Category: Technology


SKy+ migration

For a few years i have had an Early , V1, Pace 3000 sky plus box with a big disk MOD.Over the past few months this has become increasingly unreliable, locking up, not coming back after a cold starts etc etc.

Enter Ebay, 40 quid for a used pace 3100 box.
Now the fun starts, I then discover that different veriosn of SKY plus use different file systems, BUGGER

Enter Sky Copy plus?? the lastest beta (1.2.0.1), will for format conversions 🙂

Quick Download, connect to my laptop with a maplin PATA USB2 adaptor, ??convert and bob’s your aunties live in lover

I had a lovley surprise this morning, 1600 bounced spam emails in my “selective catch all” mail box

I use the term selective, as it has a huge (3000+) blacklist, that and the RDNS connection filtering I run, keeps my normal spam, in the mail box, down to less than 10 a day, with some 3000 being actively rejected.
There is a big debate around whether “catch all” is a good idea these days, But I find it soooo usefull, to be able to use a slighly different email address for any site I register with, especially when outfits like autotrader (autotrader@) leak email data to nigeria like a holey thing and inteflora (flowers@) sold my email address on,

This mornings little treat was not rejected by the RDNS process as they all came from legit mail relays, as bounced email. Which basicaly mean some arsehole is spoofing email from my domain. having been hear before, it is usually followed by a barage of don’t email stuff like this please email from the less astute netizens

I also have reason to believe that one of my work email address’s is being use to spoof spam too, as I have one or two bouced email arrive there too

100 MPH blogging

Currently sat on a first great?? (debatable) ??western train from paddington to swindon

Some of the carriages have been through a re-fit, and now have Laptop power, one socket for every two seats, well cool

so Add Laptop and 3G mobile phone, and we have 100+ Mph Blogging 🙂

Tags, Whooo Hooo

Based on the information i found, and linked to here
I have Succesfully integrated TAGS and a TAGS cloud into my Themes

Pat myself on the back

Fixing my power consumption Part 1…

Following on the shocking revelation as to how much my toys were costing me to run
I spent satuday morning, moving data, re-writing backup scripts, and have managed to SQEEZE all my data onto the disks in the server, which has enabled me to shut down the extreemly power hungry FC storage array.
This has also left me short of space, but a USB2 external disk is on the cards for the general archive stuff !

Next will be replace the UPS. i have a belkin 600VA one lying around, that shoudl be enough now i have reduce the power to under 200 Watts

got my self one of those domestic power meters and been around the house,

HOLY FUCK !!!!

Need to change my storage strategy, the Compaq RA4100 fibre channel chassis with 12 disk may well be over kill, but it is also DAMN expensive to run,
and I have NO idea why the UPS is pulling 100Watts with NO load !!!

??As i am only ising the storage for archive type stuff not “live” apps, I am planning to replce it with an external USB2 disk,
the Cost Recovery Period will be less than 4 months !

Not sure what to do about the server though, it is runnign AD, Exchange, VMware server with VOIP PBX and dansguardian ….

Device Watts kWh per month Cost (GBP) per month
Server 165 118.8 11.4048
data Storage array 308 221.76 21.28896
router 3 2.16 0.20736
hub 6 4.32 0.41472
Disk 10 7.2 0.6912
UPS ? 102 73.44 7.05024
Fish tank Light on 18 12.96 1.24416
Fish Tank light off 4 2.88 0.27648
Printer (standby) 8 5.76 0.55296
Print Server 8 5.76 0.55296
Xbox (standby) 1 0.72 0.06912
15″ LCD TV 2 1.44 0.13824
standard sat RX 25 18 1.728
cordless phone 3 2.16 0.20736

Fairly normal morning, buses actually running to timetable, unlike tuesday !

So I got on the No10 bus, at the bus-stop right outside Hucclecote Library (opposite the Royal Oak public house if you dont do librarys) only to find a tosser playing crap rap very loudly on his mobile phone,

So here is a picture of Mr Tosser for everyone to see !!!!

tosser.jpg

I have just spent several hours trying to setup wordpress MU 1.2.4 with LDAP in to a CORP Active Directory,

MU does what wordpress does best, it just worked
LDAP auth was fantasic,
but everynow and then i was experiancing a 30 secs slow page load

Well before some of you start shouting, what i now know are obvious things,
I eventually noticed, using a cool tool called ieHeaders, that the page load delay was exactly 30 seconds every time, so came to the conclusion this was a timeout rather than a random thing. After some head scratching I remembered that some of the admin pages on wordpress get data from wordpress.org on NEW features etc

Eureeka, give the PHP http client (snoopy) a proxy server to use and everyones a winner ! 🙂

[update]
This was done with?? wordpress MU 1.2.4 , and LDAP plugin 1.2.0 from http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=196841??against a WINDOWS AD / LDAP
The search and user DN need to be in this format OU=aaaa,OU=bbbb,DC=zzzz,DC=yyyy,DC=xxx
where the number number of OU fields and DC fiesl will vary depending on yoiu LDAP config

Back Home

Well it got to Friday (27th) and I’d had enough of the water shortage, so we dragged the caravan out and legged it to Somerset,

I have the lovely ability to work from anywhere i can get a good broadband internet connection.
Enter the Thorney Lakes Camp site which has FREE Wi-Fi, which based on my best guess is running at about 1.5M, Prefeck….
and that is not to mention WORKING toilets and showers

Spent All week there, i think i actually managed to get more done, than i would have in the office…

WordPress revolution

Following on from Outbreak of wordpress, it must be contagious, two things have developed

1. My humble internal install of wordpress has been gazumped for highlevel internal demos
2. I am now looking at wordpress MU with LDAP, for that enterprise, AD intragrated blogging solution

🙂