Category Archives: 42

DNA.

Getting rid of the green cable

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Got tired of the green cable that ran from the back of the router downstairs, up over the back of a hanging picture, wrapped around a light fixture, then around a banister, then draped across the floor of the landing upstairs.

Went looking for some Powerline carrier modules, and settled on the Belkin 200 Mbps model (though I paid less than that link).  The pair arrived today, and took all of 2 minutes to hook up.  No hiccups at all, no software required (there is software, but I can’t think what it might do that would be useful to me).

Now all I need is a 2-way or 3-way power block for downstairs so I can remove the long extension cable, and then the additional phone cabling and it’ll look a lot neater.

Vacation 2008: Outbound, Barbados and St. Vincent

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Over Christmas, I went back home to Barbados, with my parents, for a two week vacation.  It was an excellent vacation (it felt much longer than two weeks by the end), but it was also a very interesting vacation that included late plane flights, a catamaran, 35 knot winds, turtles and 6 GB of photos.

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Changing hosting providers

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I’ve been hosting this site on a Xen host in the UK for the past year – it was cheaper than running the server in-house, and the uplink bandwidth is certainly more than the 1 Mbit/s that my home ADSL is capable of.  However, in the past 6 months or so, I’ve noticed a distinct degredation of service, evidenced by the fact that I’ve raised support tickets on

  • June 21st
  • June 29th
  • September 8th
  • September 9th
  • September 18th
  • September 19th
  • October 17th
  • October 27th
  • October 29th

Pretty much every one of those tickets has been ‘My Xen instance is unreachable’.  At least two of them are from disk issues on the underlying server, several have been file-system write errors in the Xen instance.

On the other hand, another Xen instance I take care of lives on a US Xen hosting facility.  It’s been running since May, and I’ve not had to raise a single ticket about it.

So, goodbye CheapVPS, hello Slicehost (and here’s hoping the Rackspace buyout doesn’t affect them negatively).

There were only a few hiccups with the migration too – primarily with maildrop.  Forgot to install the courier-authlib-devel package before compiling maildrop, so it insisted on reading /etc/passwd instead of the database that everything else refers to for e-mail.

New tricks: Exchange ‘Send As’

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For the longest time, my understanding was that Exchange only allowed ‘send on behalf of’ through the delegation interface (and thus stamped in the message headers).  Turns out that if an admin with sufficient rights accesses the Security of another account, they can add the ‘Send As’ option to a listed object (ie, account).  Learn something new every day.