I’m thinking of moving my fileserver from CentOS 5.2 to something more up-to-date. Partially due to 5.3 being pretty late, but also because the NIC bonding seems to be flaky due to the old kernel I guess. The main requirements that have to be met by a replacement distro are: Must be able to run PIPS for my Epson Stylus Photo RX425; Must be able to run iscan for above scanner, which also requires a graphical display (Xorg); Must be able to run NFSv4; Must be able to do NIC bonding; Must be able to mount JFS drives; Must be supported for free for longer than a year; Must be reasonably up-to-date, i.

After my good experience with NIC bonding on Fedora7 I thought I’d implement it on my CentOS 5.2 fileserver. Big mistake. On top of the built-in 100BaseT NIC, I installed a second gigabit NIC, which was still an r8169 same as the other one, but a different brand card. That of course caused random switching around of the order of the network cards, so bond0 wouldn’t come up. As you can’t put the MAC address in the config file when using bonding, and my motherboard is modern so auto-assigns IRQ’s, I ended up having to blacklist the forcedeth module to prevent the built-in NIC coming up, leaving just the two gigabit cards.

I tried out Debian 5.0 “Lenny” today, quite impressed that VirtualBox guest additions worked flawlessly once gcc/make/kernel-headers were installed. Its funny though, only Debian would make a new release where most of the software is already a year out-of-date! I also tried OpenSolaris 2008.11, which I guess is what will become Solaris 11 – not as Linuxesque as I thought it would be, although we do have bash as root’s shell, and a proper package manager, not just useless old pkgadd.

Been a while since my last post. Today I tried out my new mountain bike. I cycled to M&D’s and back, it wasn’t too bad despite the hills, only took 10mins. I do seem to be suffering now though – inhaling all the cold air has screwed with my lungs it seems. Dad and I have been collecting free firewood from a neighbour, which is nice (although very hard work lugging around) but now we’re itching a bit, so hopefully don’t have poison oak or something.

No, nothing to do with Up Pompeii. Internet forums, I’m just about done with them. You seem to get a small number of categories that the people who frequent them fit into. It could just be life, not forums – as you seem to come across these people at work too. Clueless. Like the PHB’s who are security penetration testing using Windows machines, oblivious to the broken IP stack thats probably causing them to miss hundreds of vulnerabilities.