myrddin.org: weblog

Well its taken me a while, but I finally got around to putting back all the old screenshots.

Filed under: m.o

I finally got off my ass and chrooted all my bind9 installs today. Threw a quick howto together as well, found here.

Filed under: m.o

Yesterday I had an awesome experience of piloting a Tecnam 2002JF!

The weather looked pretty dodgy to start off the day, with some rather dark clouds and a reasonably strong wind, but by the time midday came around, and I had travelled to Bankstown Airport, it had cleared to an almost remarkable sky.

I did my introductory flight lesson with the company Basair. The instructor that I had was quite young however extremely professional and was a great person to fly with. Funnily enough he actually lives in the next suburb to me and as they say; its a small world. Speaking of small worlds, it is a totally remarkable feeling almost instantly after takeoff. The world as we know it rather quickly becomes what almost appears to be a set of monopoly houses and/or matchbox cars below.. Even mountains appear to be mere bumps in the earth’s surface. I’ve been on my fair share of commercial flights, but being in an ultralight it makes the experience oh so much more different.

I was in full control for almost all of the flight, giving the controls up for the instructor for the takeoff and landing procedures. Weighing in at a mere 340kg the plane isn’t much more than my motorcycle and I combined. Given its weight, the aircraft has a relatively short takeoff and landing distance. This distance is probably normal for this aircraft class, but I was still quite impressed. Even more impressive was the landing performed by my Basair instructor.. damn he made it look oh so easy. I have not ever had such a nice landing even on a commercial airliner. Given the differences in the aircraft I can compare to, I was still pretty awestruck. I however was totally lost for words about the whole flight. I was nothing but a gigantic smile for the duration of the flight as well as several hours afterwards

Needless to say, I will continue persuing my Private Pilots Licence and will definately enjoy that freedom to fly anywhere I please.

Filed under: m.o

Overnight I had another instance where one of my new disks with an ext3 filesystem in my fileserver remounted itself readonly due to errors. This was a week after the last one of which I had thought I’d finally gotten rid of the problem.. evidently enough, this was not the case.

Considering I had replaced most of the equipment in the machine already I was very quickly running out of reasons why I was receiving these ext3 problems. I don’t know why I didn’t think of it beforehand, but I decided to boot off a knoppix cd and do a memtest. Sure enough >3000 errors were found. This I think would have been a result of the original motherboard problem where it fried itself. I should have known better and checked this sooner, oh well… Needless to say this morning I went up the road and payed way too much for a new pair of dual channel memory for the box. A memtest later I had confirmed that this problem was fixed. So far things have been good, but given the past trend, it will take another week or two for me to know for sure if the problem has been resolved.

Filed under: m.o

I sat my CLP (Novell Certified Linux Professional) exam yesterday and I failed(?!wtf?!). I scored a 632/800 which was a really disappointing result.

The exam itself was a real shambles to say the least. Firstly I sat there for 40 minutes waiting and watching the “authorized” testing center trying to get my ‘Windows XP’ testing pc connected to the internet, then had them not know how to charge a corporate amex via their eftpos machine, and have the novell website time out after the initial test login screen… *sighs*

The whole exam was really *really* dissapointing… Here’s a link to show you how the practicum exam is actually done. Its done over the internet which means you experience a *huge* amount of latency to the testing machines which I suspected to be the USA. Yes, I’m in Australia… There were a multitude of issues including repeating keystrokes, ie: hit the ‘i’ key and get ‘iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii’ sorta deal. Correcting typo’s then become a really time consuming process. Other issues included poorly translated/broken english and extremely imprecise objectives. There was a section in particular where I was given a certain scenario setup, a series of explicit objectives however there were certain things missing, which of course I didn’t actually do.. Given that I have a heavy change control orientated background I naturally didn’t do the things that it didn’t specifically asked for.. I subsequently apparently lost points for it.

The worst part of the exam was a particular section where it asked to do a series of configuration tasks to a daemon that I am quite fluent in. I however scored *very* little in this section..(wtf?). In this particular section I had identified several bugs that yast introduces to config files and was forced to make modifications by hand. I also made some changes to a very specific file that the objectives required, but I presume they were not identical to that what the exam grading system was coded to expect and as a result gained very few points for this section. I however tested my configurations extensively based on the criteria defined by the exam objectives and was almost certain come end of exam that I should had received 100%. Alas, I scored a 632 and subsequently failed. There was a particular section of which an objective was vaguely implied but I chose not to proceed with it as it wasn’t explicitly defined…. I accept the fact that this was something I may have incorrectly overlooked, but the other section?.. no way in hell.. There *has* to be a flaw in the automated exam grading system to give me such a *low* mark in the other section.

Needless to say, I intend to contest my results, and have 30 days to do so…. We’ll see what happens… Given that my current position is ‘Linux Technical Leader’, that I scored 100% in my RHCE (verify my cert here, and my results here), that this CLP is the utmost low end of the Novell Linux range of certification… I find this score extremely insulting!

Edit: fixed the typo’s that Darren was whinging about

Filed under: m.o