Wednesday, 22 December 2010

work linux variants bye bye solaris

How sad, can't even give away sun fireblade systems anymore.
All sparc and x86 suns have gone away now.
Only ctie pizzeria remains - mainly using two ex-monash sun grid nodes and a pair of dell r710 dual xeon boxes.

Solaris has no place at my work anymore!!!!

At the moment, dell is winning the supplier race.

drats adsl disconnecting

Still getting 10-13kbs from iinet.
After all this rain, noticed crackle on phone line and also that the adsl media has been going up and down like a yoyo.
reported it to iinet by pasting in part of security log from belkin modem.

Unfortunately it actually goes back to june when it first started doing a reset every few seconds - except for the odd times it stays up for hours.

belkin modem has a "always connected" setting - but there is also a 20 minute disconnect if no traffic.

fiddled with wires a little and crackle has gone away (unfortunately it was gone before I made first wiring change.

1950's house wire with above ground telstra connection to phone jack extension lead to phone-rj jack adaptor to splitter to adsl and phone.


I wonder if the street has dried out enough now for the problem to go away for a while?
Oh well, isolation test needed to eliminate splitter and extension leads and adaptors.
So far so good has stayed up for the last 15 minutes - even using phone.

Update: Did not last - 32:11 to 52:11 - 20 minutes session. At least it is a little faster on this reconnect.
2/22/2010 20:52:54 If(PPPoE1) stop
12/22/2010 20:52:52 If(PPPoE1) stop PPP
12/22/2010 20:52:49 ADSL Media Down !
12/22/2010 20:52:04 sending ACK to 10.1.1.5
12/22/2010 20:51:48 NTP Date/Time updated.
12/22/2010 20:51:39 Daylight Saving Observed.
12/22/2010 20:43:56 sending ACK to 10.1.1.5
12/22/2010 20:39:56 sending ACK to 10.1.1.5
12/22/2010 20:32:56 sending ACK to 10.1.1.5
12/22/2010 20:32:18 If(PPPoE1) PPP connection ok !
12/22/2010 20:32:17 If(PPPoE1) get secondary DNS IP:203.215.xxx
12/22/2010 20:32:17 If(PPPoE1) get primary DNS IP:203.0..xxx
12/22/2010 20:32:17 If(PPPoE1) get IP:203.214.xx.xx
12/22/2010 20:32:17 If(PPPoE1) start PPP
12/22/2010 20:32:17 If(PPPoE1) receive PADS
12/22/2010 20:32:16 If(PPPoE1) send PADR
12/22/2010 20:32:16 If(PPPoE1) receive PADO
12/22/2010 20:32:16 If(PPPoE1) send PADI
12/22/2010 20:32:11 If(PPPoE1) send PADI
12/22/2010 20:32:11 If(PPPoE1) Dial On Demand
12/22/2010 20:32:11 ADSL Media Up !
12/22/2010 20:31:56 10.1.1.3 login success
12/22/2010 20:31:52 If(PPPoE1) stop
12/22/2010 20:31:50 If(PPPoE1) stop PPP
12/22/2010 20:31:47 ADSL Media Down !

Can't publish or save draft - lost connection again.

And that session then lasted only another 7 minutes and came back slower - a bit more hash on the line.


removed the splitter - still with 3m extension lead from only socket in house
12/22/2010 21:33:08 If(PPPoE1) PPP connection ok !
12/22/2010 21:33:07 If(PPPoE1) get secondary DNS IP:203.215.29.191
12/22/2010 21:33:07 If(PPPoE1) get primary DNS IP:203.0.178.191
12/22/2010 21:33:07 If(PPPoE1) get IP:124.168.122.28
12/22/2010 21:33:06 If(PPPoE1) start PPP
12/22/2010 21:33:06 If(PPPoE1) receive PADS
12/22/2010 21:33:06 If(PPPoE1) send PADR
12/22/2010 21:33:06 If(PPPoE1) receive PADO
12/22/2010 21:33:06 If(PPPoE1) send PADI
12/22/2010 21:33:01 If(PPPoE1) send PADI
12/22/2010 21:33:01 ADSL Media Up !
12/22/2010 21:32:42 If(PPPoE1) stop
12/22/2010 21:32:40 If(PPPoE1) stop PPP
12/22/2010 21:32:37 ADSL Media Down !
12/22/2010 21:31:47 sending ACK to 10.1.1.5
12/22/2010 21:31:45 sending ACK to 10.1.1.5
12/22/2010 21:27:45 sending ACK to 10.1.1.5
12/22/2010 21:24:27 If(PPPoE1) PPP connection ok !

