I export a bunch of directories over NFS. One of those is the filesystem I record TV onto. At the moment, the recording machine is working on two separate channels, all streaming to the NFS filesystem.

My server just crashed. I rebooted it.

The recording machine is still quite happily going. I don't know if there's any lost data, but I doubt it. More news after those files get processed tonight...

... your compiler starts rejecting perfectly valid C++ like this:

class ContextHandler: public DefaultHandler {
...
}

Of course, javac doesn't like that very much. D'oh!

After a couple of delays, my replacement Edge10 DAS 501t has arrived. Why a replacement? The first one refused to power on.

On several of my machines, I've moved over to using xfce4-terminal instead of xterm. However, my one gripe with it has been that on some machines, I can configure it to use the "fixed" font, and on others, I can't. The "fixed" font is an antique bitmapped font, but at the right size, it's absolutely ideal for text editing -- I write all my code using it, and set all of my terminals to use it. Every single other (non-decorative) fixed width font I've ever seen on my screen is just too squat and fat.

This morning, I took delivery of an Edge10 DAS 501t storage box. It's an external eSATA box with room for 5 drives, running with a port multiplier. Thus, it only needs a single eSATA connector to join all 5 drives to the host machine.

I've just had to generate a new self-signed X.509 certificate for an internal website at work, and I thought I'd generate a certificate with multiple names, so we can refer to it as "www.foo.org", and "foo.org", and "machine.foo.org", and all of the other variants that people are likely to generate.

It wasn't easy to find the exact incanctations needed, but for the record, here they are:

I found this handy little site yesterday: searchplugins.net. Go to a website, use its search function to search for "TEST", then paste the resulting URL into searchplugins.net, and it will write an OpenSearch plugin for Firefox, Mozilla, or IE7 that you can download and install.

After vlad died last week, I rebuilt him with a new hard drive in the main system RAID array. This drive was twice the size of the old one – 160GiB, not 80GiB – so I had a bunch of spare space not being used. Yesterday, I bought another 160GiB drive, and decided to test the whole SATA hotplug thing...

Vlad is now alive again.

After spending a significant chunk of Saturday grubbing around on the floor, elbow-deep in computers (think James Herriot, only less gooey and with sharper edges), I've diagnosed vlad's problems: At least one of the two hard drives in the RAID-1 array containing my home directory has media errors, and the motherboard has decided to stop working entirely.

At about half eleven last night, my server, vlad, died. Quite comprehensively.