Happy new year read more...

Since I was in Cairo and liked to use internet with (Debian) linux, I tried to configure the prepayed Mobinil Sim in a Sony Ericsson MD300 USB 3G modem. read more...

An Open Source / Standards based SAN (Storage Area Network) is within reach. With a free / open source standard for AoE (Ata over Ethernet) by Cordaid, a recent Linux distribution, a standard ethernet card and switch now you can build your own SAN. read more...

Finarea / Betamax is one of the biggerst companies that offers cheap voip minutes. Ther is a nice *nix script from Enzo Michelangeli and Simon G to check your credit or freedays from your voip account. Unfortunately it was not working with my jumblo account. read more...

Sometimes my modem seems to hang or has lost its connection somehow. And after a restart it gets a connection. So I made a little script to do this automattically for me from now on. It has been build for a Zyxel 650 HW31 but can easily be adjusted to other modems that can talk telnet. Make this thing executable, and run it every hour or so by cron and it should do the trick for you to reset your modem when there was no connection possible with google.com. It should probably test for more than one address .... but I do know some people who say "internet is broken" when they can't reach google. read more...

Today I attended the NLUUG Netherlands Unix User Group Conference about storage and filesystems. The most amazing talk was about a "Jip en Janneke" cluster that only consumes 10 Watts in total. read more...

After setting up this website again, see my post "plone with eggs" I have one more itch. On the old website we used to show a random quotatione from a sql database full with quotes. In dutch we called that thing "citator" the english equivalent is more or less something like "quotator". The next challenge will be to reuse our mysql quotator database in this plone site. read more...

Do you like to reuse your old hardware (desktop or laptop) or would you like to have a single server to maintain which you can connect to from multiple dumb terminals? This article will guide you step-by-step to make a live image (cd or disk) that can connect to a remote server (X session on the remote server over secure ssh connection) . This image can also be used on systems where ordinary ltsp clients network boot (wireless laptop, pcmcia network cards) does not work. I imagine this would provide solutions to use an old laptops with pcmcia network or with wireless as a Thin Client device, that can connect to a central (LTSP) GNU/Linux server. read more...

This new year my old laptop gets a new use as a music server and a secure remote terminal. It took quite a while to get the the right settings to use the whole display. Also it was a struggle to get sound working. read more...

Why a post about calling my mother? read more...

At my work (systems programmer at http://www.SARA.nl) I am part of the team to setup the new website for High Performance Computing and Visualisation. At my formerr job at Zest software I worked with Plone. During the discussions in the website team I got an itch to (re)setup this website. In this post I will comment on my experience on setting up a Plone 3 site from scratch with the Quills blog product. read more...

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