Misc.: August 2005 Archives

There's a lot of things I'd like to do in the infamous near future. These include:

Getting my soekris board up and functional as a router. I have the system built (LFS), I just need to copy what I need over (to fit on a 128MB CF card), and finish writing my bootscripts. It's a bigger pain than what it sounds like.

Reformatting my router (and fileserver) over, so I can figure out where the mysterious 30GB went to that seem to have disappeared (dependant upon the first item listed here)

Getting a new video card to replace my 9700Pro that died - preferably a video card with a DVI output and the ability to render Half-Life 2 at 1920x1080. You know, on a 54" TV. Of sorts.

Obtain a good laptop. For cheap. Install every little useful tool I can think of, and then image it. Throw in a nice null modem cable while we're at it. (Note: must include integrated gigabit NIC and linux-supported integrated wifi.)

Get my 400MHz "jukebox" in my room functional as a diskless* node. A wireless diskless node, that is. I've got the system built, configured, and the boot CD made (all 4MB of it). My only problem is that the NFS server where the file system is to be kept, is on reiser4. This for some reason, breaks NFS horribly. Oops.

Organize all of my MySQL databases, as odd as that sounds. I need a computer running MySQL, dedicated, and then I need another computer running SQL Server 2000, dedicated. On computers without monitors, locked up elsewhere, like a good server should be.

Decide which vhost to use SSL on... I finally figured out all of the SSL Certificate Authority crap, and now that I actually know what I'm doing when I generate a server cert, I can only use one cert per IP for web hosting. I'll soon kill off the sql., so the dav. will probably get it (though dev. would be nice also).

Drop my current (and future) wireless encryption, and learn how to setup a proper VPN under linux. This is one area where I really like Windows Server, setting up a PPTP or an IPSEC VPN takes all of a month. Wait, even if it took twice that, it's still beat my record of setting one up (having been trying for, well, months on end). In all fairness, a VPN under windows takes all of, well, three minutes to setup. That's assuming you're slow at clicking "next."

Find something to do with my vacuum...wait, I mean the 2U rackmount that was "donated". It's got the dual redundant PSUs, dual 500MHz CPUs with 1MB L2 cache each, and not to mention the amazing four 10k RPM SCSI drives...that happen to be 4.3GB each. In hardware RAID5, so that's a plus, but the thing is LOUD and I have no place to put it...

Write up some nice HOWTOs on compiling all of my favorite stuff from source, and version them, as I commonly do.

Update my PXE HOWTO...problem is, I can't think of much that needs updating, it's a pretty complete document (with a decent amount of resources, too).

Level my 46 Gnome Mage to 60. Curse you World of Warcraft for sapping away 14 days of my life. Even if that was spread over two months so far.

Beat Final Fantasy IX again. It was an amazing game, and it still is. Especially since I just obtained a images of it, and a PS1 emulator (cross-platform too! Windows and Linux!). Once I get the new video card in question, playing THAT at 1920x1080 would be awesome.

Find a good, cheap gamepad for previously mentioned game.

I've got LDAP working, to the point where I can login with PAM using it. Now I just have to put it in pratice. And, well, use it.

Find a good LDAP administration program, that's NOT phpLDAPadmin. Nothing against it, but if I could kill off my php*admin interfaces and replace them with quality GUI programs (with SSL support!), I would in a heartbeat. (MySQL already has them.)

Replace my existing frames + GoogleX + bookmarks script home page with a nice AJAX one that combines the three.

Prerequisite to previous point: use AJAX enough to do something with it.

Fix all of my music collections' file names and tags... yeah, right (though I am mostly there).

Clean up my surroundings.

More as I think them up...