31st july 1998

Had a crashed netware server today with 1000 users. What a
day.
Mirroring of the 112 gigs is still running after 14 hours.

Prited out the USB specifications. So I’m sure that I’ll
play around with this hardware stuff soon, since Linux can
handle it better than Win98, according to Alan’s smoke party.

30th july 1998

Updateted the emergency documentation of our AIX machines.

Configured automatic indexing on my local search engine.

Started to write a script to collect the status of all my
HTML pages. Maybe this will gonna be something for the
masses,
when finished. If you already know such a tool, let me know.

The output will look like this:

Current project status in category: general
Location: Filename: Filedate: Filesize: Version:
/ index.html 07/10/98 6807 3.00.001
/diary diary.html 07/30/98 14079 unknown
Current project status in category: boogie
Location: Filename: Filedate: Filesize: Version:
/boogie bpage_1.html 07/29/98 3469 3.00.012

Organized a network administrator meeting at O’Reillys
Irish Pub, so that Tom, Reyk and myself could exchange
our experiences and pains in this business.
(You know the name O’Reilly, don’t you ?
Just the right name for a pub to attract Linux fanatics.)

You could say this evening was the foundation of the
“Bavarian Linux Administrators Group”.
Short: BLAG & PLAY !

29th july 1998

Gave my Pentium II some work to do: 750 MB wave files
converted to 67 MB mp3 files. Cool compression rate 11:1 !

Played again with my webcam. Take a look.
It’s bad in quality I know, but the cam was very cheap,
therefore, you can almost forget using it with artificial
light.

Got in touch with HP-UX 10.20, nice they also support volume
groups as in AIX. Anyone make me a gift ?!?

Did a lot of updates to the boogie pages.

28th july 1998

Collected all the debugging stuff for Alan.
I hope that I don’t steal his valueable time.

Had big problems with SNA on an AIX. And discovered four
hours later, that they had changed the hostname yesterday.
The documentation of the SNA application says: If you ever
change the hostname, you have to install the application
from scratch. Well done, guys !

Again tested my billard center. Closed again !
So I had some Guinness with Gerd at Shanannigans.

27th july 1998

Discovered a new problem in 2.0.35 memory management,
when loading previously brandnew compiled bttv modules
(0.5.6 and also 0.5.8), I could reproduce the GPF
problems I ran into yesterday. Not a process, but the
kernel himself seems to grab all available memory.
Unloading modules, doesn’t free up memory.

Wrote that immediately to Alan, before he releases 2.2 !

And another day rebooting my machine, to get the system
stable, and uptime counting starts from the beginning !

Learned that simply taring files doesn’t include
pointfiles. Ahhh that’s what find is good for.
Maybe my personal uptime is just to long, since I had
no weekend for a while.

26th july 1998

Set up live video on my webserver, now you can take
a look at me while working. It takes me a bit time to get
the BTTV capture and transformations working.
CGI scripting was easy instead.

(The above link is on an Intranet !
So if you want to take a look on me live, you first have to
identify my dynamic IP while I’m online, but you should have
a fair chance !!!)

Spent another day at work, since our monitoring alarmed me
that one of our primary backbones has some trouble.
It for sure was not a network failure. Our tftp-server SUN
was unhappy with its disappearing disk space on the root
partition.

Had a mysterious GPF problem (general protection fault) when
su-ing to other users. So I had some practice in debugging
the EIP symbols. Lynx was grabbing all available memory ! F**k
!
(As I said some days before, it’s hard to measure uptimes.)

Reviewed the 2.0.36pre1. Don’t know if I’ll compile another
kernel tonight. But the TLAN 1.0 update would concern me.

One of these neverending days….
Again been alarme by our monitoring, and again the same
management module in our primary backbone. So I decided
on the spot to swap the whole management board.
Lord, please let me sleep now !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

You wont believe that, but in some countries the 26th of
july is a sunday. And believe it or not, some people don’t
work on sundays. Maybe I’ve chosen the wrong religion.
Which one says: “On the seventh day, you should rest !” ?

