rm-rf.ca

Running basically the same thing since this weekend and loving it, it's also been pretty rock solid. In my opinion (DISCLAIMER: don't listen to me) the preview release is a great time to upgrade if you're anxious and a little bit savy. Release notes here, and you can get it here.

I couldn't stick with this setup for long but I had to take a photo before I scaled it back. The third display on the right was kinda hard on the neck, and two systems plus three LCDs generates a whole lot of heat in a very small office and summer is nearly here. (we hit 29 C here which is a good two if not three months ahead of schedule for Nova Scotia) I've now scaled back to just the two displays on the left hooked up to my desktop in a dual head configuration, and moved the workstation visible down to the basement.

While my initial attempt to get rolling with the Fedora 11 Beta was pretty rocky, one of the bugzilla's regarding Anaconda's inability to recognize my existing install for an upgrade got duped on another bug about an intermittent udev timeout. Indeed if at first Anaconda didn't realize it could upgrade my system, rebooting off the ISO corrected the problem, might take a few tries if you experience something similar.

New video card arrived today, an ATI Radeon HD 3650 with two DVI ports, but it's been quite a bit of trouble getting a fluid dual monitor setup working. I think most of the issues are related to my use of two different monitors, one a standard LCD capable of 1600x1200 and the other a widescreen LCD capable of 1680x1050.

Out of the box I think mirroring worked at a common resolution as is expected, but gnome-display-properties wouldn't do much for me without an xorg.conf in place so I had to generate one and then hack it up a bit. At some point this afternoon I had both displays in their native resolution, though on the "shorter" of the two the mouse would technically go off screen above or below (depending on how I had them arranged in gnome-display-properties), although the gnome panels displayed in the correct location. (which wasn't bad)

Having some fun tinkering with firewall rules today. I've been lazy and using Firestarter for a few years but it has a couple annoyances I didn't know how to work around and got to writing out my own iptables rules once again. I ended up with the relatively simple script below which does the following:

• Enable NAT for the local network.
• Forward some port traffic straight to internal systems.
• Drop a few bizarre and most likely malicious spoofed source addresses and bad packet flags coming in on the external interface.
• Accept some services locally. (just ssh for now)
• Log and drop everything that isn't explicitly accepted. (traffic logged to /var/log/messages for convenient tail -f'ing)

Anyone know of a reason why a setup like this *wouldn't* work: three physical network interfaces, bridges created for all three but two reserved exclusively for a guest operating system, the host won't even use them. Run cable modem into one, connect the other to uplink on a wireless router, run a cable from there back into the third interface for the host operating system.

Seems to me is should be doable but before I go break the bank on a $15 USB ethernet adapter (only have room for one more NIC on the motherboard) I thought I'd check. :) I guess the big question is around the bridged interfaces, must they have an IP assigned on the host? Hrm.

I've been hearing rumblings of awesomeness about Amazon S3 as a backup service from a couple friends lately. My current system could stand some improvement and I'd love something incremental and easier to do regularly, and with S3 being so highly recommended at only 15c a gig it looks like an ideal storage mechanism.

The next step is locating a tool to encrypt the data and do the actual uploads, I hear great things about Jungledisk but I'm not thrilled about a non-open source solution. The search led me to duplicity, a tool quite similar to rsync that does encrypted incremental backups to many different backends including S3.

export AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=X
export AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=Y

Repost of a blog entry from a few months back, I either accidentally deleted this or Wordpress ate it.

Color me impressed. I’ve developed a healthy skepticism of the Linux on laptops experience over the past few years, something always seems to be wrong, usually flaky suspend or wireless. I’ve had my Aspire One for about a month now and, looking for the most stable and consistent (but still recent) distro experience, I gave Ubuntu 8.10 a shot first. Today I switched it over to the Fedora 10 preview release, which went something like this: