Lately I’ve been going through the house trying to find unnecessary things to unplug (yeah yeah, those PG&E ads running late night on Chinese TV are starting to influence me I guess), so my thoughts turned to the two routers. The main reason I have two of them is to ensure I had enough signal coverage in all parts of the house. I started googling for mods I could do, and lo and behold… it turns out that dd-wrt is compatible with the WR850g too.

Damn. Well, I have two of ‘em – so what the hell. I flashed one of them up to the dd-wrt v2.3 SP2, and upped the transmit power to 80mW (from the default 28mW, and it’s plugged into a high gain antenna) and the one router provides excellent coverage throughout the entire house now, and I can happily unplug the second router.

Now my aim is to bring that second router with another high gain antenna down to my parents house which also had crappy wireless coverage and hopefully remedy that.

I started shopping around for machines; I think I’ve found some pretty good 1U quad core Intel boxes with enough storage to keep me happy. I looked pretty longingly at the x4150, but I think I’m going to have to end up going with a whitebox system for a few reasons.

grommit’s biggest limiting factor is its storage. I need gobs of storage…. as much as I can pack into 1U. The best bang for the buck here looks to be a 1U chassis with 4xSATA drives. I can populate initially with 2×750 Seagate ES drives and have the other two bays for future expansion. The x4150 looks nice, especially with the 8 SAS drives, but as benr pointed out recently, the 2.5″ SAS drives are only at 176GB right now. I’d need at least 4 of them to meet grommit’s current requirements which rapidly prices me out of the ~$2k I was hoping to spend on a new grommit machine.

Colfax has a pretty nice 1U Quad-core Intel Xeon box (Supermicro board) with 4xSATA bays (with the 2x750GB Seagate drives) and 4GB of memory for $2100 which looks pretty tempting. I think it’d run Solaris pretty well; wouldn’t have the sexy Sun look – but well, it’s going into a datacentre – so who cares.

so, here goes one of my patented brain-dumps about what i’ve been up to recently. work stuff first. then personal.

i’ve become an intern sponsor for OpenSolaris, and started out sponsoring a few of Rich Lowe’s fixes. it’s been great to see the process working first-hand, but there’s nothing like being an actual sponsor and working hand in hand with someone in the community to make OpenSolaris better. the collaboration is great… IRC, IM, email, we have almost all the tools we need….

….one tool we don’t quite have yet is full SCM for ON. it’s coming, i swear it is. actually, a lot of my time spent recently has been on getting ON to build in Mercurial. this encompasses a few things: converting ON to Mercurial, and making sure ON builds cleanly without Teamware/SCCS around. these were actually some of the bugs that Rich and I have been working on. all my scripts/code to convert ON to Mercurial seem to be working well… well enough in fact that we started publishing Mercurial bundles on Tuesday. this was really gratifying, it’s a huge step forward to allowing community members to properly get diffs, build patches, etc.

the other OpenSolaris related thing i’ve been working on is getting the infrastructure ready for the SCM beta test phase. the companion CD, and JDS will be our first beta testers, and i’m sure it’s gonna be a rocky first few steps – but this is a big step forward to getting SVN/Hg hosting on opensolaris.org for our projects. this has been heinously complicated, mainly because there are so many groups involved. i’ll spare you all the details, but suffice it to say – that this has at times been tedious and frustrating – but it’s also been necessary, so oh well… some things you just have to put your head down and work on for the better good i guess.

as for all my copious spare time away from Sun, i’ve been working on the house – cleaning up the basement and painting in an attempt to remodel one of the rooms into a storage/work-area. we’re getting closer to having a non-repulsive basement now. wendy and i bought a 37″ LCD HDTV which has been nice. conveniently, in time for the HD coverage of the World Cup. the TV purchase, and the recent gift of an Opteron 185 chip from a friend gave me impetus to finally build the HDTV MythTV box i’ve been dreaming of for a while… so i went out and purchased all the components i need to build a super-uber-coolio HDTV MythTV box with 2 tuners. this will be my summer project, and one i’ll be blogging about periodically. i’m also hopefully going to install the SunRay server software on it and have an uber home server.

it’s been years since i’ve built my own machine (freshman year of college i think…), so i’m pretty excited to be geeking out on a project like this. it’ll be a lot of fun.

last weekend we headed to Denver for Wendy’s sister’s wedding. it was weird being in Denver with 90 degree weather. my body and brain is so conditioned to Denver being only a place to go snowboard… it was bizarre.

anyway. random ramblings are over. the webapp is done building (or complaining, at this point), so i need to get back to work. stop reading this junk, and go get some work done yourself.

Pretty amazing story of a woman who managed to recover her USB drive after it had been stolen…. with her only copy of her thesis on it.

I gotta say though – she’s just plain stupid. What’s the first rule of computers? Back your stuff up!

I know when I was writing my thesis, I had a special alias called ‘thesis’ aliased to: gvim ~/Documents/Thesis/thesis.tex;scp ~/Documents/Thesis/thesis.tex [host1];scp ~/Documents/Thesis/thesis.tex [host2] ... et. al until it was automatically backed up onto 4 different computers in 3 different time zones.

when i got my ferrari, i decided there was no way i was gonna run my beautiful 64-bit turion laptop in 32-bit mode just to get wireless working. so i bought an atheros-based card and used our spiff atheros driver on OpenSolaris.org.

so i had my leftover broadcom card. i wanted to put it in wendy’s laptop (IBM Thinkpad T23), so i bought a set of internal antennas ($8 on eBay), and set to work. i followed the above instructions and was able to install it easily. the only instructions i would clarify/change is that it’s considerably easier if you unscrew the 3 screws holding the fan/heatsink in place. move the fan and heatsink out of the way and you’ll see a little diagonal hole next to the fan intake hole. rather than running the antenna leads through the fan intake hole (and obstructing the airway), use that little diagonal hole and run the antenna leads through there.

wow. talk about far-sighted. this is really really cool… i know IBM is our evil competitor and all, but kudos to them. i think this is a great idea…

Web:

• Apache/Apache2 SSL certificates/keys
• Gallery pam_auth PAM module
• SquirrelMail cp -rf/var/{lib|spool}/squirrelmail
• Webalizer Usage Tracker
• Uptime Daemon (ud)
• Planets (planet grommit, planetidentity)
• MoveableType
• WordPress see mySQL
• MySQL mysqldump
• PHP see [1] footnotes for configure flags
• __modrewrite_

Mail:

• imaps SSL certs/keys
• smtp/tls
• saslauthd
• Postfix
• pop3s
• Mailman migrate archives, list data, and subscriber lists
• SpamAssassin migrate user’s Bayesian token databases
• Fetchmail for user’s who want fetched pop mail

Other:

• Python needed for Planet
• Perl CPAN goodness for donuthore.pl
• identd IRC
• rsync directories rsync -avzx
• smf(5) SMF manifests for mailman, mysql, ud
• __pamauth_ PHP PAM authentication module, used for gallery
• cron jobs webalizer, jesse’s planworld mirrour, planet updates

there are still some hiccups to iron out. but in the interest of getting real work done, i had to put some stuff on the backburner.

two things that had to be done though, were to update the story of grommit, as well as…..

(thanks Scott Fehrman)