It's been a while since the last diary updates, mostly due to the lack of network access at home. Boy, this sucks so badly...

And, of course, my main server in Vienna (pizzpot) and the rack-neighbor which the backup MX must go down at the same time while my network infrastructure here is nonexistent. And they don't come up automatically. Because both of them suffer from PSUs that don't do auto-on. (Stupid SparcStation4 PSU in my case)

So friends working at the colo provider move the boxes into a Better Place, reset the PSU and there we go; about 12hrs of downtime alltogether.

Some days later, 8 Jun, pizzpot has a kernel oops. I'm not fully awake yet and do a shutdown, without any force/bypass options. The result is that all services are terminated, but then another subsequent oops keeps the fucker from rebooting. Woooheee! And the serial console doesn't work, either, for whatever bad reasons. Again a few hours downtime later, my friends reset the box and everything is fine again.

Linux has a nice panic-reboot setting: on panic the box reboots automatically with no niceties whatsoever after n seconds. Unfortunately an oops is not considered as bad as a panic, thus doesn't auto-reboot. But I'm going to integrate the panic-on-oops patch next, I swear.

In the meantime, something positive: I finally got the PSU for my 'new' Sun Ultra 1, and it works and I've got some extra memory sticks, too: 400Mb in total, 27Gb disk and 6 ethernets. Good thing, that.

The pic below is of the mess I made soldering up some cables for my Garmin gps. The pfranc project is the source of almost-no-cost Garmin connectors, and the history of the project is another of those stories that inspire hope in humanity (at least IMHO). In short: you pledge that you'll pay a minimal sum, you get two plugs mailed to you, then it's up to you to honour your pledge. Nobody polices it, but it still works.

Two weeks ago, I spent a weekend with friends in Killarney, camping, freezing, drinking and flying. Lotsa fun, bit cool but fun. More on that should be coming up in the flying section RSN.

Last weekend the weather was lousy, sunny and bright but with a lot of wind (upto 35 kts). Paragliders can't fly in that, so I didn't. What I did do, is cleanup some things at home, do some software development and also sit in the sun in the backyard. The last three pics show how things look like in my living room. Yes, it's very sunny, bright and nice.

Sunday was way worse, stronger wind and me having headache and a bit of a cold. I want a RAID-1 for my stupid body!

On monday I've found out that the chin-up board in the backyard is desintegrating: the UV light is breaking down the resin...after only about 6 months sigh.

After all that I bought some lottery tickets. Maybe there's hope? On a side line: there seems to be hope for humanity. The body corp of the complex my house is in has had to make a hard, unanimous decision. This means just under 100 people, lots of old geezers among them, have to agree on something. The hopeful thing: they/we did manage to get the decision done, the right way, after browbea^Wconvincing the five counter voters.