25th july 1998

Had to work today. They tried to update our hosts OS390,
but failed when trying to run IMS on 18 GB harddisks,
so the had to go back to the old release.
Rebooting the host makes much fun if you have 40 SNA
links to netware for SAA servers. Uhhh..my legs.

Printed out all of this year published Linux-Gazette
issues. Lots of stuff to read, but always helpful.

Discovered the www.freshmeat.net and immediately subscribed
to their mailing list. You wanna subscribe too ?

24th july 1998

Installed WWWthreads, a nice little blackboard system
completely designed in Perl for easy cgi installation
on webservers. Great ! ))))

Reorganized lots of logical volumes on an AIX, missed
to shutdown one database, so I had to repair DB2 too.

Downloaded Alan’s 2.0.36pre1, hope thats the last one
before 2.2. (It’s hard to measure and assess uptimes
when installing a new kernel every second day.)

23rd july 1998

Did a lot of documentation on an AIX for reorganizing
volume groups tomorrow afternoon.

Nobody at work believes me that multiple seperate duplexed
disks on a fileserver are much more efficiently on
performance
than one big single duplexed disk. I hate those pigheaded
guys.

Debugged XDM sessions on a Sparc 20, which had refused to
startup xclients from the initscripts.

Taught Markus a little bit C programming.
Maybe he’ll write a better database software someday ?

Received the advertisments for the Amacom Flipdisk, which
would be a very nice backup device on Linux.

Discoverd how to debug crashed kernels. Heya that makes fun !
Have to try debugging a running kernel, nice feature !

The day was long Willis !

22nd july 1998

Had to do escalation procedures to Novell and Computer 2000
because of our SNA problems.

Played around with AIX printing filters.
Why is noone using PostScript ?
It could be all so easy.

Had a BBQ chicken pizza at Munich’s Planet Hollywood,
not bad, but not the right place for me.

21st july 1998

My first day at work, after holiday.

Experimented with the LexLink Tools for AIX. IP is better !

Tried a little bit Netware programming, there are some
dirty tricks around.

20th july 1998

Changed the diary dates to full month names, and made them
Y2K-compliant.

Did another four pages of my new 28 big new homepages.

19th july 1998

Enjoyed the day, did some work on my new homepage.
If you want to take a first look: New Homepage
I’m not satisfied with the colours font size and background yet,
but
this should be minorities.

18th july 1998

Worked on my new personal homepage V3.xx, which will consist
of 28 very personally documents. Looks fine so far.

Created lots of fine web arts with Gimp.

17th july 1998

Enjoyed the day.

Enjoyed Armageddon and Mercury Puzzle with Reyk and Babsi
at the royal cinema. Great ciname, great movies.

Damn, they have cracked DES-II-2 in 56 hours, but not by
distributed.net members. They’ve built up a special crypto
processor just to crack DES !!!

Security live long and prosper, goodbye….

16th july 1998

Removed Squid from my configuration and installed
WWWOffle instead. And believe me, it’s much more
comfortable.

Installed my venetian blind on my big living room window,
so I guess it’ll be a cool day tomorrow ! 8-}

15th july 1998

My last week on holiday.

Tried to poll news from my fidolink, but it seems there are
many many bit failures during transfer. Have to check this
in more deep.

Did dozens of minor updates in the local configs.
Checked security for the whole filesystem.
Added banners for the dial-up services.

Answered a few questions on news://linux.redhat

Tried to write down my PPP device/interface problems.

14th july 1998

Compiled and installed the final 2.0.35 kernel.

Compiled the tricky CDDA2WAV, now it works.

13th july 1998

DES-II-2 has started, so all my machines are working on it.
Overall rate is about 8 Mkeys/second. I’ll know that exactly
in a few days. (Lot of work to update all the different
machines
on the different OS’s.)

Encoded the blues brothers 2000 soundtrack to MP3 for my
ultimate mp3-blues-cd.

Disconnected a lot of harddisk drives and fans from my pc’s
to make my sleep more softly.

12th july 1998

Did some updates on the boogie-woogie pages.

Had lots of fun at a friends birthday party.

11th july 1998

Played around with VIC, nice video conferencing tool for
linux.

Updated the boogie-woogie event calendar.