Still not "always connected" - I found 145 hours in june and earlier logs (iinet connection history).

Tuesday, 30 June 2009

greenwash? ecse is green, really.

I wonder how many electrical engineering or electrical and computer systems engineering departments have greenwashed themselves?

Here is my contribution to the monash green and sustainability web presence:
www.ecse.monash.edu.au/green

It would be great if the academics and researchers would do a bit more marketing and expand on the above page.

Wednesday, 3 September 2008

Lotus Notes forced from above - quirks that the support people didn't know

Assorted notes about the forced use of lotus notes for email and calendar

Can't send email as "group webmaster" with webmaster's email address from my usual account.

Even setting reply to address is a major task.

One option is to create a role account (and make me the delegate so I don't have to recall all passwords) for each role I send email for.

Better option is to use thunderbird and standard smtp/imap mail for real sysadmin work.


Role accounts and Delegates:

It turns out that the lotus web client works really well on a mac.

If you open the url of someones lotus notes and then log in as the delegate (who has permission for calendar access, you can control their calendar and see only their meeting invites in the mail tab - as expected.

One complication is that the real users preferences are what is seen by the delegate - so the OWNER of the account has to set all preferences that relate to display or working hours for the calendar.

Web client on late 2006 intel imac MUCH quicker and nicer than lotus client on p4 win laptop.

Wednesday, 18 June 2008

Finally connected at home

Not really worth a blog entry!
iinet adsl2+ works first go - even with 1950's wiring and old fashioned telephone jacks and wires.

Now I need to do a speed check.

Will update this sometime

Tuesday, 3 June 2008

Recreational SCUBA and equity

The SDFV was formed back in the 1960's to promote safety, protest competition spearfishing and promote education of scuba.

It's had a long and fruitful presence in the arena of marine parks, fisheries (abalone, cray or sourthern rock lobster), access, safe diving.

It's organised a variety of events, including the Sunken Assets series of seminars.

The SDFV codes of practice govern diving in shipping channels in Port Phillip Bay, and also while the channel deepening project is on.

A recent arena that will need to be watched is the ex-hmas canberra - a ship to be scuttled as a tourist destination.
The SDFV is involved - having provided seed money to the VARS organisation, as well as having member club members on the committees.

The biggest issue to come about with the ex-hmas canberra will be the question of equity of access. The company line (that VARS committee has agreed to and proposed from the start) is that there will be equitable access for all.

Now the definition of equitable access and access methods will be interesting - I read it as: No limitations on what a recreational group want to do - so they can use all bouys if they are provided, have same mechanism to access permit system if it exists for bookings. That there is a realistic way for small groups (say 3 guys in a private boat) to suddenly decide conditions are perfect to get thru the heads and go dive it.
So it needs to be flexible access and acknowledge that there are few if any physical limitations on accessing a scuttled wreck in the water.

Department or Central computing resources?

The title says it all - what's better in the Monash Uni environment?

Central Computing Resources - Monash now has an eResearch Centre complete with projects to provide (or take over, depending on your viewpoint and knowledge of the history of facilities) disk, tape and compute resources like the monash sun grid.

ECSE dept. has the CTIE Pizza Cluster - which for most of it's life hasn't run as a grid cluster, but as a convienient set of compute nodes running specialist software and simulations.

So here we are with the chance to make changes:
Do we buy a few more rack mount boxes (perhaps sun x4150 dual quad core xeon's) or do we try and get the eResearch mob to provide boxes for our use resourced up to the level required by our non-grid software requirements?

Time for meetings and more meetings.