I’ve just installed my Corsair H50-1 watercooler on my Core i5 750 box and its amazing – I’ve idled as low as 14c at stock speeds, I’m now overclocked to 3.2GHz (using this tutorial on Youtube) and am getting ~20c idle and haven’t got above 41c under load yet – that’s running four instances of the mprime torture test.
I also installed the new RHEL6 beta1 under VirtualBox. Its supposed to be based on Fedora 12/13, so is nothing new really, still a big step up from 5u4.
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I’ve been playing with the commercial PGP Desktop Pro today. Its funny, how for 185ukp its frontend really isn’t as nice as the free Seahorse and the PGP 10 backend isn’t [reportedly] as secure as the opensource GnuPG 2.
They both comply to the OpenPGP standard so I found I could use public/private keys generated on one with the other; and create encrypted/signed files using one tool and decrypt and verify on the other.
I’ve also been doing a lot more work with Nessus scripting lately – writing a lot of NASL plugins and also a parser to convert from the new Nessus 4.2 XML format to an Excel spreadsheet.
The other day I tried to get MS Office 2007 installed under WINE. Well it didn’t go well, eventually I did it (by removing the SP2 files from the installer) but the installed applications wouldn’t start. So I decided to try those Crossover Pro 8 licenses I won. Well all I can say is I’m glad I got them for free not seventy bucks, as even though they did install and run Word 2007 without modification like WINE, the installer screwed up my MIME associations. Plus the de-installer didn’t clean up after itself.
I don’t know how CodeWeavers are making money out of Crossover when the few advantages it has over WINE (GUI config etc.) actually break things that WINE wouldn’t. So I think I’ll stick to unzipping .docx files and opening them in OpenOffice.
I had a lovely Christmas, spent most of the time over at M&D’s eating and drinking too much! I think they’re coming over for New Year’s Eve. We all went out for Chinese on Xmas Eve and I went over to PP’s afterwards.
I got lots of presents including a Senseo coffee machine which I have in my computer room as well as an electric toothbrush, clock radios, toiletries and booze.
I just watched Dorian Gray, which is right up there with Watchmen as the worst comicbook movie ever.
As I’d like to upgrade my PC to Fedora 12, but still need some F10-only applications (NessusClient 4.0.2 for example) I decided to clone it into a Virtual Machine.
I made a basic Fedora 10 64-Bit install under VirtualBox, then rsync’ed the filesystem using variations on the below commands (as root) making sure not to copy over /proc, /sys, /dev, /tmp and so on:
rsync -ap --delete --numeric-ids /sbin/ 192.168.0.133:/sbin/ rsync -ap --delete --numeric-ids /var/ 192.168.0.133:/var/ rsync -ap --delete --numeric-ids /home/ 192.168.0.133:/home/ rsync -ap --delete --numeric-ids /bin/ 192.168.0.133:/bin/ rsync -ap --delete --numeric-ids /lib/ 192.168.0.133:/lib/ ....
I modified grub/fstab (screwed up a bit there and had to use a RHEL rescue CD) and ran mkinitrd to remove the encryption, LVM and Vista partition; then replaced the Nvidia drivers with VirtualBox ones, disabled Compiz/screensaver etc. It now works very well, I’ve shrunk the memory down to 1Gb and only 2 cores and the disk only uses about 17Gb. It quite amazing what you can do using rsync on a live system, who needs cloning programs like Acronis/Ghost?
Its the ultimate backup as not only can I simply re-run the rsync commands to keep it up-to-date, but I have a completely running system not just my data, and can move it to any machine I like. I could probably even migrate it back to a physical machine if I needed too.
I’ve recently been writing some auditing scripts for IOS switches, so have been trying to test it on as many devices as I can, well that’s a lot of work setting up routing etc; so I’ve installed Dnyamips and Dynagen, the Cisco emulators.
They’re not as polished as QEMU for example, in that there’s a bit of a naff command you have to run as root to start a daemon which isn’t particularly stable, the CPU usage goes through the roof until you manually tweak it and IP doesn’t work on localhost unless you set up a tap interface. They do the job though – I’m currently emulating a 3745 and 7206.
I’ve also upgraded the blog to WordPress 2.9, which went OK, except some moron has left a load of Windows ^M characters throughout the UNIX download.
As its a bit of a slow day today and two of my three 1Tb hard disks are dying, I’m currently backing up the stuff that’s not important enough to make it into my daily rsync regimen to a stack of 80-160Gb drives (totalling about 500Gb) I have lying around in USB and eSATA enclosures.
Just noticed that as of version 3.0.8, VirtualBox has a Fedora YUM repository, so no more downloading the RPM’s and checking the website for updates. Nothin much new in this version, although I compiled the OSE version the other day and there were a few more features, mainly GUI modifications to the floppy/hard disk/ethernet areas, but also 2D acceleration; that haven’t made it into 3.0.8