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Blog server outage – and being away

by | Oct 22, 2005 | evilzenscientist, Uncategorized

Typical isn’t it – you get on a plane and one of your serves dies.

My blog server decided to complain about the lack of attention last Sunday evening – just as I was getting on a flight to London. Cycling the power really didn’t help – it needed fsck on the filesystem.

Now I’m back it’s a lot happier.

Apologies for the lack of updates in the last week!

Novell patching

by | Oct 17, 2005 | evilzenscientist, patching, Uncategorized

I seem to have won the task of writing a short paper on ‘how to update and patch Novell systems in the enterprise’.

I’m working on this in conjunction with my ZENworks 7 Linux Management white paper – which is still being written. (Sorry it’s late – I’m on the road again!)

My summary so far is:

NetWare – use ZENworks Server Management. Deploy CPKs of the Consolidated Support Pack
SLES 8 – use ZENworks Linux Management. Mirror content from a YaST Online Update mirror.
SLES 9 – use ZENworks Linux Management. Mirror content from update.novell.com. Note: Make sure you have migrated your SUSE portal account!
NLD 9 – as SLES 9
RHEL – use ZENworks Linux Management. I know it’s not a Novell product – but mirror content from Red Hat Network using your RHN credentials.

There are probably some other platforms I need to add here – small biz server and some applications spring to mind – but I’ll be working off this list.

Comments welcome.

Sudoku

by | Oct 10, 2005 | evilzenscientist, Uncategorized

I posted a few months ago about how Sudoku had hit the UK – the wave has now reached the US.

United have a set of puzzles in their in-flight magazine; I see them in newspapers; they have been on CNN – everywhere.

Bored on a flight I tried them – and they are certainly interesting. The harder puzzles really appeal to my sense of problem solving and pattern matching.

So – somewhat addicted – I purchased some cool software – Soduko from SadMan Software.

Great – I’ve now got an endless supply of really hard problems – along with built in tutorial advice. It’s interesting – since reading up on some of the pattern matching concepts I’ve halved my time to complete some of the harder problems.