Everything is a Freaking DNS problem

So unless people specifically ask me, no more openMosix talks for a while ..:)

I've got some other topics I'm preparing articles for these days ... Virtualisation, Large Scale Deployments, High Availability, and off course the biggest problem of them all, the fscking dns problem :)

I`m leaving tonight direction UKUUG Linux Technical Conference , planning on arriving there thursday.
Uff course the trip won't take that long but I`m taking a couple of days off in the UK as well, in order to catch up on some reading and do some siteseeing :)

Freax just dumped his brain in a nice article Informatics Is Like Music , worth reading
and thinking about.

After Orkut, LinkedIn, E-cademy , OpenBC and probably some others I forgot O'Reilly is going to launch O'Reilly Connection real soon now.

I`m not sure what to think yet.. I`m signing up and we'll see what happens :)

Upon reading Harald Welte's experiences at LSM , I`m actually glad I cancelled my trip and didn't prepare any talks that would have postphoned my other work.

As my advise to Harald , ask Rusty to invite you to Linux.conf.au 2006 New Zealand , the only risk is that you never want to speak at another conference again :)

and the resurrection of a zillion others.

In his article The Death of A Firewall Stuart Berman claims that he is tearing down all his corporate firewalls yet raising the security to his application servers by e.g placing them in their own DMZ's and using a multitier security model for them.

Isn't this how we should have been treating our internal network by default ? (At least we do). Face it .. your internal network is as insecure as the rest of the planet, contractors, visitors, disgruntled employees etc.. all of them are a potential risk for your data. You should protect it as if you were protecting it to an external party. So there's nothing new there.

However he claims that the hardware costs aren't rising becasue he adds the extra layer of security on virtual machines on the same physical machine as his application.
Do we really trust Traditional Virtualisation tools not to give any access to either the Host os or another Virtual Machine, haven't we learned from things such as hughe E1000K security issues and some z-Series memory isolation issues. I don't trust them (Yet). I`m having good hopes for XenSE however :)

Just ran into the Linux Drivers for Soundgraph Imon page , google really hid it well this time.
Got a working module now

The lsusb output shows

root@mythtv-fc3 misc# lsusb 
Bus 002 Device 002: ID 15c2:ffdc

Upon modprobing lirc_imon we get

 lirc_dev: IR Remote Control driver registered, at major 61
/usr/src/lirc-0.7.1/drivers/lirc_imon/lirc_imon.c: Driver for Soundgraph iMON MultiMedian IR/VFD, v0.3
/usr/src/lirc-0.7.1/drivers/lirc_imon/lirc_imon.c: Venky Raju <dev@venky.ws>
/usr/src/lirc-0.7.1/drivers/lirc_imon/lirc_imon.c: imon_probe: found IMON devicelirc_dev: lirc_register_plugin: sample_rate: 0
/usr/src/lirc-0.7.1/drivers/lirc_imon/lirc_imon.c: imon_probe: Registered iMON plugin (minor:0)
/usr/src/lirc-0.7.1/drivers/lirc_imon/lirc_imon.c: imon_probe: iMON device on usb<2:2> initialized
usbcore: registered new driver lirc_imon

And irw gives us the following output

root@mythtv-fc3 misc# irw
0000000029b715b7 00 AppLauncher iMON-PAD
00000000288195b7 00 AppExit iMON-PAD
00000000298115b7 00 Record iMON-PAD
0000000028a195b7 00 Enter iMON-PAD
0000000028b715b7 00 MouseMenu iMON-PAD
000000002b8195b7 00 WindowsKey iMON-PAD
00000000299115b7 00 MouseKeyboard iMON-PAD
0000000028a395b7 00 Vol+ iMON-PAD
0000000028a595b7 00 Vol- iMON-PAD
00000000289395b7 00 Ch+ iMON-PAD
00000000288795b7 00 Ch- iMON-PAD
000000002b8395b7 00 Timer iMON-PAD
000000002b9595b7 00 Mute iMON-PAD
0000000028b595b7 00 1 iMON-PAD
000000002bb195b7 00 2 iMON-PAD
0000000028b195b7 00 3 iMON-PAD
000000002a8595b7 00 4 iMON-PAD
00000000299595b7 00 5 iMON-PAD
000000002aa595b7 00 6 iMON-PAD
000000002b9395b7 00 7 iMON-PAD
000000002a8515b7 00 8 iMON-PAD
000000002aa115b7 00 9 iMON-PAD
0000000028b515b7 00 ShiftTab iMON-PAD
000000002ba595b7 00 0 iMON-PAD
0000000029a115b7 00 Tab iMON-PAD

As said before.. to be continued :)

And I got to see some results from the remote :

I`ve just cancelled my hotel reservations for LSM/RMLL, things are just to busy these days.
I initially even planned on giving a talk at LSM but with LinuxTag just finished and way to much work to be done at the office I`m gonna skip LSM.

It's too bad since I was looking forward on meeting Moshe again.

On the same subject my hotel for the UKUUG conference where I`ll be giving yet another openMosix talk has been booked. I still have to book the train trip trough the Eurotunnel but I submitted my paper already so if everything goes well I`ll be in Swansea early August.

When first starting to look at what hardware I wanted for a HTPC machine, I was looking at a SilverStone LC04 casing.
It seemed that this kind of case is really realy difficult to find in Belgium :(
So I finaly oppted to go for a iUNEED case with the following config:

1 x UNeed HV5 - HTPC Case - Black 
1 x Silent Micro ATX PSU 
1 x AMD Athlon 64 2800+ (1.8 GHz) - socket 754 - 512K L2 64Bit
1 x PC3200 DDR 512 MB - 184pins - PC400 - CAS3 SimpleTech 
1 x MSI K8N Neo3 FSR / Socket 754 / nVidia nForce 4 / ATX motherboard 
1 x Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 200GB S-ATA 8MB 9ms 7200RPM 
1 x NEC ND-3520/3540 Dual Layer - Black DVDRW-6,DVDRW+8,DVDR-16X,DVDR-16X,DVD12,CDRW24,CDR48   
1 x Creative Labs Audigy 2 ZS PCI 
1 x MSI nVidia GeForce NX6200TC-TD64E - 64MB PCI-Express 
1 x Hauppauge PVR500

After a long wait and realising that the Uneed cases had even bigger problems being delivered my supplier suggested to go with even another SilverStone case.
As a 6 weeks wait was already long enough I decided to take their offer and go for a LC10B.

Upon arrival I was really disappointed. This case is about double the size of the case I initally wanted
and eventhough I ordered a slient power supply the case itselve has 3 hughe fans :(

I`m taking my first steps in HTPC land now and I`ll be reporting my experiences here :)

First dissapointement of the project was the fact that the remote control that came supplied with the case currently has no Linux support.
So I`ll have to go shopping again for a Remote Control that works. I am already communicating with the people that produced the Remote and they currently have no plans to release Linux software for it but they plan on giving the specs to "the linux developer". I`m wondering wether they mean Linus or Greg KH , or just any Linux Developer that ask them.

I'm hoping on more feedback on this subject soon.

To be continued ..

I placed the documentation on how I upgraded my iMac from a Broken 8.6 install with no CD-Rom to a bleeding edge Ubuntu machine online here