Mentioned more than 2 years ago, we’ve finally started to use it. Jim and I are migrating as many of our physical machines to VMware Server virtual machines hosted on very nice Dell PowerEdge servers running CentOS 4.4 as we can.
I kind of thought I was getting away from this kind of stuff when I left Housing, but obviously not.
It’s been quite some time since I’ve put anything up here, so this may end up being a rambling mess.
Hoopeston Area lost a good superintendent last Saturday to an apparent heart attack, Mr. Conolly will be missed.
At CITES, I’ve been working on an RFP for a solution to support our DNS infrastructure. The most I can do is to link to a similar effort being run by The University of Michigan. Hopefully ours will be on the street sometime in January, then I get to work on a committee to evaluate the proposals and maybe some evaluation equipment.
On consulting sites:
The holidays are coming up, I’m not sure what to get anyone, as usual. Hopefully the utilitarian gifts and gift certificates will work again this year. Now, if we can just make it home without borrowing a trailer to haul Robin’s gifts in.
And, as usual, I’m way behind on getting pictures of Robin posted. Maybe next week after we’re done driving all over the Illiana area…
Starting with the walkthrough from the Q*Box project, I’ve gotten a base Bering uClibc 2.4.2 image installed on a Compact Flash card in a PC Engines WRAP board.
Continue reading
It’s always great when someone new discovers the wonderful mascot name that is the Cornjerkers.
Being able to see the referrer logs for the school district website make these easier to spot.
This wins my uptime trophy. Proxyarp firewalls seem to be amazingly stable.
[xxxxxx@xxxxxxx betka]$ uptime
9:26pm up 1004 days, 3:51, 1 user, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
Hopefully Jim won’t hit me too hard for posting this kb article.
Oh my, this is a mess. Trying to keep amavisd-new up to date, using the fine RPMs provided by Dag Wieers. First, apt-get tells me that amavisd-new is being held back because perl-Time-HiRes is less than 1.55. RHEL4 has an updated RPM, so download the SRPM from RedHat Network and rpmbuild --rebuild it, all is better, right? Nope, amavisd-new still needs perl(Digest::MD5) > 2.22. No handy rpm from RHEL4, it’s part of the main perl package. So, maybe I can just update it with CPAN (perl -MCPAN -e shell). After configuring CPAN, and remembering the odd commands to try an install, I get this error when doing install Digest::MD5:
Makefile:84: *** missing separator. Stop
Luckily, google seems to have indexed some new mailing list pages since the last time I searched for this, and I found this mailing list post. So, drop out of CPAN, export LANG=en_US, climb back into CPAN and now the build works. Silly broken multilang support.
Yay, up to date on amavisd-new. Now to get the other packages up to date and update the primary mail host.
I’m not sure how to react to this post on boingboing.
For one, the student did (probably) violate the AUP he (should have) signed at some point. But, if the filtering software really is that bad, can you blame him for trying to bypass it? Judging by what he’s doing now, I’d say he’s on a path to a career in computer support….
Are there any good ticket systems out there?
Continue reading
One of those subjects that make me twinge: computers in classrooms can’t replace teachers. Students don’t just magically learn better or faster because they get more time with technology? I’m flabbergasted.
I’ve got to be careful here, since technology in the classroom pays 100% of my part-time job (and my full-time job probably wouldn’t exist if college students didn’t need access to computers and the internet). The part-time job is at a smaller k-12 district in east central Illinois dealing with the behind the scenes part of delivering the internet to the desktop, with Linux based web proxy servers, email, and other infrastructure.
In my limited direct dealings with teachers, I’ve noticed that some are able to use new tools better than others. Dealing with change is something we all have to do, some grasp it, become inspired and move forward. Others look at it as an obstacle and curse it. Most of us are somewhere in between, embracing what we like, dealing with what we must and resisting that which makes us uncomfortable.
There isn’t a magic box that we can place in the classroom to instantly transfer knowledge to students, there will always need to be an instructor who knows the material and is willing to transfer that knowledge to students using methods that keep the students interested. This isn’t always going to happen, some humans just have no interest in science (or math or english or wood shop or…), but we can hope that one instructor finds that at least one way to connect with one student.