Long Time Since Last Post

Yep, busy as heck. Lots of personal issues as usual.
Finally got my OpenBSD 3.9 cds and my new wireframe
daemon t-shirt. So busy, haven't had time to update
my system. And now, FreeBSD is out with version 5.5
which, as I understand it, will be the last in the
5-STABLE branch. I'd like to try 6.1 but I'm not too
sure how well it'd run on my old HP Netserver. 5.4
cadillacs on it, considering how old the hardware is.
As I'm writing this, I've got my latest backups on the
OpenBSD box tarred/gzipped and I'm running rsync to
update the mirrored backups here on the windoze box.
Working great. Had a hell of a time teaching myself
the ins and outs of rsync, but I've got it doing all I
need it to do, now. It probably is childs play for old
"nix" hands, but I have trouble finding time around here
to keep on learning all I need to know to run these
systems proficiently. I added another account from the
FreeBSD box here on the windoze box and ran into some
issues with my cygwin stuff, but it's ironed out now,
too. I've got cronjobs setup on both BSD boxes for the
users to be able to do backups across the LAN with rysnc
for their home directories, mail, and so forth. I've got
a new Seagate USB 2.0 160G external harddrive on this
windoze box now, and it's sure nice to have room for a
change to do the backups that have to be done. Found
out one day, after hosing my usr partition on my OpenBSD
box just how nice backups are. I had never done a restore
before and wasn't too sure I could pull it off, but it worked
like a champ. I had just done a full dump a few hours before,
lucky for me.

Got my hands on an old DEC Prioris dual-processor box that
got abandoned by the yacht club in Gulfport, and picked up
a serial cable to be able to run it without a keyboard or
monitor, but haven't gotten around to doing all the setup
yet. Now I've got OpenBSD 3.8 on it, and it ran okay, but
I had a kernel panic on it when I tried booting it with
the mp kernel. I haven't had a chance to go back and
reproduce it yet so I can run a trace on it and try to see
if it can be debugged. Not really sure if the cpus are
supported for smp in OpenBSD. I'll have to investigate
that before I fool around with the mp stuff again. Might
have to do some hard wiring, bios work, and kernel tweaking
if it is supported. Time will tell.

I got an old Epson scanner off of eBay and it works great
on the windoze box, and I got the sane backends to build
on the OpenBSD box, but not the frontends. I tried hacking
some stuff, but to no avail. Got a lot of help from the
port maintainer, but he finally got too busy to help any
further. It's supposed to be fully supported now, in the
new 3.9 release, so I'll need to get off my duff and get
it installed so I can try it again. X is working great on
it with the old voodoo card. I need to get some speakers
on it so I can fool around with the sound and some music.
Creating iso images, writing cds, erasing rewritables,
and so forth is a snap on it. Got foomatic stuff on both
BSD boxes and am able to print everything I need to over
here on the windoze box on the old HP Deskjet. Also can
print from here to the old Star dot-matrix printer on the
FreeBSD box, and also to it from the OpenBSD box. I want
to get to the point where, if this windoze box craps out,
I won't be pressured to hurry up and fix it or replace it.
Trying to get weaned as soon as possible. I know, almost
for sure, that I'm not going to be able to afford the
hardware I'll need to run Vista when the final version is
released. Not that I'd want to spend that much money anyway,
on a MS product, though, in retrospect, I can say that XP
has been darned reliable. I probably would've never gotten
involved in computers, as much as I have, it weren't for
Microsoft. It's just all the damned security issues that
worry me. Which brings to mind another project I want to
start, getting pf setup on the OpenBSD box, spamassassin,
and maybe clamd to protect the box as much as possible.
I've already got some basic pf stuff down, but now nearly
as much as I need do have. Well, as can probably be seen
from the timestamp on this post, this is about the only
time I really get anymore to do much on my blog. And with
that in mind, my old butt needs to hit the rack for a while.
Hope it's not so long until I can get on here again.

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