Archive for April 2008
How I felt last weekend
26 Apr 2008This describes it pretty well. I’m a fan of web comics, so this ones now on my feed radar.
{.snap_noshots}
Thanks Keacher
OpenBSD, postgresql and semaphore failures during initdb
21 Apr 2008Today I upgraded my postgresql database instance on OpenBSD. Did a pg_dumpall, removed the old packages and then added the new ones (latest version 8.1.9 for OpenBSD 4.0 – yes I’m behind).
During the initialisation of the new DB, I got the following error:<br /> creating directory /var/postgresql/data/pg_tblspc ... ok<br /> selecting default max_connections ... 10<br /> selecting default shared_buffers ... 50<br /> creating configuration files ... ok<br /> creating template1 database in /var/postgresql/data/base/1 ... FATAL: could not create semaphores: No space left on device<br /> DETAIL: Failed system call was semget(1, 17, 03600).<br />
The PostgreSQL documentation talks about this extensively. However I don’t want to recompile my kernel away from GENERIC. What else can I do?
Coral Content Distributed network
20 Apr 2008Have you ever had your website hit on a topic that people find conflicting? When the site gets viewed by the masses, you need to be prepared. If you have access to modify your web server .htaccess file then go and have a read of the Coral CDN Overview
For those interested in the techie bits, here is my .htaccess for news site flood protection, and to allow CDN to serve up all my site images – thus offloading from my puny connection the bandwidth burden for images.
Wikipedia Article creates Circular references
19 Apr 2008A recent post on SlashDot quotes an IT professor saying:
People are unwittingly trusting the information they find on Wikipedia, yet experience has shown it can be wrong, incomplete, biased, or misleading
After reading this, I thought it was time to write about a something I found that backs this up. An anonymous user added information about Sacha Baron Cohen (known onscreen as Ali G.) to Wikipedia on November the 14th 2006.
Telstra ADSL2 upgrade complete
11 Apr 2008Telstra announced yesterday that their ADSL 2+ (what’s with the plus?) upgrade has now been completed Australia wide. What does this give the average end user access to? The Telstra PR and discussion site explains:
The ADSL2+ upgrade of 907 telephone exchanges serving 2.4 million homes and businesses announced in February is now complete. This means millions of additional Australian families, businesses, non-profit organisations and government agencies across every state and territory can now enjoy the benefits of high-speed broadband
The state of Broadband in developing countries
06 Apr 2008Australia is a mixed bag at Broadband. In some ways we resemble the US, and in no way do we resemble the Japan style FTTN networks (yet). But the infrastructure is starting to be there. What sucks is that sometimes to get the 30 Mbps connections you have to pay quite a bit for it (AUD$90/bundled per month for 25GB, Bigpond Cable). Yes I’m only with Bigpond cable as no ADSL service exists in my area that comes close to that speed.
Storms and Power outages
03 Apr 2008We’ve had some stong winds in Melbourne yesterday. Up to 130 kph!
These winds were good enough to cause a 24 hour extended power outage in my area, meaning my provider had upstream outages and the internet connection was down. Add that to the errant html comment in my last post which made the whole page commented out.
All resolved now. Now what else do I have to debug that is technical?
Mailing attachments from the Solaris Shell
01 Apr 2008I needed a quick way to send some files from the command line when logged into a Solaris server via ssh.
This assumes the server is already configured to deliver your smtp mail. I also used mailx for the sending client.
Here is how I did it, for your geeky reference.
First write your message:
cat << EOF > /tmp/mailmsg<br /> Hi this is a message<br /> And this is the second line<br /> EOF