rjw57's Journal: Server Wonk

*sigh* Charon (my server box) was up and down last night. What I initially put down to hardware failure actually appears to be driver/kernel related. Under heavy load the wifi driver managed to hang the networking stack requiring (since the box is headless) a hard-restart :(. Lots of buggering about last night attempting to upgrade the kernel/WiFi driver and interfacing with Debian's fundamentally broken kernel system. Really they should just admit that APT/dpkg, whilst wonderful in some ways, just isn't up to managing the kernels in Debian. They either need a specialised kernel package management system or to fix dpkg.

That aside, Charon seems happier now with the new drivers/kernel + a bit of manual fscking/restoring the disks but I've decided I've had enough of Debian. Although wonderful when it Just Works, you have to live with some parts of unstable just to get things working :(. Gentoo will be my new friend.

Aside from that, I also posted a request for help to the mono list wrt Perl#. Reproduced below for posterity :)

Hi,
 
  I was wondering if anyone on this list had a Windows box + Mono + Perl that
could try out my Perl interpreter bindings for C#[1]. Basically I wanted
access to all the useful utilities out there on CPAN[2] that aren't yet
available in managed code or in the standard class libraries. The
distribution gives a sample IMAP client using Mail::IMAPClient.
 
  It works on Linux (Gentoo & SuSE 9) and seems to work OK on OS X with a
little munging of the library names and modulo mono-wierdness wrt exceptions
(yes I know about mint...). I'd ideally like it to work on Windows as well,
then it could be a truly cross-platform way of getting lots of functionality
into C# for 'free'.
 
  I've based the build system on Gtk#. For those that just want to look at how
easy it is to embed Perl using the powerful features of C# take a look at the
IMAP example[3]. C# really does make this nice, a lot nicer than the Perl C
API! For example Scalars are auto-boxed to the approriate fundamental types
(int, double, string).
 
[1] http://www.srcf.ucam.org/~rjw57/mono_files/
[2] http://search.cpan.org/
[3] http://charon.ucam.org/mason/highlight.html?file=IMAPExample.cs
 
--
Rich