000
Got a few new DVD's today. The Gladiator 2 disc set, and the Evil Dead II boxed set. Life is good. I loved Gladiator in the theater, and I can't wait to watch all the extra footage. And well, what can I say about Evil Dead II, other than it's the funniest horror movie of all time, and one of my favorite movies ever. Plus all the extras. :) I am a happy fox. Now to find the time to watch them.

New Enlightenment Theme

November 26th 2000

Well, I finally switched themes, from Arctic to spiffE It's a nice small theme, not as bulky as Arctic was. In general I like it. You can find the new screenshot here. Speaking of screenshots, I finally posted a screenshot to e.themes.org. Since then I've gotten a few emails asking how to do the Xinerama thingie. I need to post a howto page on that one I think, both on Xfree86 4.0 and MetroX. Check it out here.

Happy Belated Birhday

November 21st 2000

Yesterday, November 20th was the day that my godson, Nicolas Alexander, was born. He is now 1 year old. Boy has he changed. He's started walking, talking, and in general is the cutest kid imaginable. Of course, I'm rather biased. Well, he is my godson ;) Happy birthday Niki, first of many happy ones. :) Now to figure out what to get him for his birth day. Hmm, he already likes tech toys (my pager especially) that's what he needs...a 'Child's First Linux Server' *laugh* Well, I'll find him something, and if his mom is reading this, relax...the drum kit won't be for a year or two. ;)

Dental Foo

November 21st 2000

Well, I finally found the cause of my headaches. I had a abcessed tooth. So I went to a dentist, actually found one via the Internet. Dr Jay Baxley D.D.S.. He did a good job, especially seeing how scared I am of dentists and dental procedure. I had to have a root canal, which I thought was going to be hell. Actually the most pain I was in during the procedure was the novacaine injection. I go back in to get the crown put in next monday. Now, I'm in some pain (actually quite a bit of pain) but the drugs I'm on dulls it down to an acceptable level. Oh well, this hurts less than the headaches for the most part, so it's all good.

Kitsune's memory

Movember 19th 2000

Well, i've now graduated to the level of too much geek. I upgraded the ram in kitsune from 256megs to 512 megs (1 256 meg dimm). This is getting scary. My first windows box had less space than this for hard drive. *laugh* This is probably the last big hardware upgrade for a while, at least of new hardware. I plan on putting in a Adaptec 2940 SCSI card to use some hardware I want to get. I want to have a SCSI cd burner on kitsune soon. I also plan on installing the IDE Zip drive from Nogitsune on as well...and a working floppy drive. I also want to install some kind of tape backup device on Urocyon for backups/storage. I've got the backup scripts written but right now they just make .tar.gz files. But it's amazing how compressed mail files get ;) Stay tuned for news. ;)

Red Planet

November 19th 2000

I saw Red Planet on Thursday. It was a pretty good movie, a few glaring failures in scientific info...just to make the plot work. But baring that it was pretty good. Val Kilmer actually does a damn good job in the role, his deadplan style makes the jokes in the movie go very well. Best line in the movie was 'This is it- this is the moment the told us about in high school when algebra would save our lives' *cackle* All in all, a very fun movie, if you can ignore the big errors. Of course, your average movie goer wont care about the flaws. Good special effects, decient acting, Carrie-Anne Moss (always a good thing). I give it thumbs up.

Mid Week Flernage	November 16th 2000
Still sick...but getting better. Had a busy day today, migrating users from a dying MRTG box, to a fairly robust one. Of course, adding nearly 1/3 more customers to that box has got it on ICU watch for now, but that still beats crashing 4 times a day. So I'm in a good mood. :)

Vim	November 16th 2000
Well, I started playing with my .vimrc files yesterday. I think I ended up downloading about 5 different people's .vimrc files, and tryng to see what made them work. I finally parred it down to a workable, fairly simple file. I still need to work on how it sees colors, but that can wait.

Weekend Jazz	November 12th 2000
Still sick, still stoned of my butt. Whee...Haven't gotten much done this weekend, besides sleep, read and watch DVD's. DVD's are fun. But gods is it going to be expensive to replace my VHS collection with DVD. Oh well.

New Linux Server

November 12th 2000

Well I did get a little work done yesterday, finally got around to building a new Linux server. Urocyon (which is part of the scientific name for a grey fox) was going to be a primary DNS and web server, but due to some issues with memory (a missing 128 meg dimm) and plans for a newer server down the road, I've decided to make it a secondary DNS and FTP/File server. So lots of disk space. :) Urocyon has got the following hardware.

ATX Mid tower case

Pentium II motherboard

Pentium II 266 processor

64 megs of RAM

13.4 gig hard drive

Netgear 10/100bT NIC

Linked to KVM switch for monitor, keyboard, and mouse.

