Cricalix.Net

Networking gear can be irritating some days.  Case in point, the Catalyst 5500 at work, with its WS-5410 line card and WS-G5484 GBICs.

Everything on Cisco’s site says that these devices work together (and they do), and that the G5484 GBICs are 62.5/50 micron adapters designed to talk to multi-mode fibre.

Yet the only cable that works (ie, that makes the CatOS say the port is connected) is a 9 micron core single-mode fibre.

It. Should. Not. Work.

But. It. Does.

Does. Not. Compute.

I even tried the cabling and GBICs in another switch.  Same result.

Argh.

This weekend has been an interesting contrast for me so far.  Saturday was filled with activity - up at 6 am, on the road by 7:30, in Newcastle by 9:30 (motorway accident delayed me), worked on the garden to somewhere around 1 pm with my parents’ help, cooled off, and then up the road sometime before 2 pm to find the location for Jack’s wedding reception.  Managed to miss two turnings in a row, but managed to get there about 2:30 for a 3 pm start.  Six hours of chatting to folks from my previous job, taking some photos, eating, and generally having a pleasant time, then a drive back down the motorways (passing a 5 fire-engine accident on the Newcastle junction) to get back to my bed for about 10:30 pm.  Jamming to Alison Hinds (plays music if you have Flash enabled) on Westwood’s show for the last 15 miiles or so, and before I zonked out.

Sunday, on the other hand, has been a nice lazy day.  I think I finally had ‘breakfast’ at 1 pm.  In fact, I still have a blueberry muffin to eat.  Mowed the lawn, laid in the sun and snoozed like a cat, and generally took it easy.  Monday is a Bank Holiday, but I’ll probably spend it working on stuff for UberCon, and perhaps go find the 21 locks at Hatton.

I flattened my laptop on Sunday gone, and laid down a Kubuntu Feisty Fawn installation.  It’s been a while since Flyingfish (the name of the laptop) was an exclusively Linux box, and I have many memories of quirks and problems.  However, Linux has come a long way since I last had it installed on the laptop.  Things that surprised or pleased me:

• K ->  Log Out -> Suspend works, as does resuming from suspend
• The media buttons of my Inspiron 8200 just work
• Amarok’s MusicBrainz integration
• Right-click n audio file, click preview, and it plays in an embedded player

It should be borne in mind that I use Linux daily, but in a VMware session that has no audio, need to suspend or media buttons; or I’m working with RedHat/CentOS servers, which only have a command line.

Applications like Konversation and Kopete are certainly more mature now - I remember when I used to use the bleeding edge of Kopete to get webcam support; it’s now a mainstream feature.

Life is good in the Linux desktop land (for me at least).

In a set of round-up links, James McGovern wonders if I’m aware of the fact that CIFS is considered legacy for interacting with Microsoft domains. I wasn’t, but I am now :) Alfresco, luckily, supports more than just CIFS for enterprise authentication, and way more than CIFS for presenting the data to users - and I had already started going down the path of LDAP or Kerberos based authentication for users. We’re also not exposing the CIFS service ability of Alfresco to our users either for now - it’s webdav and web browser for the forseeable future.

With the arrival of the internal deployment VM server at work, I’ve started the process of narrowing down exactly how I’m going to be providing server rebuild and management abilities. Prime candidates right now are the Kickstart capability of RedHat Enterprise (and any derived distributions such as CentOS) for automated deployment of servers, and Reductive Lab’s Puppet for management. I’m well aware that there are other automated management tools that can do what Puppet does, but as one article I read said - using any of them is better than using none of them. So I’m using Puppet.

For those who don’t know, Puppet is a Ruby tool that has two halves - puppetmaster on the central management server, and puppetd on the remote clients. All authentication is done with centrally signed SSL certificates, and all the communications appear to be encrypted with those certificates.

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I’ve been aware of Facebook for a while now - the same way I’m aware of MySpace, untamed killer bunnies and salad; I know they exist, but usually want nothing to do with them (especially untamed killer bunnies, I can’t rule the world with untamed killer bunnies).  This changed yesterday when Kristie sent me a Facebook invitation.  I don’t know when she sent it, but I’m guessing it was in the past few days, as the notification didn’t pop up at work.  So I went exploring.

Nifty place.  Finding lots of faces in the Barbados network that I recognise, mostly from Queen’s, but a few from BCC, and a few from growing up.  Not quite sure what I’ll do from here on out with Facebook, but I’m sure I’ll find a use.  For now, it’s time to find breakfast, finish my morning browsing, and laze around until it’s time to walk to work.