Diary Import December 1998

To make my japanese learning more
efficient here’s my
(new “jwotd”: japanese word of the day)
to bad that I can’t view you the kanji version too.
But I think the unicode guys are working on it.31th december 1998

Wish you all a happy new year !

Hey Reyk, are you prepared for videoconferencing on midnight
?
No, he was not, because he didn’t had to work ! BUUUHHHH !!!!!
Winking

After a few hours of bored working:
Celebrated the new year on Munichs Königsplatz.
Many crazy students there, making big fireworks, but had to
go
back to work immediatley.

Finished a statistics about all our systems which are not yet
Year 2000 compliant and why. Huahhh, there’re so many of
them….

jwotd: (shinnen/the new year)

30th december 1998

Reviewed the 2.0.37 pre patch and there’s a lot of new RAID
stuff
in it. Also some completely rewrited code for i386
processors.
Memory detection is now done automatically up to 900 MB and
when
done manually up to 3 GB, which should also be enough for the
crazy
ones of you.
A lot of new PCI identification routines are also added.

The new 2.2.0 kernel is 54 MB in size… wow, a new record !
Some new features: NTFS filesystem support, Acorn, Sparc64 and
SGI
architecture support, IRDA and video support.
For those of you trying the new code and wanting to report
bugs
maybe first take a look on this page: Alan’s Joblist.

Studied a little bit more japanese today, trying to build
sentences
when just looking up some words in the dictionary. But it’s so
much
harder than in other languages.
Will need your help with this Aya.

Have to go to work from 22:30 to 6:00 am, and on sylvester
too…
If someone wants to talk to me or wish me good new year feel
free
to call me: +49-89-2171-8516

A big kiss from the tiger to the dragon !

jwotd: (narau/to learn)

29th december 1998

Kernel 2.2.0 is out. But I had no time and absolutely no fun
to take a look at it.

Just to lovesick.

jwotd: (koi no nayami/lovesick)

22th to 28th december 1998

Ayako from Japan is here. Finally.
What a X-mas gift for me.

We’ve visited castles (Neuschwanstein, Hohen Schwangau),
visited Salzburg, celebrated christmas, toured around
Munich and much more private things… Winking

And she left…. very hard for me….

I love you !
(And don’t forget to check your eMail.)

jwotd: (meisho/sightseeings)

21th december 1998

Gone to work today, and a fileserver crashed. Cool….
Also some minor problems, but who cares…. Xmas is near.

Printed some Alpha compatibility stuff and also some information
of
different cluster software packages.

Reconfigured my RC5 machines to use a local proxy at work, next
will be
fine tuning on contest switching and DES block flow to the
internet.

jwotd: (butaniku/pork)
jwotd: (gyũniku/beef)
jwotd: (toriniku/chicken)

20th december 1998

Programmed some database applications using a web-interface with
serverside
Perl-script and MySQL as the backend database.
Pretty cool, but I think I prefer flat files. Much easier to repair
and
modify. (As long as I can live with two dimensions.)

Planned for the future is to use a MySQL database for all the
information
about boogie woogie piano players and to easily create on the
fly
webpages. Also to enable advanced search criterias and simple
update and
modification handling… (long way to go…)

Played Xshipwars together with Reyk and did exchange some of the
newest
RedHat 5.2 updates. (We also tried to install Gnome on Reyks
laptop,
bad idea…. don’t know… almost anything broke.)

New mail from Aya, so it seems she has found an internet-cafe in
Frankfurt.
So here begins the crash course: Winking
jwotd: (bo, fu/mother, father)
jwotd: (shukubo, shukufu/aunt, uncle)

19th december 1998

Don’t ask me ! Everybody needs some relaxing !

jwotd: (gogo/afternoon)

18th december 1998

Almost nothing to do today.

Another X-mas party at work….
(The same procedure as every year…….)

Found someone from Digital who will hopefully sell me four
Alpha-Workstations
to set up clustering for private testing with some friends.
I hope we can make the deal. Winking

jwotd: (chũi/watch out !)

