EXPERIMENTAL *5* Online!

Ain't she a beauty, boys and girls?

Yep, a genuine off-lease, refurbed IBM ThinkCentre corporate type PC!  Vintage 2006!

It's not so bad as it looks.  It has the good old P4 3.4gHz CPU and a gig of RAM.  Hey, 32 bits is all you really need!  Not much to speak of in disk space (40G), but it's really not needed for a lowly UT99 server.  And, as usual, it was cheap!  What else do you expect from the Dinkster?

She's runnin' Debian 5.0 (Lenny) and I just hacked together a custom kernel out of the latest release code (2.6.35.5) from kernel.org.  Plus I threw in the latest greatest revs of iptables & ipset.  Slicker 'n snot on a doorknob, kiddies!

And I did it just for YOU!

Welllllll... maybe.  It's part of my Take Back The Dual Core AMD64 Project.  We never did need all that power for a UT server and I'd like to get some mileage out of it before it goes obsolete, although it pretty much is already.  There's a few more things to do before I take it down, like migrate the UPS and reroute one of my covert tunnels but those are projects for another weekend.

So, EXP 5 (the box) now runs BITCH House, Classic ]i[, and Experimental 5, which is identical to Experimental 4 if you haven't noticed already.  It will also be the backup for BOT House, if need be.  If push comes to shove and BH (GAWD FORBID!) dies, this thing can take over the whole operation.

Besides being a rockin' UT99 server this box is actually a very decent Linux desktop!  Especially with Google Chrome and Firefix on it (you can keep IceWeasel, Debian).  On the first rev (actually the second after my disappointing experience with Xubuntu 10.4) I tried the LXDE version of Lenny but it was just too limited.  So I wiped it in favor of XFCE.  I usually go for Gnome, but I've seen Gnome on Lenny and it's just plain boring.

And of course, I despise KDE.  Always have, always will.  It's simply a matter of aesthetics.  I don't care if it's faster and I don't want to get into a flame war about it.  It's just fugly.

So anyways... come by and play a few rounds.  When was the last time you played Classic ]i[?  There are some fun levels in that package!

So Long, Ubuntu!

I have to admit I'm a little behind the curve on Ubuntu. 10.4 LTS has been around for months now, but all I've done is throw it on a VM and play with it a bit. That, and a disastrous upgrade attempt on a VirtualBox VM. But the other day I installed Xubuntu 10.4 (the Xcfe version) and I really liked what I saw, especially after installing Chrome on it.

In fact it was just about set up to my liking and I was moving some UT servers over to the disk when I decided to wrap up the install over Xwin from my XP box.

What a fucking disaster that turned out to be. It's all explained here.

Long story short, Ubuntu has decided to start screwing its pooch. So I said "buh-bye" to Ubuntu for good and started to look for another distro to install.

Oh, I thought about Fedora and CentOS and Suse and my first love, Slackware and I even [i]tried [/i]to download Suse & Slackie but it was a no go.

And although I'd [i]had it [/i]with Debian 5.0, that's where I landed. Deb will always take you back like a fat fuckbuddy.

At least it runs Chrome. That's about all I ask for in a Linux distro these days.

So here we are again. Look for EXPIV to become EXPV, but the BITCH House and Classic ]i[ will remain the same.

Five Hour FAIL

Today, on the Autumnal Equinox, a powerful storm blew through the area during rush hour. Driving through it was a serious BITCH, and when Pinky & I finally got home, the power was out and the house was dark.

According to the one analog clock in this house, it shut down a 5PM. It finally came back on after 10PM.

On the bright(-ish) side, all four UPSes shut down perfectly, even the new APC 1500, which had been giving me fits lately. Everything came back up without incident.

But, as expected for a long outage, the IP address changed, so you'll have to update your UT99 favorites accordingly.

And speaking of UT99, I may be replacing one of the servers in the near future, probably the 64bit dual core system, which is the hottest box I have right now. Unfortunately it is also severely underutilized.

But that plan is subject to change without notice and I have so many things going on right now it may be quite some time before I do anything at all (but I do have the replacement box right now).

Stay tuned.