Brett's Blog

Finally got round to putting the HG612 on my connection… this might make some people a bit upset

Max Speed = 123412…. thats right 123MB!

But at the moment its capped at 70mb

Current speed :

I think I can coax a bit more speed out of this as well!

So here is a picture of gnome-disk-utility doing a read speed test on my /home partition……

And for comparison a read speed test on a 6 disk raid 10….

The difference 2 ssd’s make…

Hey ya all, time for a relaunch of my blog!

Now I am 100% GNU/Linux on my system’s here at home (at least on the live boxes) I have decided to get the blog rolling again!

All my windows machines are now VM’s and are used for learning and development work for my job, its nice using VMs for testing as I can snapshot them break them, and restore them

I have chosen to use vmware to do my virtual hosting on as its the system I use at work and I am comfortable with it, the only downside to this is that I have to use a virtual workstation to access the console of the esxi server. I have read that vmware are bring a flash based admin center out for ESXi and that will make my life a lot easier (yes I know flash… but its better than the C# version at the mo)

You can probably guess what my distro of choice is… Gentoo!  Yes the laptop is a bit slow at compiling but it gets there in the end.

I am still working through learning how to create android apps, and pretty much having to learn how to program in java and its proving a challenging experience but I am enjoying it as learning how to program is something I have always wanted to do.

I will try to keep the blog updated from time to time, I am aiming on a post a weekish

For the interested people here are my details of my boxes :-

• Name : dreadnaught
• OS : Gentoo 64bit (Gnome DE)
• Role : Main workstation, with vmwork workstation for testing
• VMs Hosted : Windows 7 test workstation , 2008 R2 DC2 , XP test workstation, Windows 7 main workstation
• Spec : 16GB Ram, i7-2600K , 2 x 120gb SSD’s (/ and /home as a raid 0), 4 x 1.5TB drives raid 10 for storage / VMs

• Name : limbo
• OS : Gentoo 64bit
• Role : File Server (NFS+Samba) , DHCP server, TFTP server , royles.co webhost
• VMs Hosted : None
• Spec : HP Microserver with 8GB ram, Athlon II Neo N36L, 1 x 1TB drive (os) 4 x 2TB drives (Storage, Raid 5)

• Name : titan
• OS : Gentoo Hardened 64bit
• Role : Web Hsting Server sites (hosted with oneandone), Quassel
• VMs Hosted : None
• Spec : 2GB Ram, Opteron 1216HE, 250GB mirrored drives

• Name : dantless
• OS : Gentoo 64bit (Gnome DE)
• Role : Laptop
• VMs Hosted : None
• Spec : 3GB Ram, Intel T2330, 500GB SSD Hybrid drive

• Name : valiant
• OS : ESXi
• Role : ESXi VM host server
• VMs Hosted : 2008 R2 DC1+WDS , Exchange Server, SCCM Server
• Spec : 8GB Ram, Intel Xeon, 4 x 1TB drives for vms

Well I have decided to install a test site on www.royles.co (yep .co) this is currently sat on my server box at home so it might be a little slow at times

New services on royles.co : Zabbix , Mantis
Webmail is coming soon! (Honest)

Ok,
My pc is currently dual booting with a gentoo install and a windows 7 install for gaming
However I wish to move to a pure gentoo (GNU/Linux) environment
Does any one have any suggestions?

I can only see these options

A) Don’t
B) Stop playing WoW
C) Stop raiding in WoW

The reasoning for this is that WoW’s performance under wine is not good enough for raiding.

Does any one have any tips for getting WoW to work better in Gentoo?

I have moved my internet connection away from Sky and joined the Digital Region Network via ask4. Could not have asked for a better experience in all parts of the signup process.
And here is a speed test result

Linux arkari 2.6.39-gentoo-r1 #5 SMP Fri Jun 17 23:53:54 BST 2011 x86_64 Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-2600K CPU @ 3.40GHz GenuineIntel GNU/Linux

Well, after looking over the changes made to Gnome3 shortly before release, it looked like they have sorted out the dual screen bugs that put me off it at the start, so yep I added the gnome overlay unmasked a couple of USE flags and 215 packages… and emerge –newuse -avuD @world and now I am running gnome 3, and I will be honest.. I LOVE IT! hopfully a screenshot or 2 will be up soon.

Looks like failbook have done it again so time to totally delete my account from there just twitter for me (Link here)

Skype is now owned by…. Microsoft for $8 Billion! ouch thats a lot of loose change, for me I have ran emerge -C skype as I don’t want it on my machine anymore.  I will take a look at enigma or another app for my voip needs.
New project is to learn how to use emacs

As you can gather from my previous post I am using Gentoo again, not sure why I can’t seem to get along with *buntu or *deb based distros, its not that I don’t understand or know how to use them. I just feel happier with Gentoo and the way it does the configuration of packages, and the fact I can trim down to just what I need installed.

I am however back on Gnome 2.32.1 as Gnome 3 did not work for me!

After migrating my data, my server is back on Ubuntu Server (don’t ask) with working NFS mount to my pc with my distfiles now network shared.

I am doing my best not to have any Microsoft Windows operating systems on my home network, and just base my entire system on a free stack, however I am not against the use of propriety systems

One good piece of software I have found is called Back in Time. Its almost a clone of apple time machine, using rsync and cron jobs.

Work is getting extremely busy now Chris has left to go and work for Civica, I have had to step up to become to team leader, a role I am finding challenging and rewarding.

Thats a quick update on where I am at the moment.