Lights out, nobody hme

Two days ago I rebooted my Sun servers, and they didn't appear on the network. So today, I went to Maplin, got some bits, built a RS232 RJ45 to D9 cable, and spent a few hours getting the laptop to talk to the LOM port on the netras.

When I got them, they were configured with hme0 to a fixed IP, so I named hme1 as the nodename, and configured DHCP. Later, I got a new ADSL modem/router and so had to redo the routing. At the same time, I set the nodename and named both ports after it. The DNS lookup didn't work so well with the new router, so I added all the local names to /etc/hosts. Apparently, as hme0 now had the nodename, which was in /etc/hosts, it grabbed that ip, and so became the primary ethernet port, whilst hme1 (which had the cable connected to it as it was the one I intended to be the main one) was taken down. So they vanished from the network.

After I'd spent 3 hours driving into town, building cables, finding minicom, finding what the serial ports are called on the laptop, setting up minicom and working out how to use netra LOM console, I discovered that if I'd tried switching the cables to the other network port I could have logged it right away.

But then I'm learning how to use Solaris, so it's all good, as I now can use LOM if I really need to.


TME

But I didn't think I owned a graphing calculator

(Actually, OS X 10.4 comes with a 3D graphing calculator, that's quite pretty really.)


TME

WebDAV methods

Been playing with using XMLHttpRequest for accessing a WebDAV server. Fine on Firefox, but Safari won't send anything other than 'GET' or 'POST'. Checking the XUL reference, it seems that Firefox supporting the WebDAV methods is accidental. I guess I'll have to make a filter that converts GET <url>?method=PROPFIND and POST <url>?method=PROPPATCH ... to PROPFIND <url> and PROPPATCH <url> server side. Which is a bit naff.

The canvas API in Safari I stumbled across trying to find a definition of the XMLHttpRequest API (and don't you just love the random capitialisation of XMLHttpRequest?) looks cool, but that would mean targetting only Mac users at present, at least until Firefox 1.1 happens next month.



TME

Things I'll forget

I recently aquired a new 801.11g capable router, so have had to set up dsn etc. on my boxes; for some reason this is less automatic than before with regard to the local machines, so on the router I've had to set the mapping of MAC to IP4 and nodename, and on each box I've had to manually add the others to /etc/hosts.

On the OS X and Fedora machines that was enough, as the DCHP seems to set gateway and dns without further ado; on the Solaris 9 boxes to set the dns /etc/nsswitch.conf must contain the line 'hosts: files dns', and /etc/resolv.conf 'nameserver ' , and to set the gateway the command is 'route add default 192.168.0.1'.

Sometime in the late 90's I googled (probably altavistaed actually) a problem I was having with an apache config file, and found an answer I'd written a few years before and forgotten, as it's something you only set once when you install the thing that way, so I make a habit of putting things I'll forget on the web or usenet somewhere, like this is now.


TME

Too Wide

Yesterday, walking along the beach at St. Annes, wind, waves, scudding kite-surfers.

I want to video it, but it's too wide, and if you zoom in, it becomes about the person not the sea.


TME