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10 April 2014 21:50

Today I took down my KVM-host machine, rebooting it and restarting all of my guests. It has been a while since I'd done so and I was a little nerveous, as it turned out this nerveousness was prophetic.

I'd forgotten to hardwire the use of proxy_arp so my guests were all broken when the systems came back online.

If you're curious this is what my incoming graph of email SPAM looks like:

I think it is obvious where the downtime occurred, right?

In other news I'm awaiting news from the system administration job I applied for here in Edinburgh, if that doesn't work out I'll need to hunt for another position..

Finally I've started hacking on my console based mail-client some more. It is a modal client which means you're always in one of three states/modes:

  • maildir - Viewing a list of maildir folders.
  • index - Viewing a list of messages.
  • message - Viewing a single message.

As a result of a lot of hacking there is now a fourth mode/state "text-mode". Which allows you to view arbitrary text, for example scrolling up and down a file on-disk, to read the manual, or viewing messages in interesting ways.

Support is still basic at the moment, but both of these work:

  --
  -- Show a single file
  --
  show_file_contents( "/etc/passwd" )
  global_mode( "text" )

Or:

function x()
   txt = { "${colour:red}Steve",
           "${colour:blue}Kemp",
           "${bold}Has",
           "${underline}Definitely",
           "Made this work" }
   show_text( txt )
   global_mode( "text")
end

x()

There will be a new release within the week, I guess, I just need to wire up a few more primitives, write more of a manual, and close some more bugs.

Happy Thursday, or as we say in this house, Hyvää torstai!

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Sometimes it is surprising how stable systems are

5 May 2014 21:50

Yesterday I received an automated alert from my kvm-hosting host-machine, informing me that one of the drives in the RAID-pair had failed.

This particular machine has been up and running since 2009, and according to my outage log this is the first downtime in three years. (The uptime was over 1000 days, which seems to confirm that pretty nicely.)

I like reliable systems, and sometimes it's worth remembering just how well they can work.

In other news I'm currently continuing to chase a new job. The companies I've approached, or which have approached me, are being a little slow in replying which is a shame, but I'm not hugely concerned .. yet.

I'm going to give things another week, or so, and then add a banner to the Debian-Administration website, and see if that results in anything interesting.

In the meantime I've got some wood, and a new mitre saw, and I will be spending the remainder of today working on my new desk. Doing physical things is always fun, and right now especially.

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