It's a nice little system, should do just fine as a file/ftp/dns server. Slowly moving the various saved files over from Fennec. I still need to get another hard drive, and some kind of tape backup system in there. Oh yeah, at least another 64 megs of ram (I wish I knew where the hell that 128meg dimm went).

Pine Stuff

November 12th 2000

Well, as most of you know I'm a Pine freak. I've used it since I was at UT Austin, and I can configure it in my sleep. I haven't kept up with version releases, except for bugfixes. With Suse 7.0 they forced me to upgrade to 4.21, which had a bunch of new features that I never touched. Well, I got bored, and started touching them. The new big thing is color coding. Pine used to be two colored, foreground and background. This is one of the few reasons I ever looked at Mutt. Now you can configure colors for formatting, and for quoted text. This is the feature I've wanted for a while. It's cool and snazzy. :) Take a look at it here. If you want a copy of my pinerc file, drop me an email

Sickness

November 11th 2000

Well, I is sick. The mother of all sinus infections. It is truely amazing how much pain a little pressure on your cheekbones can cause...*wince* I'm currently on enough drugs to kill a small moose. Makes for some intresting comments on IRC and email. The little part of your brain that keeps you from saying what you think when it's not 100% appropriate isn't working. *laugh* I'm scared to check my HTML code on this update...I'm that loopy. Oh well, I've got juice, I've got soup, I've got DVD's and stuffed foxes, I'm good to go. :) And speaking of going, off I go back to bed til the dizzyness fades. *spin*

Back to Clearwire

November 11th 2000

Well, Thursday was my first day back at Clearwire as a contract Sysadmin. Roving BOFH for hire, that's me *laugh*. First thing was to install all the toys I needed to do Linux sysadmin in a NT enviroment. Netscape, CRT, a decient background, and I was ready to rock. Or at least tackle a pair of Redhat servers. First things first, lock security down. Turn off telnet for everywhere except the internal network and a few remote admins. Then, to install SSH and ween everyone over to using it instead of telnet. While I was at it, I planned on installing sudo, so we could stop having to hand out the root password to everyone on the box. So I download the tarballs for SSH and sudo...unpack them, configure them... and find out, no C compiler. Curse, alot. For the non unix geeks, a complier is the program that allows linux to create new programs from source code. It's useful...but in Redhat not necessary. So I spend a boring hour searching various archives for the .rpm version of these programs, then install them on both servers. Then, configure them. Easy. Then start working on a backup scheme. Easy enough to design, but with how these servers are built...no real place to back things up to. So that goes on the back burner til I talk to the head honcho. Finish up the day with a crisis, as ftpd goes nuts...and the server starts using 100% of it;s memory and CPU. Fix that, go home.

Friday was much quicker, since I only worked about 3 hours due to illness. Spent that time figuring out a quick (sorta) audit for the MRTG configs, then starting to go though and make sure they are updating. It's gonna take a while, but once I get rolling (and get some of the NOC people to do the auditing for me) it shouldn't be too bad. Then, it's on to Solaris boxen. :) As I said, this should be intresting and fun.

Reynard

November 8th 2000

Speaking of new things, I got my Windows box, Reynard, back up and running. It's hard drive fried a few weeks ago, and I just took my sweet time rebuilding it. What can I say, I've had bigger things to work on besides Windoze. It's current hardware is,

Mid tower case

AMD K6-3 550 processor

Creative Labs TNT2, 32 meg video card.

KDS 19" SVGA Monitor

Soundblaster 16 sound card

Netgear 10/100bT NIC

Logitech keyboard

Logitech mouse

It's a game box for the most part, and a few other windows apps that I've yet to find replacements for under Linux. Now to install all the crap I was using before...now where did I put that install CD...

New Toys on Kitsune

November 8th 2000

Well I've been tinkering with Kitsune's desktop. (note to self, must update screenshots page...since it's nearly a year out of date.) My new toy of the week is LinNeighborhood , which is a GUI frontend for Samba and Smbmount. Not a big deal to setup but it works, so the fox is happy. So now I have a frontend so I can play with all the files I have on my Windoze boxen. You can see it in action in the new Screenshot.

No News is Good News	November 6th 2000
Yes, it's been a while since I updated news. laugh The whole idea of the new news layout was to make it easier to update...but I had a large case of reality strike. So get ready for alot of reading

Kitsune

November 6th 2000

Well, I have finally moved primary workstation duties from Nogitsune to Kitsune. Hopefully Kitsune will be more stable, and crash less. Nogitsune was a nice machine, but the Abit BP-6 motherboard was flakey as hell, and would lock every 4-7 days. Kitsune has the following toys...

Mid tower case

Athlon motherboard (don't have the box here, I'll put the brand on later)

Creative Labs Soundblaster 512 powering Cambridge 4-point plus subwoofer speakers

2 32 Meg TNT2 Nvidia video cards

2 KDS 19" monitors