17th december 1998

Tidied up my desk at work and finished all open cases.
My colleagues tried to make some jokes, but I had no time to listen
to them.
You should have seen their faces as I told them that I’m on holiday
next
week. Happy))))
Panic… so it seems you’ve to do your jobs yourselves again !
Laugh

jwotd: (iriguchi/entrance)

16th december 1998

Get more and more in touch with clustering. Another two machines at
work,
and some news on a project by a friend.

Ordered Madge token-ring drivers for Linux today, and they gave
them only
when filling out some forms about limited support alpha-release and
so on.
But the Presto version isn’t supported yet, and those dumbs gave me
only
a part of the developement libraries so I couldn’t recompile a
modified
version for my needs…

Now my rooms are perfectly clean ! Makes me think they never were
before…
And where is the visitor ???? Hey Ayako, no eMail and no phone
calls yet,
what’s up. Do you want to stay forever in the Netherlands ???

Finally built up my 16 channel mixer and connected almost
everything
which offered a connector useful or not.
Sounds really great when you can watch TV, tune in another channel
on the
VCR, hear a CD, get the PC sound of two machines and play E-guitar
at the
same time 8-)))))))))))))))))))

jwotd: (sei/clean)

15th december 1998

Doing the DNS administration at work from today on. Yeah….

Finished to pin in all my Australia photos. 8-)))
Now it’s showtime.

Downloaded Beowulf to get some more know-how on clustering
technique.

jwotd: (terebi/tv)

14th december 1998

Swapped some router interfaces on a cisco 7206. Plug and play
Happy)
Had to remove a token-ring probe which produces automatic
beacon
wraps on a hub port almost every minute, very obscure…

Investigated the new 2.0.37pre2 kernel features, which contains a
lot of
raid controller support addition on network drivers (especially for
my cards)
and some new hardware detection and description routines.

Downloaded Netscape Communicator 4.5 already fortyfied and the
Apache 1.3.3
which is already compiled with SSL support. (Yep, I still was
unable to
compile it myself. SSLeavy is a little bit too tricky for
me.)

Collected some fun stuff for the upcoming hard working days.
(Audio-samples from the series “Married with children”, sure
MP3!)

Seen the new bttv 0.5.22 which now has videodat support and the
vbidecode
included in the package. Maybe I can reactivate my vidcam and
lifevideo feed
because the latest driver seems to break eveything.

jwotd: (samukatta/it was cold)

13th december 1998

Burried in eMail again…. hooohooo Sad( I hate it, don’t you !!!!!!!!!!

Reyk and myself decided to buy Alphas in january and do some
experiments on Linux clustering.

Tidied up my bathroom and kitchen completely.
Hey man that was just the right time !

Learned some new japanese phrases. Hey I seem to love that
language.

jwotd: (yasumi/holiday)

12th december 1998

Had a fascinating night, working from highnoon to 6 AM after a
colleague
has destroyed some of the contents of three different netware
servers.
Sad((((((

Since this day had no real beginning, I did go to bed when
arriving
from work.

Completed another part of my Australia photo album.
Only 350 pictures left. Happy)))) Sad

jwotd: (eki/railway station)

11th december 1998

In the morning did some japanese phrases practising.
Now I can understand what time it is in steps of five
minutes.
And also colours, countries and some other stuff.
(It only takes 2 hours to learn 200 new words. I’m surprised by
myself…)
WoW ! Winking

Get called by my colleagues because of some problems on two
netware
servers after a planned movement of volumes.

jwotd: (Nani o kaimashita ka?/What did you buy?)

10th december 1998

And again a netware server installed. So they’re moving to NT, I
see Happy))

Time to get my castle polished. Tidy up day.

Installed my 100 MBit hub today ! So the every six hour plug
swapping
comes to an end. And RC5 can work uninterrupted. Winking

jwotd: (Nihon-go ga wakarimashita ka?/Did you understand the
japanese?)

9th december 1998

Did some fine tuning on our netware servers.

Enjoyed our company’s X-mas party.

jwotd: (p&atile;tĩ/party)

8th december 1998

Installed another netware server to get some load sharing
effect.
But this requires moving some of the users. Stress……

Upgraded Markus’s Linux machine and enabled netware
emulation,
samba and pnp sound, everything without having to reboot
!!!!!!!!!

jwotd: (made/until)

7th december 1998

Martin Schmitt plays at Jan’s Bistro, I hope to get there in
time.
Nope. To much to work for today, sorry.

