This month’s come together will be held on 2011-01-12, 8pm at our regular pub (Trödler).

This month’s come together will be held on 2010-12-01, 8pm at our regular pub (Trödler).

I’ve found a nice plugin for WP:
After the Deadline.
It might help to improve the text quality. At least mine.

Long ago I’ve spent a day in Frankfurt. Since I’ve never been there I went for the first parking I saw. And I got the following ticket with an interesting date.

In the evening I got an amount displayed on the machine that slightly exceeds the credit level of my credit card. (Sorry for the bad quality, but taking pictures of LCDs in direct sunlight is a challenge)

After waiting for a long time and talking to the service people the amount was reduced.

During the last week I’ve replaced the disks of my software RAID with larger ones as the capacity was exceeded. While this is theoretically an easy task, I had to learn a few things along the way:

• Trying to perform such an upgrade on a headless system without console will fail.
• fdisk silently fails to parse integer values larger than 2147483647.
• The md superblock is located at the end of the partition/disk that you add to the RAID.
• If the kernel associates the complete drive to a specific md device instead of the last partition, blocking the use of other partitions for other md devices, resize the last partition to leave some (wasted) space at the end to ensure that the end of the last RAID partition differs from the end of the drive.
• Some manufactures build ‘green’ disks that constantly unload/load their heads, causing the drive to run out of spec in a very short time. If the manufacturer provides a DOS tool to correct that behavior, a pretty easy solution is to put it onto a bootable CD.
• This stride calculation script helps to optimize the performance of the filesystem running on a RAID5.
• Cheap desktop drives might be a bad choice for a RAID, if they break during the first re-sync of the RAID you can try to recover your data by re-creating the RAID – Thanks, Adrian!

This month’s come together will be held on 2010-11-03, 8pm at our regular pub (Trödler).

This month’s come together will be held on 2010-10-06, 8pm at our regular pub (Trödler).

Added new mirror: The Document Foundation.

Added new mirror: mariadb.

This month’s come together will be held on 2010-09-01, 8pm at our regular pub (Trödler).

This month’s come together will be held on 2010-08-11, 8pm at our regular pub (Trödler).

This month’s come together will be held on 2010-07-14, 8pm at our regular pub (Trödler).

Since my boss told me to reduce my overtime I’ve ordered a new toy to compensate the lack of work.

Currently I’m installing the system based on this description. Main idea is to get rid of the loud, big and of course power consuming solution I currently use as internet gateway and print server.

This month’s come together will be held on 2010-06-02, 8pm at our regular pub (Trödler).

Last weekend I upgraded most of my home systems to run Lucid Lynx. From the software point of view everything went pretty smoothly and I am really happy so far. I like the new look which is not surprising as I’ve been using the Dust theme prior to 10.04 and they are not very far apart. The new Ubuntu One integration is an interesting way of trying to make Ubuntu sustainable, I do hope however that it will stay out of my way if I don’t want to use it.

I was close to downloading an album through Ubuntu One until they requested me to register my computer. This is something I do not want to do just to buy an album, so I stopped right there and resorted to the wonderful clamz.

Anyway, during the setup I had to realize that CD-Rs have become the floppies of 2010 – not only capacity-wise but also regarding the reliability. I’ve been having this problem with Ubuntu as well as Fedora setups: When you burn the CD-R just before running the setup on another machine with a different optical drive you will often get read errors at some point in time – typically after being halfway through the setup process. This brings me to my request to the authors of Linux distribution setup procedures: If you cannot read a package from the CD please try downloading it from the Internet after asking the user whether it is OK to do so. I fixed one of the setups with a manual chroot onto the new root fs after modifying the sources.list, on another machine I simply used the mini iso which downloads eveything via the network.

This month’s come together will be held on 2010-05-05, 8pm at our regular pub (Trödler).

Sorry for the German title, but the translated one I did not like. Someone has stolen my partition in the basement. Not just some things from it. My complete partition is taken over by someone else. When I recently went down to put my suitcase I could not find my partition any more. The place did not look like before any more. After some searching it turned out that someone has broken my lock, filled my partition with his things, put paper on the inside of the metal grid (that’s why it looked completely different) and put a new lock. So now I have a partition with someone else’s things any my flat full of things.

This month’s come together will be held on 2010-04-07, 8pm at our regular pub (Trödler).

This month’s come together will be held on 2010-03-03, 8pm at our regular pub (Trödler).

This server will not be reachable tomorrow (Saturday 2010-02-27) due to campus wide network changes for at least 8 hours.