What a week....

First of all I discover a week after the event that mirror.ac.uk is out of action after Jisc withdrew funding back in March.

I use this occassionally as my main CPAN mirror and other stuff and rarely visit the home page so didn't pick up from the message on the mirror.ac.uk either. Mind you just everyone I've asked about this in the .ac.uk sysadmin community and wider we're aware of it either, so I don't feel so bad. Alot of the time I tended to Mirror Service run but the the guys at Computer Labs Kent Uni as they has a fuller mirror list and used to run mirror.ac.uk before Eduserve at Bath got the contract. At least now CPAN is listing MirrorService as a valid mirror.

Another this that's happening in the UK this week is the fact the VirginMedias (was NTL/Telewest) Cable TV/broadband network has been suffering massive outages since around 1600 Monday 6th August. Again no one in the press seems to have picked up on this, esp as they are currently involved in being sold to a private equity firm (used to called "asset stipper" ;-) or someone else.

Well I had real computer bug yesterday.

Well I say bug, it was actually a spider!

A Mac Mini was complaining about a RAM error on boot (3 beeps). So we cracked open the thing (no easy task in itself) and found a dead spider spread over the RAM module. Replaced the RAM module and the Mac was a happy Mac again.

Looks like the spider had managed to short out the RAM module somehow and died along with the RAM module.

Ok
out of interest I looked at work's email gateway and did some sums as to how much *inbound* email got blocked as it was spam/malware/ to invalid users etc etc.

Now this is yesterday's stats (a Thursday) and 93% of our inbound traffic is crud.

I hate to think what it would be if I averaged this over a week and included the weekends mainly (!) spam traffic.

OK, so I've done many source level upgrades for FreeBSD.

Yesterday 5.2 popped out, so I cvsup-ped the source, followed the usual install set

cd /usr/src/usr.sbin/mergemaster
mergemaster.sh -p
cd /usr/src
make buildworld
make buildkernel=GENERIC
make installkernel=GENERIC
reboot
make installworld

and and splat on the csh/sh install.

and the install README says - do the kernel first then buildworld......aaaaaahhhhhhhhhh

OK so back to refresh the src tree and make buildworld. segfaults from make....ahh well restore make from tape or... ..back to downloading the ISO...

Think I'll download the ISO over lunchtime.. :-(

Looks like we might have a little money to spend this year at work (as opposed to none last year).

might even be able to get enough bits to make a new imap email server together for the company...heck I might be useful with a budget...

arrgghh
OK so I spent 2 days debugging the optical link only to find out one of the 10basef to 10baseT trancievers was broke.

do'h - always check the hardware first -d'oh

-update

d'oh always check how the hardware works - when resetting on side, need to reset the other too. arrrggghhh!!!!