Simon Lyall's Blog

A few updates.

1. Julien Goodwin is serialising and adapting my Linux.conf.au: First timers Guide on his blog.

2. My little post about “hidden” information in the cabinet paper attracted a bit of attention in the papers. I notice that while blogs give credits there was no mention of my name in any of the papers (or even a hit of how the information came to light). I’ve heard this is common with the MSM and I wonder if it’s a good policy for them in the long term.

3. The Sysadmin Miniconf is getting there. About 86% of the presentations are sorted out and with luck the rest should be in a few days time.

4. And last off NZNOG 08 is finally taking registrations.

The Xen bug is still open but a nice person on the Ubuntu Forums suggested using aptitude to install the packages. Aptitude was smart enough to downgrade libc6 in order to get around the dependency problem.

So I am now about half way through step 8 (Create new default Xen image) of my plan. I’d hope I can get a draft tidy Xen image sorted out in the next couple of days

Every day it looks more like management have decided me and the rest of the team just get to look after old stuff until another team builds and runs the replacement. We have been trying to fight this for a while but it doesn’t look like we are going to be able to fight this.

Half the “interesting” stuff (products not technology) is already gone and most of the rest looks like following over the next 1-3 years (things don’t move fast).

Looks like my main option is to go elsewhere, so if anyone knows of anything…

So the government releases a Cabinet paper on this page about “New Digital Advisory Body to be established” and invites people to:

Download a copy of the cabinet paper Potential Merger of Higrowth and the Digital Strategy Advisory Group confirmed on Monday 12 November by Cabinet. Some items in this cabinet paper has been removed because it refers to financial or other sensitive information.

So I download the PDF document and find I can highlight blank section with my mouse and read the financial and other data. Only problem is that I don’t know if it supposed to be secret or not. Anyway. told a few people just in case.

Tight timeframe


National Library and SSC consider the timeframe for establishing the new
body is "ambitious."

As detail in my previous post I am upgrading and installing Xen on one of my servers to replace a dodgy one. However I got stuck earlier in the week because Xen is currently broken in the latest version of Ubuntu ( 7.10 or Gutsy). See this bug 161783 on launchpad for details of the problem. So far nobody in Ubuntu seems to have noticed the bug so I don’t know when it’ll be fixed, hopefully in the next few days.

I had a little play about bypassing it but I really don’t want to hack libc since that’ll completely kill the box if I make a mistake.

Another separate thing I noticed this week is that since I don’t watch any TV ( I watch TV programmes but not broadcast TV ) I don’t have any idea what the latest cool ads are (at least not the New Zealand ones). Perhaps somebody could create a simple system where I can watch the “hot” ads that I currently miss on TV. Like the “Mr T” one that I’ve been hearing about.

One of my machines finally gave up last night. It was an old machine I was using to run the Xen virtual machines for everything else on. The problem was that the VMs were getting slightly corrupt. I suspect the problem was bad RAM but it might have been something else.

Last night the VM that ran spamd, DNS and email died I couldn’t get it to work again. Things were just too corrupt. So I’ve decided to do what I was half intending a while back which was to combine the media and Virtual box into one. I was putting it off cause I was hoping to buy a new machine at some point would would include a CPU with Hardware Virtual Machine support so I had the optioning of switching to KVM at some point in future.

However events stopped that so I’ve had to switch things on the existing box. Steps so far have been:

1. Buy 1 Gig of RAM ( up from 256MB)
2. Install RAM and test
3. Upgrade Ubuntu from dapper to edgy
4. Upgrade Ubuntu from edgy to feisty
5. Upgrade Ubuntu from feisty to gutsy
6. Install Xen Server
7. Make sure existing filer serving, backups etc work
8. Create new default Xen image
9. Recreate email/spam/dns server image
10. Create DHCP and Wiki server (images to be decided)
11. Go though and check backups
12. Get EEE working on LAN and start configuring.
13. Get remote to home access working

Right at this instant steps 1-3 are done and the feisty upgrade is running. I don’t think I’ll get much further tonight but hopefully I can polish off the rest over the next few days. END

Just thought I’d post a quick pointer to BarCamp Auckland 07 which is happening on December 15th at Botany Downs Secondary College.

Have a quick look at the website for more details and to signup. They even have some sponsors already (Microsoft). In case you arn’t aware Barcamp is a type of unconference, see barcamp.org to learn more.

I got my new Asus Eee PC today. I’m pretty happy since I only ordered it from Dick Smith’s online store on Sunday. It is even smaller than I expected.

So far all I have done is unpacked it and spent ten minutes testing. Main points:

• The power plug is quite large but the cord is very long.
• Camera has to be enabled in BIOs since it is off by default
• Works okay once activated though
• I plugged in a USB Flash drive and played some music and a TV episode no problem.
• Shutdown and startup are pretty quick.

Some Photos:

I was called up for jury duty this week. I had sent a letter asking to be excused but no luck getting off.

I’ve been called up twice before, the first time I was on a jury while the second time I got challenged and didn’t have to serve.

This time around it was the Auckland district court so it’s fairly busy with around half a dozen jury trials running at once. However the whole system is pretty slow so I took a book (as advised) and managed to get through quite a few pages while waiting around.

Eventually I was picked along with about 25 others (there were two other trials starting that day) to go into court, our names were called out on at a time and people walked forward to take their seat unless one of the lawyers challenged them. I got challenged so got to go home (well work really) Monday and another go on Tuesday.

Tuesday we had another twenty-something people go into the court. However it turned out this was the same trial as Monday. Apparently a witness had dropped out so they had to restart with a few changes dropped. Of course I got called up again but the lawyer recognised me and challenged me again (same with at least 1 other person). Sort of amusing I guess although the charges were fairly serious.

I get another go tomorrow (Thursday) so I still might end up on something.

The whole process feels very inefficient, lots of waiting around in rooms with lots of other people wondering what is happening next

Trying to do the post per week thing. I’ve been oncall (primary and secondary) for the last two weeks so not getting much done. Curry was at Raziv in the central city which was noisy and slow service but cheap.

Over this weekend I got a little addicted to Wesnoth so I didn’t get a lot done. Also had a splitting headache on Sunday so wasn’t exactly 100 percent when I was getting calls about an outage we were having.

Some interesting things coming up in the next couple of days. I’ll write later