Progressive Day

Posted by stephen on Wednesday, 16th November, 2005 @ 18:09

It's been a pretty good day all in all, my first day back in London since my holiday, the usual M25 slowness, but otherwise a good journey in and back out.

The work day started with a trip to Newham Council's special portacabin full of surplus to requirements, retired equipment that the company I work for tends to inherit for our various evil schemes. And in amongst many, many Alcatel switches were too little blue cubic surprises. Cobalt Qubes to be precise. A quick Google and it appears to be easy to install these cute little boxes with a more modern Linux distro and make them useful again. Watch this space! Which reminds me, I must dig out my empeg and have a little fun with that one of these days.

Then back to the office with our booty, and I got on with setting up the new set top box server to boot the Pace DSL4000 we have at Carpenters. After lots of fiddling, it's working nicely, apparently multicasting a TFTP boot image. Not sure I believe that it's not being unicasted at the moment, we'll have to see what happens when I move more STBs to it.

Talking of set top boxes, we'll also be deploying 12 Amino Aminet 110 boxes at Carpenters, the same we used on the beta site. So another job is sorting out our boot server to provide software images for these boxes.

I've noticed a lot of my search engine referred traffic is people looking up information about the Aminet 110 STB, mostly people looking for the default password, along with some other less dubious stuff. I'd love to be able to write a few howtos about the things you can do with this rather cool little box, however I suspect our NDA prohibits this, so sorry guys, you'll have to find out for yourself.

Today I also discovered LDAP configuration support is now actually built into the ISC DHCP server, so I'll be configuring that tomorrow and another document will no doubt appear in the docs/carpenters section to go along with my tweakings.

Richard's decided he's getting fat and doesn't wanna eat lunch any more. And as I've already got fat, rather poor and am lazy enough not to want to wander into Stratford everyday on my own, I've decided to make myself a little lunch to take in each day. Tomorrow's tuna sandwiches are prepared and in the fridge. We'll see how long I last and/or how long it takes Richard to break.