Rediscovering Snakefinger

Thanks to a kind person who posted some Snakefinger albums on Usenet I am now very much enjoying some old stuff like the Chilli Willi and the Red Hot Peppers albums that I have never heard until now. Great stuff, some is a bit like Brinsley Schwarz (a 'pub rock' band that I know a bit longer), some is C&W and other songs remind me of Steely Dan.
Funny thing is, this puts his carreer in a whole new perspective for me. Cool: I can revisit all his albums and listen to it from a new perspective :-)

Broken DVD file

From PLG I downloaded a music DVD that 'everyone' is having troubles with. It looks like there's 'something' wrong with the second VOB file and I thought that I had it fixed (using a tool called 'super') but when I came round to burning it turned out the repair was also borken.
So yesterday I wasted some time trying to find out what is wrong with the file but got nowhere. I can split audio and video but I can't put it back together because the file seems to be wrong somewhere, although it looks okay enough in PowerDVD.

Disaster recovery tested, but not planned.

Last saturday I was updating our Sun servers with some patches when one of them gave an error after a reboot and didn't come up anymore. There was a problem with the database that defines how the disk mirrors are configured, but it took me a while to find that out. I'll keep this short and say that I now have a lot more experience with booting from cd, repairing filesystems and software mirroring (I had to build a new database from scratch). Obviously this took way too long for one person who is learning along the way so we decided to switch the application that used a database on the faulty server over to the shadow database on our 'disaster recovery' server which is located in a different city. Monday I got the server back on it's feet, tuesday we moved the database back to the server and tuesday evening we switched the users back. Wednesday everything was running smooth again.
So, we can cross the disaster recovery test off our list for this year: it worked!

Nice start of an otherwise dull Friday

Yesterday evening the part of the city where I work lost power for two hours. So when I got in this morning some servers were down and others were up but not functioning correctly (to be fair, a big numer of systems were up and running with no problem). The main problem is that the order in which some systems are started is important and that order is not taken into account when the power comes back on.

Update xubuntu from 6.06 to 6.10

This seems to be quite an adventure. It's lovely to play with on a laptop that's only used to play around with, I'm glad I don't really need it for work.
The Edgy Eft distribution (6.10) needs special treatment for the update that I found here.
I did that and apart from some annoying things (like a question that is asked after I thought finally I could go downstairs to whatch some tv) it probably went smoothly enough, although it took all evening to complete. That is, I think it was completed as I had only a desktop to look at with no activity so I switched it off for the night.
I quickly found out that the wireless stuff needs some more tweaking as something with the ndiswrapper package is changed or something like that. When starting up the Synaptic Package Manager I got an error message, luckily with the needed commandline (dpkg --configure -a). It looks like a lot of stuff needs to be configured first, or maybe it was not done yesterday because I shut down the laptop.
Okay, the package manager works after the configuration. After some searching I found this document that indicates I have to re-do some work, which turned out to be correct. What I did was:
- selected ndiswrapper-utils-1.8 in the package manager and install that
- sudo rm /usr/sbin/ndiswrapper (a shell script)
- sudo ln -s /usr/sbin/ndiswrapper-1.8 /usr/sbin/ndiswrapper
- sudo modprobe ndiswrapper (wheee! success!!)
The wireless card is recognized and the NetworkManager Applet even asks for a keyring password to be saved. Of course I am scepical so I rebooted and waited for the loadndiswrapper error during boot... it did not appear! I also don't have to re-insert the card, however I do have to enter the network name and password (in fact I have to enter the password twice now, once for the applet and once for the keyring thinghy).

Nod32 to the rescue

Not proud to mention it, but our daughter caught a variant of the Troj/Zlob-QK Trojan. This was not caught by the free-AVG scanner. We installed Nod32 and easily got rid of the rubbish.

The Tapes, part two.

I have finished part two of the pictures of The Tapes. They are available here.