lesser-evil

I’ve been playing with Dynagen this week to build a copy of part of our network, so I can test some config changes safely. One of the things is to figure out if we have enough resources to run full BGP views on one of the routers, so I’ve been trying to figure out a nice way to take MTR RIB dumps from routeviews.org, and inject them into my emulated network.

So far I have a perl script that uses Net::BGP to act as a BGP peer, and another bit of perl to read the MTR-format dumps. You can then use Loopback interfaces in Windows to make an interface on one of the routers appear as a ‘real’ interface on the host PC. Finally, I should be able to get the perl BGP speaker to talk to the virtual Cisco, and pass in my RIB.

At the moment, something funny is happening, and the peer is never established. I don’t know yet if it’s perl on Windows, the loopback interface or the emulation though. Net::BGP will talk to a real router, because I do that already for something else, but on a BSD system. TCPView says that perl isn’t listening on any port, and the router is complaining about connections being refused, but I can’t see why. Ping works, and I can also access the web interface on the router, so I know it’s roughly right.

I’ll be fiddling with this some more on Monday, because it seems like a useful thing to me.

It’s been a while, but there’s a site back here again!

I wanted something other than the Weathermap site to post somewhat techy things, and things that aren’t really LJ stuff. Mostly it’ll be either network stuff or sysadmin stuff, I expect.

Although I originally deliberately kept the two seperate, I can’t honestly see why now, so here’s the link for my LiveJournal. Generally, that tends to be more whiny. lesser-evil ends up being more readable (no, really, that was the idea). Anyway, the two worlds collide, should you wish to read them. I update my LJ most days, unlike this thing.

Got back from Reading Festival (much fun). Moving house next month whether I like it or not (not much fun). That is all.

Grr. and this is something I’ve always wanted for Windows. I have a couple of PCs with multiple sound channels, and I’d love it if I could stop the Windows BONG from coming out of the same sound output that I’m trying to record for something else.
As you can probably tell, I’m working my way through a list of the most innovative OS X software

I found a neat toy last night for my Mac. Hydra (although they’ve actually just stopped calling it that) is a collaborative editor. It does all the usual nice editor things, like syntax-highlighting, document navigation and so on, but it also has a rather unique feature: more than one person can edit the same document at the same time. You can share the document, and have other users edit along with you, with your changes being highlighted seperately. It does it all without a server, and using standard things too (standard on OS X 10.2 at least).

I really ought just decide on one or the other between this and LJ, you know…

New things in the last few weeks: I am looking for somewhere to live (maybe buy). I have joined the dark side of the Macintosh (with a 12″ PowerBook).

Oh, more Glastonbury pix, for those who are interested. Going to Reading Festival on the bank holiday weekend too (although I haven’t actually had any confirmation of that yet).

Ben got his Glastonbury pics back today, so I put them up here.
I think this one sums up the weekend for me - strangeness, huge grins and fire. Oh, and music.

The last Tales Of The City book is on my bedside table now. Realistically, I have enough reading material to last until I’m 50, but that’s not how it works for me. The immediate top of the pile is:

Coraline - Neil Gaiman
Blue World - Jack Vance
The 2nd and 3rd series of unfortunate events - Lemonny Snicket
Roadside Picnic (2nd go) - Boris & Arkady Strugatsky
Tourist Season - Carl Hiassen

I have a hankering to try Robert Rankin too. After that, it’ll be grabbing things at random off the shelf - I buy way more than I read. One of my failings is not being able to buy just one thing in either record or book shops - this is partly why I avoid going shopping too often, since it gets expensive!

I wish there was an imdb/allmusic.com for books. More freeform than Amazon, although I guess the list-o-matic bit of amazon does cover this ground a little.

One long hot bath, and two books finished. Not, I hasten to add, from end to end - it wasn’t that long a bath. I have a terrible habit of reading several books in parallel. This evening saw the end of the fourth Tales Of The City book, Babycakes, and also The Leaky Establishment, by David Langford.

A conversation on IRC about a month ago regarding the internationally-agreed slant-eyed temptress scale prompted me to get myself a copy of Leaky - a book I haven’t read in around 14 years, but which made quite an impression on me. Very good parody of the workings of the civil service, and of scientific research establishments. Blimey, 14 years.

