The Shoes of the Fisherman's Wife Are Some Jive-Ass Slippers

Mon, 15 Aug 2005

The TSA can go inspect my smelly underwear

Oh wait, they did. Back in Canberra finally. Woohoo!

Sat, 13 Aug 2005

Fort Collins

I have been in Fort Collins all this week for work and it has been quite pleasant. My last trip was in December at the start of winter. There was snow and ice everywhere, although there was a bit of a warm spell for that week so the temperature range was't that different for a Canberra winter (0-12 degrees C). This time is was 20-30 degrees C with a couple of short showers towards the end of the week.

Summer looks like lots of fun over there. On the weekend I saw many people riding their pushbikes and motorbikes (often with no helmets!!) around as well as joggers and dog-walkers out enjoying the sunny weather. I went out with Randy for a very short hike and some rock climbing on the last day I was there. He also took me out for free (woohoo!) samples at the New Belgium Brewery which was pretty good really. I don't think I'm much a fan of wheat beer or Belgian ale though. The ale is definitely an acquired taste. Fort Collins has a high density of microbreweries and regular breweries. There is a giant sized Budweiser plant on the side of the highway on the drive up from Denver if you like that sort of thing.

The Fort Collins office is so very quiet in comparison to Canberra where there are mobile phones going off in your face every 10 minutes and sales guys hang their arm over the side of your cube to have a loud conversation with someone else. I guess it's a difference between an office that does primarily sales and technical support versus an office that does engineering.

Thu, 11 Aug 2005

CIFS 2005

Last week I was at the CIFS 2005 conference, now part of the CIFS 2005 conference, now part of the Developer Solutions Conference & Showcase run by SNIA. As per the the last couple of years, the technical content has been slowly decreasing in quantity and quality, as have the count of companies attending and the number of engineers they have been sending.

I attended some of the Developer Solutions talks about WBEM which were a bit waffly. I don't think WBEM has quite hit the mainstream enough for people to present technical talks about it just yet. iSCSI is apparently on teh spoke at the moment. The talks were apparently well attended and interesting. There were also iSCSI startup-type companies, something which has been lacking at CIFS for quite a while now.

Still, it was great to meet some of the new Samba Team members and put a face and personality to some of the nicks on IRC. I also picked up some cool tips on general Linux stuff and learned all about quilt (googling for quilt doesn't bring up any computer references on the first page at all - WTF?) which was lots of fun.

There are some photos from the conference on samba.org.

Wed, 03 Aug 2005

Man of the match award...

...goes to Andrew Bartlett for finding out about ssh master connections working with the dodgy proxy we seem to be behind at the moment. Master connections are somewhat like fsh in that they keep one connection open all the time, and subsequent ones are multiplexed over it. I never could get fsh working reliably last I tried but master connections are working well.

From the changelog for OpenSSH 3.9:

* Implement session multiplexing: a single ssh(1) connection can now carry 
  multiple login/command/file transfer sessions. Refer to the "ControlMaster" 
  and "ControlPath" options in ssh_config(5) for more information

Add the following to your $HOME/.ssh/config file:

host svn.samba.org
	ControlPath ~/.ssh/master.svn.samba.org

and then run ssh -M svn.samba.org to start the first connection. tridge recommends running watch true in the master connection window to check that the connection is still active if you are worried about that sort of thing.