It’s all in a day’s work

As trivial as its configuration actually is, I find it surprising there is no easy (as in GUI-driven) way to connect your (K)Ubuntu/Debian box to existing Cups infrastructures. Even in (K)Ubuntu 8.10 you need to use Konsole or Terminal. But then it is easy.

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So, I’ve been inactive for a while now. With the new job and moving to a new place my time to blog has been very limited. I’ve been preparing some more drafts (the number of drafts is now bigger then the number of posts… Guess I should do something against that).

So, in short an overview of what has been keeping me busy (besides moving and getting used to the new job).

Wireless bridges

Trying to get a wireless to wireless bridge. Since I didn’t want to drill some more holes in my new place, I wanted a wireless to wireless bridge from the closet down stairs to my room upstairs. At Dynabyte they sold me a Belkin wireless N1 router which should, according to them, be able to create a wireless bridge with my Belkin wireless N router. “Of course” that didn’t work, so In the end I settled for a combination of an airport extreme and an airport express, which works perfectly. Even though 1 month had passed, the Dynabyte accepted the return of the N1 router, which is nice of them. And, fortunately for me, the N router has it’s use as well. I’m using it now as an access point, since I’m not able to get my Belkin USB stick to connect with more then 65Mbit to my Airport… And well, it’s better to have the wireless bridge at 5Ghrz and since my mac mini doesn’t support 802.11n I need a non 5Ghrz wireless network as well (oh, that Bekin USB stick doesn’t find the airport at 5Ghrz either, guess that’s why it’s still called Pre-N…)

IPv6

Having to switch to two airports had a nice side effect. I’m now able to use IPv6, which is a good thing IMHO. If only to be able to see the nice animated google logo on http://ipv6.google.com

APT-Cacher

I was always using apt-proxy to be able to update multiple debian based systems faster, since you only need to download the packages once that way. But a while ago apt-proxy stopped working so I went looking for an alternative. That alternative has become apt-cacher. More on this will follow later.

Quartz Scheduler

For the new job I’ve been looking at Quartz Scheduler, a cluster aware job scheduler. It looks nice, but the cluster features seem to be very limited. I’ll post something about this once the solution is completed.

Changing the <title> of my blog

And last, the page tittle on the blog has been changed a bit. I don’t want it to start with my blog name, since that makes the google results harder to read. So now it starts with the title of the blog entry, and then the name of the blog. It wasn’t that hard to change it, I just had to alter the header.php of the theme. I used this blog entry as a basis and then did my own “magic” with the header.php file and turned the default <title> into

<title><?php 
if (is_home()) {
        bloginfo('name');
        echo " &raquo; ";
        bloginfo('description');
} else if (! is_single() && ! is_page()) {
        wp_title('');
        echo " &raquo; Blog Archive &raquo; ";
        bloginfo('name');
} else {
        wp_title('');
        echo " &raquo; ";
        bloginfo('name');
}
?></title>

The '' in the wp_title call is needed to override the default » that is put before the title otherwise.

A few days ago I wrote about VMware and the Virtual PC images. I said that it’s not a problem that you don’t have the Windows CD, and that you just had to press cancel when requested.

This was only true for the IE6 image. The IE7 image needs the CD. Without it, it won’t work properly. Now after I used it for IE7, I thought, well lets do that with the IE6 image as well so all is installed properly. How stupid can I be…. With the IE6 image when the mouse driver is installed, it’s no longer working properly!

But, I did another re-install from the converted images while I was writing this post, and guess what: if you wait long enough after the first boot, windows will request a restart even though there is an software install box waiting for you. If you just ignore the software install box, and restart the system, the problem with the mouse is gone.

Oh, another thing. The fix that is needed to be able to compile the kernel module can be applied before you install VMware. I used the following steps for my second install of VMware (using my version didn’t work since I’m on X86_64 and my colleague is on i386).


tar xzvf VMware-player-2.0.3-80004.i386.tar.gz
cd vmware-player-distrib/lib/modules/source
chmod u+w vmmon.tar
tar xvf vmmon.tar
vi vmmon-only/include/vcpuset.h
change line 74 from: #include "asm/bitops.h" to: #include "linux/bitops.h"
tar uvf vmmon.tar vmmon-only/include/vcpuset.h
rm -r vmmon-only
cd ../../../
sudo ./vmware-install.pl


Since I see many people blogging about things they do, and I use that to acquire a lot of knowledge, I’ve decided it’s time for me to start blogging as well. I hope I’ll be able to help you out with some issue’s I / my colleagues encounter.