I recently bought a refurbished HP DL385 server at auction. It turns out that it takes SFF (Small Form Factor) disks and has the ability to take 8 hot-swap disks (not bad for a 2U server).

The machine supports SAS disks and S-ATA disks as well. So the next thing to do is to buy a bunch of S-ATA disks for it.

When I got the machine it reported that the battery for the write-back cache on the RAID controller could not be recharged and needed to be replaced. Apparently this is a firmware bug and I can fix it by upgrading the firmware on the machine. Of course I need to buy some disks so I can do an OS install first.

As an aside it’s amazing how cheap some of the Opteron servers are at auction nowadays.

This morning there were two or three classes from a local primary school on board my tram taking up all the seats (mostly three children to a seat).

So to answer some email and write blog entries I had to sit in a stair-well. Melbourne trams are symmetrical so that they can just change direction at the end of the line (unlike some other trams – the Amsterdam tram line 10 that I used to catch has a circle at each end of the line for the tram to turn). Being symmetrical means that the doors on the left side of the tram are used for passengers to get on and off, and the doors on the right are locked – so the right stairwell is a place you can sit to use a laptop if all the seats are taken.

While I was sitting on the floor some women started talking about me, I heard comments such as “he’s answering his email”, “it must save a lot of time, he could do half an hour of email on the way to work”, and “he must work for an Internet company – look at his shirt” (I was wearing an Intel shirt given out at LCA 2007). At that point I decided to briefly explain the work I do, there’s a limit to the amount of time I can refrain from joining the conversation when people are standing around me and talking about me.

They didn’t seem to understand enough to enable me to explain anything about Linux.

You might expect that a vaccine against a disease that causes cancer would be widely embraced as soon as it was proven safe. If the disease in question was transmitted by contaminated food or water, sneezing, or most of the other ways that diseases spread then it probably would be widely accepted.

However recently there is a recently released vaccine against Cervical Cancer. The virus in question is only transmitted sexually. Apparently 80% of women in the US will catch it before the age of 50 (so it’s obviously not scaring people away from unsafe sex).

There is a strong Christian lobby against the vaccine, their idea is that if sex doesn’t cause debilitating and/or fatal conditions such as cervical cancer then their daughters will have less reason to avoid it. The fact is that religious people are statistically more likely to practice unsafe sex (see this link) so it seems unlikely that preventing one of the STDs that religious people might catch will affect the amount of unsafe sex.

One thing that seems strange about the entire discussion is that no-one has raised the possibility of vaccinating boys. Vaccinating boys could lead to the virus being eradicated. Even if an eradication attempt fails it will help save some of the Christian girls.

Martin F. Krafft blogs about looking for advice on buying a “beamer“. He describes the word as meaning a projector in Germany (it also means the same in the Netherlands).

Since the time when I lived in the Netherlands I have been using the word in English, most people immediately understand what it means, and I believe it’s a better option than the word “projector“. The only possible confusion in this regard is the term Beamer is slang for a BMW car. But it’s pretty rare to talk about cars and computer display methods in the same sentence so this shouldn’t be a problem.

It is reported that a theater in Florida has changed the name of The Vagina Monologues to The Hoo-Haa Monologues after a complaint.

How does a medical term become so offensive? Is Hoo-Haa less offensive than other terms such as Beaver?

The Vagina Monologues is old news anyway. The idea was surprising when it was new, but that was a while ago. Anyone who wants to complain has really missed their chance.

Wikisaurus has a collection of synonyms for vagina, maybe a better name than Hoo-Haa could be found?

Wouter wrote an interesting post about names. I wonder how many people know me as Russell SELinux…

Recently I had someone call my mobile phone asking whether I wanted to change phone providers. I asked them if they could hold the line – then I put my phone down and went back to work.

It took over eight minutes before they hung up on me.

Next time someone phone-spams you try to beat that record, please post a comment on this blog entry if you can beat eight minutes and twenty seconds of dead-air.

The call might have lasted longer if I had periodically picked up the phone and said “I’m almost ready“. It’s something I may test in the future.

On a Debian mailing list someone claimed that it was inconvenient to use ssh tunneling for sending and receiving email due to the issue of broken connections.

On my source-dump blog I have posted an entry with xinetd configuration for doing this in a reliable manner.

service smtps
{
       disable         = no
       socket_type     = stream
       wait            = no
       user            = USER
       server          = /usr/bin/ssh
       server_args     = USER@HOST -C /home/USER/bin/localsmtp
       bind            = 127.0.0.1
}

service pop2
{
       disable         = no
       socket_type     = stream
       wait            = no
       user            = USER
       server          = /usr/bin/ssh
       server_args     = USER@HOST -C /home/USER/bin/localpop
       bind            = 127.0.0.1
}

I have the above in my xinetd configuration to automatically generate ssh tunnels. I configure my MUA to talk to localhost on the pop2 port for POP connections to my real POP server and I configure Postfix (my local MTA) to relay all mail through localhost on the smtps port with the directive “relayhost = 127.0.0.1:465“.

The localpop script contains the command “nc 127.0.0.1 110” and the localsmtp script contains the command “nc 127.0.0.1 25“. I use the localpop and localsmtp scripts so that if I change anything on the server end then I can easily adjust the scripts without reconfiguring the workstations that relay their mail.

The same configuration can be used whenever you have shell access via ssh to a machine that runs a MTA. It’s not difficult and the ssh connections are terminated whenever the MUA or the MTA that initiated them times out and closes it’s connection. This means that there is no need to have cron jobs monitoring the ssh tunnels or anything else that is difficult.