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Tech: DVD Burning - media matters
Sat, 27 Aug 2005

Since before when I figured out how to actually burn DVD data disks from FreeBSD, I've had no luck whatsoever. Every attempt has failed after a few minutes of burning.. maybe 10 per-cent, maybe 25 or even 50 per-cent.. but always a failure (regardless of data size .. 600MB, 1.2GB or 2.5GB. Regardless of speed as well since these discs required a minimum and maxium of 4x burn speed.)

Today, after the 10th coaster or so in the pack I decided to run over and pick up a fresh high quality brand named DVD pack while doing some other chores - this existing pack was an inexpensive no name brand from China somewhere (25 DVD-R's for $8CDN seemed a good deal :) and rather than blame the drive I figured it more likely to be the DVD platters themselves. After all, I was able to burn CDR's no problem.

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Tech: Kernel compiling, and failing succeeding to burn DVDs
Tue, 02 Aug 2005

Update: Success! See down at the bottom.

Earlier I started mucking with burning DVDs and CDRs from this new FreeBSD 5.4 box and didn't really get anywhere with DVDs but did get CDRs working great. I thought I'd waste a few more hours and attempt to get DVD-R's to burn - alas.. no luck yet. Fired off a question to freebsd-questions though in hopes others can help.. however, I thought I'd summarize my experiences so far.

'cdrecord' comes with the OS and is the most commonly used tool so I figured I'd work that angle. You use the same mkisofs to produce the intermediate .iso file that is fed into the burning process, so see the prior blog entry for details about that. cdrecord needs ATAPICAM added to the kernel (since the GENERIC kernel doesn't include that option) as it allows use of 'SCSI' devices on the ATAPI (IDE) hard drive bus.

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Tech: How to stay in IRC, or How I made TCP/IP not get timed out by a firewall
Sun, 31 Jul 2005

Changing core LAN components always leads to a time of discovery, though fortunately I've had very good luck and things have more or less 'just worked' (excepting new problems that showed up on their own, like machines failing etc. :) One thing thats been niggling me is that idle IRC sessions have been getting hung up on. This sort of thing usually screams 'bored firewall reaping its connection table' and I've experienced it numerous times at work and home -- a long lasting Oracle connection mid-query or an ssh session running a job that doesn't emit output until completion will spontaneously be killed. Most people just background a job and fire up 'iostat 1' or 'top' to keep things busy, but thats both 'userland' and dirty an approach..

(I wonder if these tips are useful to anyone? Really, I've been posting them as reminders to myself really, but also in hopes someone may stumble across these when in need :)

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Tech: Burning a DVD from the FreeBSD command-line
Mon, 18 Jul 2005

Over time, IT folks are virtually guaranteed to complicate everything with a series of nasty acronyms (largely as a form of job security) despite their job description stating something to the effect of "Your job is to reduce complexity of a system." In general, things (be it IT, or automotive, or whatever) tend not to be complex once you catch the lingo, or at least get a feel for whats going on. (A car looked at as a whole is complicated, but a schematic of how the invididual components of a car connect is not, nor is the inner workings of each part.) Likewise with cellphones -- when trying to get your first phone I can guarantee the plethora of terms will throw you for a loop, as it did me -- GPRS, GSM, CDMA, 1xRTT, etc etc -- yet people use cellphones every day. Well, with my new little server having a DVD burner, I figured I'd fire it up and see how many coasters I could make..

(If you're not an IT guy (programmer, sysadmin, etc) or a home Unix hobbyist, you should probably just skip entries I label with things like "FreeBSD" :)

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Tech: Voodoo networking, or How I got sendmail to like me.
Thu, 14 Jul 2005

<skeezix>Deep code is where we want to live; shallow code is where we make a living

This is another one of those posts only a few people will read, I know. I'm going to talk about 'sendmail' (a system for receiving and transmitting email on the Internet, for those who host domains. Normal people just use an email program to suck down mail, but the guys who host the email use sendmail or postfix or other tools) and LinkSys. If you're still reading, cool - its been a busy week of hacking around on our LAN and new machine to get things working, but I finally made The Big Switchover where I killed the old machine and started using the new one -- pretty successfully too, with only a few gotchas! making me swear like a sailor for a few minutes each :) The telnet BBS is still hosed and no idea why (and I bet no one notices ;), but otherwise things are up and snappy as heck. I even added a new photo gallery script since the old machine wasn't fast enough to load images. But for now I'll rant about the torture Linksys and Eric Allman put me through..

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Tech: Rebuilding the LAN, Migrating between FreeBSD's
Sun, 10 Jul 2005

You'll have to forgive my transgression into being overly specific to a topic few will care about, but its been a slow-post week and this might be handy for me to remember sometime :) (On the entertainmeny front, my wife has grown her Katamari to some 15 or so metre's in size and is enjoying picking up cars, houses and trees..)

Some of you will know that my oldest server (really just an old Compaq desktop I picked up used some 6 years ago) has been slowly eating itself lately -- some bad sectors or lost files here, some hanging at random times through the day/night there -- just slowly becoming too unfriendly. It could be just overheating, or clogging up of the fan intakes, or the hard drive going, a combination thereof or any number of things. Though this machine has worked hard (24-7 for 6 years, plus whatever time it did before I got it.. already a few years old and with broken ports then!) its way past retirement. I personify equipment, so this stoic machine will be missed... anyone want to buy some old RAM? :)

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