The main harddisk of www.stun.de seems to be defect, because I
heard
it respinning this morning. Reyk will give me his 2 GB UW
harddisk
for swapping.
BTW: next install date (yes it’s still here) is the 12.12.98
Hope the best. Password rotation and SSL needs to be completed on
friday.

jwotd: (getsuyõbi/monday)

6th december 1998

Results of the last 9 hours (CCNACHT):

– world record for the biggest heterogenic Linux cluster
– german internet backbones glowing in the dark nicht
– ISPs overloaded due to multiple the videostreams
– 140 MB internet traffic through my local network
– IRCed and Videoconferenced until late morning
– Transferred 2 GB of MP3 stuff internally
– Tom, Martin and me are very tired, but not bored at all.

Good night for now.

jwotd: (nemu/tired)

5th december 1998

Tonight is the big ComputerClub night, so don’t expect to
much
details. Instead go to: http://www.ccnacht.de

jwotd: (hitoban/the whole night)

4th december 1998

Another quart gone, time for statistics at work. This weekend
a
year 2000 compatibility test is planned. Wish you much fun
folks,
without me.

My perl scripts displaying web activity and counting page
accesses
are up and running. Fascinating ! Winking

Wrote some emergency stuff for www.stun.de.

Tonight there’s a Guinness Book record to fight for in every
Irish
Pub in Germany. I wont miss that.

Will get visited by Ayako from Japan in about two weeks. Time to
get
all the words in my head. 8-))

jwotd: (raihõ/visit)

3rd december 1998

Got my big 19 inch network rack today, thanks to Cetin for
driving,
so I can move all my machines in the rack and close the door to
get
my silence back. Happy

Tried the BIND 8 configuration and everything runs beautyful and
fast.

Hacked some more perl code to do page access counting and web
server
statistics as on-the-fly images. Hey I think I love it…

Configured masquerading today so that we can start the long
CC-Night
without any problems. Next step will be load sharing with a second
ISP.

jwotd: (todana/cupboard)

2nd december 1998

Installed another (it was the same, but on a different hardware)
4.11
netware server, and on the old (newer) hardware a 3.12 one, at
work.

Bought two new books to be prepared for sylvester at work
Winking
One is “Goto Perl 5” and the other “CGI programming for the
WWW”,
I’m still waiting for the “CGI programming in Perl” to become
available.

Revised the whole nameserver configuration today, since the
RedHat
5.2 update has changed from BIND 4 to BIND 8, which is
completely
different.
Takes a lot of time, and you can do a lot of mistakes too.
(www.stun.de and zuse1.fps-net.mbox are totally tuned now.)

Maybe some performance problems are resolved too, I just didn’t
have
the time to verify this. (gatewaying and BIND 8 DNS through
firewalls)

jwotd: (moto/basics)

1st december 1998

Configured gatewaying and some firewalling stuff to be
prepared
for the spectacular Computer Club Night coming up this
weekend.
Here is a first part of the upcoming program:

FR 4.12.98
16:00 Computerclub Spezial (TV: WDR)
– 17:00
21:00 Essen
23:00 Irish Pub (Guiness Buch Rekordversuch):
(Gerd, Andy, Thomas, Reyk)
– 0:00
SA 5.12.98
0:00 Irish Pub (Deutschland Rekordversuch)
– 2:30
4:00-14:00 SCHLAFEN !!!
14:30 Computerclub Praxis live (TV: WDR)
18:00 Aufbau Hardware / Internettest (Routing) Proxy
20:00 Essen
21:00 Computerclub Vorschau Programm (TV: WDR)
23:00 Computerclub Nacht Paderborn live
(TV: WDR/Phoenix ; RADIO: 3 Stations ; INET: 60 WEBCAMS !!!)
– 0:00
SO 6.12.98
0:00 Computerclub Nacht (Linux Cluster WeltRekord Versuch)
– 6:15
6:30 Hardware Abbauen
– 8:00
9:00-18:00 SCHLAFEN !!!

jwotd: (mojõshimono/event)