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agittins's blog

New Server

  • Posted on: 29 March 2007
  • By: agittins

The great news is - I have put in a new server! Yay!
You should find page loads far more expedient now, the old server (a dual P-II 400MHz with 256MB RAM, slow SCSI disks) was really struggling to do all the things I have it doing, and I now have a (very noisy) HP Netserver LP-2000r (dual P-III 1GHz with 512MB RAM, fastish SCSI disks) serving up the pages.

The Future of Systems Management? Puppets!

  • Posted on: 7 February 2007
  • By: agittins

For those who administer a number of unix systems you have probably found there is little out there in the way of tools to help you manage multiple systems in a clean and efficient way. While cfengine is perhaps the most advanced F/OSS offering it is lacking in many areas - I know when I checked it out some time ago I got the distinct impression that the Cost/Benefit break-even point would be somewhere beyond 50 machines - I want something that's worth setting up for the ability to replace (or reconfigure) 10 machines without as much effort as it would take to do manually.

Alsa sound broken after update (FC4 x86_64)

  • Posted on: 10 January 2006
  • By: agittins

I recently applied a whole bundle of updates including alsa-lib on my Fedora Core 4 x86_64 desktop. Since then I started getting the error message

ALSA lib control.c:817:(snd_ctl_open_noupdate) Invalid CTL default
Open error: No such file or directory

whenever I tried to open alsamixer, and similar errors and crashes running other apps that expected to be able to use the Alsa sound system (which worked quite well before the update).

Nerd, Geek or Dork?

  • Posted on: 16 September 2005
  • By: agittins

Turns out I'm a "Modern, Cool Nerd" - some kind of freakish half-nerd, half-geek beast I guess. Take the survey yourself if you're interested....
Modern, Cool Nerd 56 % Nerd, 56% Geek, 30% Dork For The Record:

A Nerd is someone who is passionate about learning/being smart/academia.
A Geek is someone who is passionate about some particular area or subject, often an obscure or difficult one.
A Dork is someone who has difficulty with common social expectations/interactions.

My Camera

  • Posted on: 21 February 2005
  • By: agittins

Well, I noticed that one or two people were searching the site for "camera". I figure perhaps they want to know what the camera is that I'm using for the photo's displayed here. First up, a better camera will not make you a better photographer. But I understand that there is a minimum point to start at, my previous digicam had no lcd display, which made it almost impossible to use.

Unidentified Ants

  • Posted on: 30 December 2004
  • By: agittins

Found some ants under a bin out in the yard today. Not being any type of entymologist myself (nor even being able to spell it correctly) I decided to photograph them for the DPI (Department of Primary Industries) to identify, in case they are the dreaded fireants. With no further ado, the photos (all graduations are in mm).

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