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. On the way there today we decided to take a shortcut and I ended up getting stuck in a waterlogged ditch, luckily right next to a tractor which pulled us out. I’ll never moan about slow tractors on the road again!

M&D got a new DivX player, its got a USB port so I’ve ordered a couple of 8Gb thumbdrives to try it out with. Its also got a SD card slot, so should be interesting to see if it will play video’s from Mum’s digital camera (as well as obviously the photo’s).

I switched my fileserver to NFSv4, which seems to have improved performance and stability as I’m not getting the “server not responding” errors and Nautilus dying as I was with v3. Its a very different setup though – it has the concept of a root share, and then individual shares beneath it.

Strangely enough MacOSX 10.5 is not supposed to have an NFSv4 client and NFSv4 is not supposed to be backwards compatible, however I can still mount the root share albeit not the individual shares beneath it.

I’m still getting strange speeds though – like NFSv3 took 8mins to transfer 2.7Gb, NFSv4 took 3m30s, NFSv3 on the Mac took 1m30s, SCP took 3m30s and FTP took just 70secs!

I also tried out NIC bonding on my Fedora7 box, you basically setup two GigE cards to round-robin between themselves, appearing as one IP address externally (bit like IPMP on Solaris). It increased my bandwidth from 580-690Mbit/sec to 910-940Mbit/sec – or 112MBytes/sec, and also can cope with you unplugging one of the ethernet cables. I might set it up on my fileserver with a second PCI card.

I tried out Oracle Unbreakable Linux 5.3, which is a shameless ripoff of RHEL 5u3, but not in the free vein of CentOS, it still requires commercial support (a RHN/up2date ripoff) instead of free updates via YUM, and it has a few Oracle-specific patches which either haven’t been accepted upstream or are closed source.