The upgrade is complete.

Well, after both Thursday night ’til 12:30 and Friday night ’til midnight plus some time today getting the IP-NAT and firewall stuff working, my gateway computer is now full operational again. You can see why I upgrade it so rarely, can’t you.

Everything’s ok.. though strangely, the old Creative 2X CDROM seems to tell the machine that it’s a 322X DVD-RAM, DVD-ROM, CD-R drive! How I wish it were.. it’s not even multi-session or bootable. 🙂

Other than this, I’ve done nothing today other than go do the weekly shopping, watch a little telly, eat some food and try to beat off a sinus headache.. oh and get some sleep to make up for the hours I’ve lost over the last few days.

Tomorrow I have great plans for washing the car and cutting the grass in the back garden.. oh and I might watch the Grand Prix too.

Productive evening.

Last night was pretty productive, despite having originally decided to flop and have an early night.

I
backed up my main server and net gateway machine to tape, installed some
old memory I’d found in the cupboard, installed my old Creative 2x CDROM
drive and Diamond Stealth 3D 2000 video card and then reinstalled it with
a new OS version. That took me ’til 12:30am this mornign though.

Anyway,
the upshot of all this is that the machine is now running Mandrake 8.2 instead
of Redhat 6.0. All I need to do now is configure iptables for my NAT network
and set-up the DHCP and SMB servers.

All script kiddies must die!

Forgive me bretheren for it has been more than a week since my last wittering..

This is going to be one of those catching up posts, so bear with me: so a quick resume…


Thursday 22nd: Parents arrive for long weekend.

Friday
23rd: Parents pop off to my Nan’s in Derbyshire for day whilst I’m at work.
I pop into Oxford and buy DVDs of “2001: A Space Odyssey”
and “Galaxy Quest” from the 2 for 1 sale.

Saturday 24th: Do shopping, do DIY with my dad.

Sunday 25th: Do DIY.

Monday 26th: Do DIY and find out in the evening that our web server was hacked Sunday afternoon.

Tuesday 27th: Diagnose hacking incident & start rebuild of web server. Fight off some sort of gastric flu-y thing. Parents drove back to Cornwall.

Wednesday 28th: Continue web server rebuild. In the evening go out to pub with Katie, Sam et al.

Thursday 29th: Finish web server rebuild and add extra security.


OK, that’s the quick run-down. Now for some proper comments.

(1)
I Wish I’d discovered that /etc/init.d/sshd on the web server had been pointing
to the correct sshd binary.. it would have made life a whole lot easier.
Still, ALL SCRIPT KIDDIES MUST DIE. Sorry.. 🙂

(2) Last night at
the pub was fun. However, it seemed as far as Sam was concerned the BBQ hug
etc. never existed and she seemed somewhat remote and disinterested. C’est
la vie.

Anyway, that’s all that’s happened, for better or worse.

Men in a hurry

Last
night I went out to see Men in Black II. Before I get to the film, however,
I’ll talk about the other things surrounding the visit.

The whole
idea of the trip, other than to see the film, was to meet up and see again
Katie and Sam (seeing as I see john around the department a great deal already)
as I’d not seen them for over a month. The “planned” pub thing didn’t happen
on Sunday either etc. Anyway, to cut a long story short, I was told that
Sam didn’t want to come to the cinema.. which is slightly disappointing but
OK. When i picked up Katie from thier house on the way to the cinema Sam
wasn’t around.. when we returned Sam’s car had returned but when Katie noticed
this she said that she was feeling tired and so would like to postpone looking
at the photos she had wanted to show me eariler.

I’m getting a little bit paranoid about this.. probably undeservedly.

Anyway,
back to the film.. It was very short! The whole programme started at 8:45
and we were out of the cinema by 10:15.. so that’s 1.5 hours for adverts,
trailers and film.. so I guess the film can be only about 1 hour 15 minutes
in length, if that! It was quite fun, though it did seem to be rather a quick
remake of the first one but with a lot cut out and different aliens inserted.

Different weekend.

This weekend turned out almost totally unlike it was planned.

I
didn’t get to go out on the pub tour with John, Katie & Sam (due to organisational
problems) but I did get to go and see the performance of Lords & Ladies
(Terry Pratchett Discworld story) at the Rollright Stones.

Continue reading

It’s that Friday feeling.

It’s
now Friday evening. I was going to be going and doing social things with
Paul and Jenn but they’ve postponed until Sunday evening, so I have nothing
to do.

Sunday’s going to be busy, at least during the second half
of the day as it’s likely that the afternoon will be spend with John, Katie
and Sam walking around Old Marston visiting pubs, then it’s on to Paul and
Jenn’s place.

Saturday’s not busy at all, however. I could go into
Witney and see if the camera shop still has the adaptor ring for my digital
camera in stock and if they do, I’ll buy it, probably along with the external
power supply for the camera. I could also wash the mud from Cropredy out
of the wheel arches of my car, cut the grass in the back garden and hack
back the bramble so that it’s no-long taking up a quarter of the garden (ie.
all the growth since I last cut it back about a month ago).

There is also a slight possiblility of a BBQ at John, Katie and Sam’s house, but I’m not counting those chickens at all.

Still,
I have to fill up this evening first.. I’ll probably just sit in front of
the telly and veg out. After all, I have been out twice this week, Tuesday
at Wok This Way and last night helping Annette Kleppe celebrate submitting
her thesis. For me that’s counted as a hectic social life.

Phew! What a scorcher!

I’m
sitting here today in a very hot office, the fan is blowing but it’s only
offering slight relief. I’m really glad I decided to go for just wearing
the t-shirt, shorts and sandals today otherwise I’d be well cooked.

I
would have preferred to have had more sleep last night. The weather was rather
too warm and sticky for my liking so even though I slept on top of the covers
it still wasn’t comfortable. I have to keep my bedroom windows closed because
the traffic noise from the road which skirts my part of the town is enough
to wake me.. I’m a very light sleeper. Oh well. I guess, from the weather
forecast, I’m not going to get much sleep until at least the middle of next
week.

Definitely weather to wear as little as possible in, so that means t-shirt,
shorts & sandals for the foreseeable future then.. unless anyone else
has some better suggestions?

The world will just have to put up with seeing my legs for a while.

Tuesday night’s visit to Wok This Way was very pleasant, as has been
remarked upon by the other attendees. Well worth the 40 mile round trip.

As
for other social events.. so far there’s an embryonic plan for an afternoon
out visiting pubs with my friends John, Katie and Sam on sunday. Sam’s a
member of CAMRA, the campaign for real ale. The current guess from the weathermen
is that it’s going to be about 32C (90F) by then, so it’ll be baking..

Back to work.

Hmm.. dispite a decent sleep last night I’m still mildly spaced out and brainless. Oh Well.

Anyway, I’m back at work and I’ve got the Cropredy photos on the web. (Please excuse the FujiFilm photo album web page format.)

various things went wrong whilst I was out of contact, so I better get on and fix them.