August 18, 2008 at 7:40 pm · Filed under Techie Stuff
I have been working for a while on a new fileserver using Solaris and ZFS, and it’s working like a dream 
I wanted to integrate my fileserver with my Active Directory so that I wouldn’t have to login to the fileserver every time I reboot the desktop, and to help reduce the management overhead of two different account databases.
For anyone who’s interested I’ve written a wiki article showing all the steps I took and some hints as to how to set it all up. I’ve been talking with Simon Breden who wrote an excellent series of blog posts on the first stages of a Solaris ZFS fileserver and he will be providing links from his site to my article.
I hope that it’s useful to people, if anyone has any comments or feedback, please leave it as a comment on this post, or on the Talk page of the wiki article.
You can see the article here.
July 29, 2008 at 8:03 am · Filed under My Life
Well again I haven’t written much, I’ve had a new job before I go off to college and it’s kept me tired out. I’m working behind the reception desk for a childrens charity, meeting and greeting etc. We do birthday parties and it’s great to see how much the kids enjoy it 
If you’re really interested and have some time on your hands, you can see the website for the charity here.
I haven’t had many projects to work on recently so I’ve just been playing some games and hanging out with Taz after work. Incidentally Taz is going to be coming over towards the end of August and we’re both going to start university together in September. We’re not going to be on the same course but I hope we’ll get to have lunch together sometimes
Oh yea almost forgot, as the title of the post says, it’s too damn hot right now. Thats another reason I haven’t posted much, I’ve just been laying around with as many fans as I can find pointed at me
Hmm not much else to talk about right now, I guess I’ll sign off before I start to drone on. I’ll leave you with something from youtube, it’s a band called Hazmat Modine who I heard on the radio a couple of weeks ago, they’re so good I’m actually going to buy the album.
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July 13, 2008 at 3:35 pm · Filed under My Life
I know, I haven’t posted for ages. Well I do have a fairly good excuse, I’ve just got back from Holland where I was visiting Taz and her family. I didn’t get any souveniers as I didn’t consider myself a tourist, and my camera still isn’t fixed so I couldn’t take that but you’ll just have to take my word for it that I was there.
Unfortunately I think I took the rain with me, so we couldn’t do most of the things we planned like swimming in the local lake, or going for a bike ride down by the river. It was pretty relaxed though, and we managed to spend some quality time together which is the point.
I haven’t got a lot to talk about at the moment as I’m don’t want to give away all the details of my holiday, but I’m planning a series of posts in the Techie category for things that I’ve been working on recently.
Just wanted to let my small reader-base know I’m still around and I haven’t forgotten about you Maybe one day this blog will actually become better known and I’ll get comments on more of my posts
June 22, 2008 at 11:35 pm · Filed under Techie Stuff
I recently upgraded my phone and got a Blackberry 8310 Curve which is quite nice and didn’t cost me anything extra. There’s just a couple of things with it that I don’t like, and one thing that really pisses me off. Firstly, RIM (manufacturers of Blackberries) have very cunningly created their own protocol which email must use, and suprise….you have to buy it from them.
I have a very stable and useable email system of my own, which I can access through any of the commonly accepted protocols already available, IMAP, POP and webmail inclusive. So why won’t my Blackberry access any of these? Because RIM want to sell more copies of their Blackberry Enterprise Server.
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June 16, 2008 at 11:50 pm · Filed under My Life, Techie Stuff
Yep I’ve got my flights and car booked, I’m all ready to go on a little holiday to Holland. Taz is frantically trying to find things that we can do, apparently there’s a bowling contest on so I’ll have to turn up and show my terrible ability. Also, the dates I’ve booked means I’ll be with Taz for her birthday so I’m really happy with that
I hear there’s a disco of some sort on while I’m there too, I asked what sort: “A swimming disco”. Wow, thats a new one for me, so we get to pay extra to swim with coloured lights? Cool!
Anyway just a little update for my readers, nothing much interesting happening except I’m still working on the website for www.genestate.com. I’ve managed to overcome several obstacles with Ruby on Rails that I was struggling with, but I’ve still got to make a system that handles reminders and records of monthly payments.
I’ll post again in a few days, seems like there’s more happening these days
June 13, 2008 at 10:08 pm · Filed under My Life, Techie Stuff
I know, I know, I haven’t been blogging much recently. I just haven’t felt like writing much. Don’t get wrong, things are going well, very well in fact. I’ve got the the smoking kicked, I’m getting ready to go back to university in September and I’m arranging to go to Holland to visit Taz.
I’ve got several projects I’m working on, you might have noticed that this blog has now moved domains. I thought I should get a domain for my personal stuff and one for the potentially commercial projects I’m involved with. This blog will be staying here and mattharrison.org will be new home from now on.
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May 21, 2008 at 8:13 pm · Filed under Techie Stuff
Wow I’m back I’ve had problems coming out of my ears recently. Anyone else with they’d never started with computers? I got a new machine as I mentioned in a previous post, and thats all fine and lovely, enough to make all my friends dribble.
My main problem is my fileserver. Its an old dual PII-350 with 512Mb RAM and about 900Gb of disk space. As you can guess, the disk space is the important thing and I try to keep it as well protected as possible. At the moment there’s 6 disks in 3 mirrored pairs, then a stripe of the 3 pairs to make one large, mirrored space. Using LVM I’m dividing up the space into usable portions and mouting on my linux box.
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April 11, 2008 at 11:37 pm · Filed under Techie Stuff
For those who use Second Life, I’m sure the thought has occurred that land is expensive and that often restricts peoples’ creativity. Well the future may be here in the form of Open Simulator, an open source project to create a virtual grid system very much like Second Life.
The OpenSim project allowed users to download and run the code necessary to host your own simulator, with the possibility of connecting it to one of the various public grids that exist. While still being in development, much of the system works as expected. Scripting is still hazy although that is the focus of the dev team at this time.
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April 7, 2008 at 5:33 am · Filed under My Life
I like blogs. Wait let me rephrase that, I like the idea of having a blog. What I don’t like so much is the way I have to think of things to write about. Don’t get my wrong I love writing my posts, and it’s even better when people find it interesting enough to leave a comment. It’s just that I never kept a diary or anything, so I’m not used to writing down every little thought. I don’t want to worry that what I’m writing isn’t appropriate or isn’t interesting, but I can’t be certain unless I get feedback.
I try to write a post when something happens, or when I have something to talk about, although on that second point I could be here forever. Right now however, not much is happening and I’m scraping the barrel to keep this blog running.
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March 21, 2008 at 2:33 am · Filed under Techie Stuff
I know the crew that argues constantly over using Windows or *nix, I try not to get involved in this because I know each has it’s place and can work well when used properly. No matter how hard I try I keep finding myself crippled thanks to Windows and it’s “user friendliness”.
I was doing some work and accidentally pulled the network cable from my machine. No biggie you say, plug it back in, wait for DHCP to renew and good to go, oh if only that was it. Upon boot my machine now refuses to start any networking services that I depend upon.
According to Google, the errors I’m getting only appear on Vista (I’m on XP) so thats helpful to know. When referring to Microsoft’s knowledgebase, the problem I’m having was fixed when XP Service Pack 2 was released. Oh really? That’s funny because I’ve been on Service Pack 2 for about 2 years, and this is a new problem today.
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