11.02.2004
Hot weather and new kitchen
Busy busy last few days. Life returned back to normal on Thursday when the other member of the household returned from deepest, darkest Tasmania. Then the fun started - putting the new kitchen in - work, work, work. Still, it is in now (sans a sink for the moment) and now we just need to put everything back in.
In computer things, I’ve learnt that Net::DNS is a very useful perl module and that Windows2000 doesn’t appear to register PTR records very often (at the end of a 128k link). Annoying to spend a few hours working on a perl script to do DNS lookups only to find that of 195 servers you look up, only 1 (ONE) actually had a reverse record in DNS. Bah.
Installed Fedora Core1 and found it very very nice. The installation was the best I’ve ever seen in a Linux distribution and the desktop is very polished. Yum makes updating easy and even updated kernel correctly - being able to do upgrades like apt-get upgrade makes living in FC1 nice. My current plan is to put this onto a computer I’m building for my mother and see how she goes. Yum is a but sluggish but that is because I haven’t sat down and changed the mirror list for updating. Having used Debian exclusively for the past 18months, moving back to the redhat way of doing system configuration is interesting to say the least.
Knoppix 3.3 has been updated and the German magazine C’T has released the 3.4 version (which includes the 2.6 kernel). This should make a lot more people try 2.6 which is a good thing. The normal version has been officially released yet but is on the way. Speaking of knoppix, a nice article on IBM DeveloperWorks about using Knoppix as a recovery tool.
Both myself and myrddin are experimenting with using Linux software raid - I’ve currently got a 45gig raid1 partition on my FC1 box and am looking to put a raid1 120gig mirror into my firewall/fileserver. The price of hard drives these days makes this a very inexpensive option. I remember the cat /proc/mdstat command and, as usual, found the Software-Raid howto to be very handy in learning and planning the migration.
John from monkeyc has some very amusing comments about blogging and the whole Livejournal/Blogging setup - well worth a read. Now to create a hosts file via perl that I can then use to do my reverse lookups.