I don’t think I’ve mentioned them here, but the series of Tales Of The City books, to which Babycakes belongs, is a fine diversion. I read the first three in the space of a week while in a sort of low spell a few weeks ago. The crazy freedom of San Francisco in the 70s that fills the first couple of books has been replaced with a sort of hangover in the 80s, but the characters are all still strong, and the story trots along nicely. The good news is that there are still two more to go too.

After becoming used to Semagic for updating my LJ, I thought I’d try Zempt, which seems to be roughly the same thing for Movable Type (the software which drives lesser-evil). If that’s all working, and if the MT upgrade I did at the same time didn’t scramble the thing, then It’s All Good, and you can see these exciting words.

This weekend has been an organising and catching up weekend. Something that’s been bothering me a lot lately is that I never get things finished. I suppose it’s really an ego thing - nothing I do leaves a trace, anywhere (*). Anyway, with that in mind I’ve been trying to finish off a few little projects. I have a couple of possible-product-shaped things in the works, that would be really cool to finish too, but I thought I’d start small. So far, I’ve finally finished the MP3ing of my CD collection, and made decent headway with a data-conversion tool I’m writing for a friend. I got a little moping time in, but only a little, and also a bit of guitar time, having been inspired to pick it up again by several things in the last few weeks. I think I’m becoming a live music addict.

* Of course, what I really want is a several mile high statue of me that breathes fire, but that’ll have to wait.

I’m not dead or anything. Just got back from an amazing long weekend at the Glastonbury Festival. Prior to that was a few weeks of gloom, so no posts. I’m feelin gin the mood for doing things now though

A sad story, swiped from jwz’s LJ (which is as entertaining as his ‘gruntle’ stories).

Balls. This page is the third hit for freebsd/nvidia/multihead in google. That doesn’t bode well at all.

I upgraded to XFree86 4.3.0 this morning, and the kernel module still won’t load for the other screens. They sit there with just the BIOS copyright message showing. As an added bonus, now I’ve installed the NVidia drivers, I can’t even get software OpenGL, because it replaced the Mesa GL library with it’s own one, which I have to comment out to get all my screens up. Excellent.

This sounds like the fix for my multi-head issue. The way you initialise the 2nd and subsequent heads of the system is a bit odd, and seems to vary from system to system. The closest I got (BIOS copyright message), was using this Int10 thing, which is quite possibly broken currently in the release code. I’ll have a little play when I get in tomorrow. Multi-head GL! Weee.

At work I run multi-head X on FreeBSD, with multiple Nvidia cards - an AGP GF2MX, TNT2 PCI and TNT Vanta PCI. After playing with xscreensaver this morning, I decided I wanted to get accelerated GL going - I’ve been using the nv drivers until now.

This seems to be a bit of a challenge. This is the first release of Nvidia’s drivers on FreeBSD, but I couldn’t find anything about doing this with Linux, either. I get as far as one very nice, silky-fast GL screen, and two screens hung on the VGA BIOS. I don’t want xinerama particularly, because that causes other strange problems, and not too much benefit. Time for some more playing I suppose, although it seems to be a pretty exotic setup.

I just noticed that I have been updating l-e so irregularly that it was down to 4 posts on the front page. I’ve been doing my therapeutic ranting on LiveJournal lately, which is part of it, but I’ll try and put some effort in here too.

IMAP final score: I just bought Mulberry - it’s really nice.

I feel I should make it a matter of public record that MFC really annoys me. I am trying to build a couple of apps that I thought were relatively straightforward in this day and age, and at every stage I seem to hit some new MFC wrinkle that make it difficult or a rewriting job to do what I want. Unfortunately, MFC does save me a lot of time with grunt-work.

I got the first round of mods for my Shuttle box yesterday - new fans for the PSU and heatpipe, and new fan guards. I’ve fitted the big fan, with OK results. I think I’ll need to do both, and do a little bit of hacksawing before the benefits are really felt (supposedly a lot of the noise is air forcing it’s way through the punched-out fan grill). I’m sure that the video card will seem noisy then. The only way to make these things truly quiet is to avoid the fans altogether, which isn’t really practical with an Athlon XP2700.