In my last post about setting up a slimserver I said that I was having trouble getting slimp3slave working: Whilst it doesn’t appear to have any problems, I didn’t have much success with the players. mpg123 got confused by the stream, and madplay kept skipping the beginnings of tracks when I hit next on the server. This could be a …
This weekend I thought I’d have a go at setting up SlimServer, an application that streams music to various audio devices. It’s primarily design to work with the SqueezeBox, a hardware device that can wirelessly stream the music, but there are various bits of software that can use it too. The server itself was a doddle to set up. There …
I’ve never got on well with software RAID systems on FreeBSD. I’ve tried gvinum (previously I used vinum), gmirror, and ataraid, all with varying degrees of success. The latest machine I built is using gmirror, and so far I’m happy. However, over the past few days I’ve been having problems with a system I built a couple of years ago. …
I’ve known about Google Bookmarks for a while, but until recently couldn’t really see how they’d be useful to me. A single set of bookmarks on the web is great, but if you have to go to a webpage to find them it rapidly becomes too much effort. Compare this to a single click within your browser’s menu. My Internet …
I’ve been playing a game called Entropia Universe (previously Project Entropia) recently, and I’m finding it quite addictive. It’s much like other MMORPGs at a first glance, but it boasts a “Real Cash Economy”. This means that there’s a direct exchange rate (fixed to the US dollar) and you can exchange money to and from the game currency just like you …
We’ve recently moved to having our filestore NFS exported from a cluster. This provides almost complete resilience from hardware failures, and moves us away from depending on individual end-user systems with locally attached filestore. Given the inherent insecurities with NFS we opted to use IPsec authentication (but not encryption) between the hosts involved. The NFS server only accepts connections from …
It seems I’ve never got enough time these days. I’m a FreeBSD ports committer, but recently I’ve hardly done anything. All I’ve managed to do is keep my own ports updated. It’s quite frustrating because I want to be more involved. Then there’s the other projects like libstatgrab, they don’t even get a look in. I blame the “day job”; …
If you’ve been following my blog you’ll know that I’ve been working on a new filestore project at work for a while now. After getting things working nicely on our Solaris machines, and finally moving my home directory over, I decided to tackle our Debian server. It quickly became apparent that I’d need to upgrade the machine, which was running …
It looks like the BT Exact IPv6 tunnel broker is finally back up and running after being offline for a week. It seems they had a hardware failure of some kind which knocked out their whole TB operation. I appreciate this is a free service, but it’s still a pain not having it available. That said, I was reluctant to change to another …
If there’s one thing that drives me completely insane in the modern world of computing it’s spam. It consumes my time, day after day, and devours the resources of our mail systems. In my own mailbox I get a few hundred spam messages a day, most of which I’ll never even see, let alone read. Thankfully most of these are …