Caliban – Opinion and Righteous Anger

Wow, things have been really busy lately.

Google is ticking along nicely, though I need to get my teeth more into the production stuff than I have done so far.

No date set for the wedding yet, though it’s almost a certainty that 30th August 2002 will be the date that lives in infamy.

We finally got DSL last week. After 18 months in the USA, with nothing more than dial-up service (and poor dial-up service, at that), I finally have a fast connection to the Net again. What a difference this makes to one’s quality of life.

In the wake of recent events, it seems almost absurd to find happiness in something so trivial, but it really is nice to have this little luxury.

So, I’ve installed one of my servers with bind 9.2.0rc4 and configured that securely. Next in line is Postfix, followed by Apache.

Once those are optimally configured, I’ll start pointing to my own box for Web and e-mail, moving it away from The Netherlands for the first time in 7 years. The end of an era.

I’ve already modified my whois information to point to this new box for DNS, but that DNS currently just points back to The Netherlands for Web and e-mail. I’ll migrate those services one at a time over the weekend. My Netgear MR314 arrived yesterday. This really is a nice piece of kit, though I was disappointed to discover that, unlike the RT314, it has no selective packet filtering capabilities. I guess I’ll fix this by placing my RT314 in front of it.

The MR314 also doesn’t have the ability to syslog to a log-host and its Telnet interface is very limited, requiring most duties to be performed via an admittedly very easy to use Web interface.

There’s also no serial port, which is a shame.

Still, the main reason I wanted it was for its wireless capabilities, and it seems to be performing very well in this area. A firmware flash to the latest version added the ability to restrict on MAC address, which is a nice security measure (though not infallible). So, the net result of all of this is that I can now hermetically seal off the computer room (which now sounds like there’s a DC10 taking off in there) and sit on the couch with my laptop, obtain a DHCP address and surf away, protected behind the NAT of this clever little gateway.

The only thing wrong with the MR314 (and any product like it) is that it’s not open source, so it’s a trade-off between trusting Netgear’s code and not having to purchase another computer with moving parts for the purpose of firewalling my network.

Anyway, time to go to work…

Still unpacking in the new apartment and still settling into the new job. These things take time.

Sarah and I got engaged while in England, but haven’t yet set a date for the wedding. The venue is also unknown, but is likely to be somewhere in New England. It won’t happen any earlier than next spring, with the summer being a likelier bet.

Godverdomme, ik ga trouwen. Ongelooflijk! Nu maak ik me al zorgen over hoeveel mensen er zullen zijn aan mijn kant van de kerk…

We drove up to San Francisco on Saturday and spent five hours with a jeweller before finally finding the ring we wanted. So, now I’m skint again. Je moet er wat voor over hebben.

Back from holidaying in the UK, back at work at Google, and in the process of unpacking in our new apartment in Palo Alto. It’s been a busy time as usual.

Currently playing with Netgear RT314 router/firewalls. Give me iptables over this thing any day of the week.

So, two full weeks have now passed since starting my new job at Google. It’s a very interesting experience, and culturally worlds apart from my previous employer, Linuxcare. It will take me a while to get used to working in an environment where the intellectual property is considered essential business leverage and not an abomination, where all company information is treated as privileged and confidential, and where inventions are patented, not released for incremental improvement. I guess this explains why my best efforts to find any of my new colleagues on Advogato turn up blank.

Right now, I feel rather useless in my job. I’m a sysadmin with very little clue how each piece of the infrastructural puzzle fits together to make the whole. I already have business cards and a cell phone, but am not yet self-sufficient in my work. These things take time. No doubt I will one day yearn for my erstwhile empty plate and lack of responsibility.

So, what else is going on?

Well, Sarah and I are moving to Palo Alto this coming Thursday. That will place me within healthy biking distance of work (Sarah will be a lot further away, since she still works in San Francisco) and give us a much roomier apartment with lots of daylight, a swimming pool, etc. I won’t be sad to leave the dinginess of our current apartment behind. We’ll be getting a lot more for our hard-earned cash in Palo Alto.

The day after that, Sarah and I fly to England for two weeks of holiday fun in London, Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly. I can’t wait.

hacker seems to have come up with exactly the same basic CVS completion routine for bash that I wrote and that is included in the source distribution of bash 2.05, as well as on the Linuxcare BBC.

Incidentally, bash 2.05 improves the completion facility significantly with the addition of the -o parameter to complete. So, if you need CVS completion in bash 2.05, use this instead:

_cvs()
 
{
        local cur prev
 
        COMPREPLY=()
        cur=${COMP_WORDS[COMP_CWORD]}
        prev=${COMP_WORDS[COMP_CWORD-1]}
 
        if [ $COMP_CWORD -eq 1 ] || [[ "$prev" == -* ]]; then
                COMPREPLY=( $( compgen -W 'add admin \
                               checkout commit diff \
                               export history import log \
                               rdiff release remove rtag \
                               status tag update' $cur ))
        fi
 
        return 0
}
complete -F _cvs -o default cvs

This is as basic as it gets, since there’s no attention paid to any switches, but it does cover a great many cases of basic CVS operation. If someone could extend this to cover all of the cases, as I have done for rpm, that would be great.

Since joining Google, I’ve added p4 (Perforce) completion and intend to extend my iptables and tcpdump completion routines when time allows.

Anyway, I need to get packing, or we won’t be ready for our move on Thursday.

We drove down to Palo Alto this evening to sign the lease on our new apartment. It’s expensive, but 1000 square feet will come in very handy.

Anyway, the lease is now signed and the deposit paid. We’ll move in on or around 1st August.

It’s hard to believe that just a couple of months ago, I was deliriously happy at Linuxcare and had no plans to leave San Francisco. How quickly things can change.

There’s a great little storage area in the new place in which I can build out a network and connect DSL. I can’t wait to get started on this project.

I may also need to get a third bike, this time a decent mountain bike, to take advantage of all the off-road trails in and around Palo Alto.

dyork, thanks for your good wishes. Incidentally, the fix for your rpm problem is not to upgrade to rpm 4.x, but to install 3.05 or later, since these versions can also read 4.x RPMs. I think 3.07 is the latest 3.x version.