Developments and delays

I know I had said I would be trying to post some of the ideas I had at The Next HOPE but The past week has seen me rather distracted from that goal. Aside from trying to recover physically (turns out a 3:1 ratio of Club Mate to water over the course of a weekend isn't such a good idea) trying to catch up on the news (particularly the 2600/HOPE/OTH related stuff I had missed in the runup to and during the conference) and then catching up on the new release of my primary Linux distro.

That last item has probably been the largest source of delays and distractions as they had made a few changes that seriously screwed with my graphics drivers (eliminating SaX2 and introducing the Neauvou drivers as the new default) which lead to a couple of days of madly trying to hand configure my xorg.conf and so on, prompting an additional change of desktop. The last chapter in that was the change from multiple independent NICs to bonded NICs, complicated by some odd configuration issues (gateway settings getting lost randomly) and one of the cards randomly dropping out and loosing it's kernel module declarations. I had thought that that card had finally crapped itself as it had become entirely non responsive after an attempt to move it to a different physical bus which lead to me purchasing a replacement this afternoon ($23 isn't bad for a gigabit NIC of known origins in New York). In the process of installing the new card I noticed that the previous card had been non responsive because it had been incorrectly seated (hard to do with a PCI connector). So bond0 now has three slaves eth0-2, all running at Gigabit speeds, which I think is about the appropriate level of overkill for my lousy DSL modem.

Then there was the idea of running a Tor node on the same workstation, not exactly well suited to NYC's anemic residential DSL connections (seriously, 300kbps upstream is the best you can do Verizon?) but having listened to a recording of the Wikileaks keynote from HOPE I figured I should try to contribute to the larger community more. It turns out that I always forget about the pseudo-firewall built into most SOHO routers, a fact that eluded me for a couple of hours. But I'm now providing a Tor relay, even if my available bandwidth is pretty lousy. Maybe I'll set one up on my station at work too, the T3 doesn't get much of a workout on weekends.

Now that things on those fronts have calmed down I might actually get myself to write something a bit more thought provoking.