The fans in my PC’s power supply and on its graphics card are acting up these last few days.

I’ve sent for a new PSU, a huge 650W one with a 120mm fan. So when that arrives I’ll probably take this one apart and see if I can replace the fan with a standard 120mm one I’ve got lying around and then maybe use it to rebuild my old fileserver into a desktop machine or something. I’ve got a couple of 80Gb IDE drives doing nothing, and a nicer AGP card than it used to have, I’ll have to put it in the old full tower case though, as that’s the only case I’ve got spare.

I was a bit worried that I wouldn’t be able to use my Epson Stylus Photo RX425 printer with a 64-Bit Ubuntu 8.04 install, as Avasys/Epkowa haven’t written a 64-Bit version of PIPS. So the alternative was to install a 32-Bit Ubuntu or a distro like Fedora that includes both 32 and 64-Bit libraries in its 64-Bit installation.

Anyway, I think I’ve gotten around it with help from this forum post. I can’t really test it actually prints as I’m doing it in a Virtual Machine until I build my fileserver next week sometime, but it did at least start the ekpd daemon, ekpstm ink monitor and CUPS registered the printer.

I’ve been playing around with dm-crypt and LUKS.

I’ve come up with a 10-step process to encrypt a couple of hard disks (not the boot drive) and use a USB key plugged in at boot time to unlock them – boot without the USB key in, and you boot fine, but the drives aren’t mounted or readable.

Initially I was going to try some UDEV rules to unlock+mount the drives whenever a USB key was plugged in, but in true UDEV style, it didn’t work – we got an endless loop of cryptsetup processes, also there’s a method for reading the keyfile from the USB drive from Grub, but that didn’t seem to work either, so I’m sticking with my method below.

I’ve been programming Expect scripts today, to login to Juniper routers and parse their config using Nessus. Similar to what I attempted with Cisco switches a while back, but I never really got into it then. I’ve got a working implementation now that can login to my Olive VM using just the regular expect program and a NASL script, no custom TCL or Perl or even the policy compliance plugin required.

Dad came over the other day and helped me run some CAT6 cable from my computer room to my lounge so I can stream video’s etc at gigabit speed over NFS from the fileserver upstairs to the Mac Mini which is now hanging off the LCD TV using my new HDMI-to-DVI cable.

MacOSX at 1920×1080 on a 37″ screen is incredible! I’m awaiting my wireless keyboard/trackerball so I can use it to surf downstairs as well as running Plex (Xbox Media Center ported to the X86 Mac) with the Mac’s remote control. I’ve watched my first 720p and 1080p movies, and you can actually see the difference from a regular 480p XviD or DVD – not just the resolution, but the detail like hair and leather textures and lack of compression artefacts, plus you get DTS 5.1 sound and so on that the Xbox1 simply can’t cope with.