10th july 1998

Set up DNS for my internal fidonet. Found a solution for my
net-pf-4, net-pf-3 error messages. (RTFM may help sometime.)

Convinced Tom to join the DES-II-2 contest on monday.

Used the time to answer and update all the boogie news in
my inbox folder.

Will go to the little octoberfest tonight.

9th july 1998

Played around with LIRC (Linux Infrared Remote Control),
nice tool !

Found some more tools for my bttv-driver, but had no time
to test it so far.

Did a complete backup of my mailbox areas via ftp.
TCP/IP and FTP are such stupid protocols !
You need to acknowledge 300MB for 1GB to transfer. Great !
&-{

Got ifcico and ifmail working over VModem/Telnet, now I can
get all my fidomail via TCP/IP as a new virtual line !
Pretty cool !

Reyk had to fight with dummy devices on a sun, hope he got
it.

8th july 1998

Updated my PalmPilot’s OS to 2.05, works fine under linux.

Tested incoming and outgoing faximiles, had no problems,
many thanks to the c’t team !

Tried to compile some new gnome-pre-alpha software, but
without
success. What have they done with the C-compiler ??? Had no
chance to compile anything without parsing errors !

Had some crashs with gnome when video4linux runs for more
than
20 minutes. Just console blocking.

7th july 1998

Edited a few HTML pages for my new PPP-based mailbox-system.
Thought about transparent proxying for ftp, when allowing
users just to make connections to the dialin-server.

Played around with Kanji-term, and hunted for some japanese
language training programs on the linux-os.
(wnn, canna, skk, ng, mule) Pretty cool !

Set up hourly fortunes for every login session. )))

6th july 1998

Another big shopping day, finally I got a lamp for my
kitchen.

Now leeching the last few megabytes to complete my updated
RedHat 5.1 CD image.

Got Gnome running, as I like it ! Wow !
So all you outthere having problems with KDE change to Gnome.

5th july 1998

PalmPilot PPP now works fine, but without authentication.

Compiled 2.0.35pre5, which runs so far.

Tried to get KDE running, now with 200 MB of RAM, but after
five minutes swaps again to disk with crash. Great !

4th july 1998

New RC5 clients are now available, so I had to go through all
my
RC5 condemned machines. Join us on 13 july with DES-II-2 !

Got big brother running more or less. Nice tool.

The Germans lost against Croatia ! What a fool !

Experimented most of the day with PalmPilot’s direct PPP link
to my server, but without any success.
mgetty seems to loose connection after receiving the first
string.
Ignoring carrier detection don’t seem to work properly.

The normal modem line, now works without any failures.
(FAX, UUCP, FIDO, PPP and LOGIN) Great !
Time to get the Fido-mailer linux-based.

3rd july 1998

Ohhh, my head…. I guess the fourth Guinness was the bad
one…

Reyk seems to be in trouble, because one of his linux
machines
can’t mount it’s root partition anymore. Bad luck !

Tested the IPPP dialup with Chris, and obviously we have the
same problem with multiple interfaces and IPPP-daemons.
(Calls are accepted on ippp1 instead of ippp4, the daemon
started
for ippp2 answers on ippp4, the static IP from ippp1 becomes
overwritten with the dynamic IP of ippp4, GREAT f.ck !!! )

Maybe I should change to FreeBSD someday.

2nd july 1998

The firewall configuration is broken again… but finally INN
seems to work now. Just waiting for Chris’s feed.

Registered my linux machines at counter.li.org, this time
without form-failures from netscape.

Updated the system with the newest redhat updates.
Fighted around with the 2.0.35pre patches…

Installed the excite search engine for private webservers,
works
great, but was a little bit tricky since we don’t use the old
perl 5.001 anymore.

Will have some Guinness tonight with Reyk and Babsi at
O’Reillys.

1st july 1998

Bought an effect processor for my e-guitar, sounds great !

Tried again to get up INN running….. no chance….
But found two new patches, one for netscape’s form problem
and
the other for the INN path problem ! Ahh, amazing…

Phoned to Chris, but it seems it’ll take some more time until
he can feed me with news. Also dialup still isn’t working
yet.

Had to notice, that my preferred billard center started its
summer break today for the next 2 months, sorry Gerd.