Thoughts from the abyss

Well, I haven’t posted in awhile so I figured I’d better. We’re starting to get the rain effects off tropical storm Ernesto now. We’re actually supposed to get 2-3 inches of rain this weekend, so I can stay in and do some stuff I’ve been meaning to get done. Anyways, back to my week.

My week started with fighting on the phone with Verizon DSL for about three days. My area was experiencing problems on the network in a radius of about 60 miles with at least four different people that I know. Yet everytime I and they called, we got the usual it’s your computer or equipment and we’re not experiencing any trouble crap. I just love that excuse. After I don’t know how many hours on the phone I had enough and called the customer relations department. I was promptly put on the line with a technical supervisor who had myself, and my friends all fixed up in a matter of hours…how about that huh. After that ordeal, I have had enough and so I switched over my phone and DSL service to business class. Now when I call, I can at least talk to some geeks who are on par with what I know. It’s hard to find good tech support these days. And it’s even more frustrating to talk to these people after I have troubleshot my own network before I bother calling. That’s what they don’t understand. Before I waste the time calling, I go over all of my stuff to make sure it’s not me. What I love is when they start asking you what OS you’re running and of course I run Linux, and naturally they state the “we don’t support that so we can’t help you routine.” It’s annoying, but I shouldn’t have to worry about that anymore.

Let’s see what else this week…oh yeah wireless support on Linux. I’ve been enjoying my wireless card working on my laptop now in CentOS under the Madwifi drivers for almost two years. All of a sudden after an upgrade it quite working and was doing some very strange things. Well, before all I ever needed was two RPM packages but now where I obtain them, they’ve split it into three packages that I was unaware of. After I don’t know how many hours, I figured this out and now I have my wireless back up and running, finally.
Next I decided to start playing with remastering Knoppix this week too. I’ve done one remaster previously before I had much Linux knowledge and I have no idea how I got it to work before, because it’s a real PITA. I bought a Knoppix Hacks book written by Kyle Rankin. He’s a younger guy like myself, and I had the privilege of hearing one of his talks at one of the last open source events I attend. I almost have the procedure down pat, but I didn’t get time to get it finished this week before the work week ended. I have a need to produce a couple custom distros for some things at work I want to do for diskless clients. It’s interesting though how much you can pack onto one CD.

Since it’s a rainy day I figured I’d blabber on for bit on here while I wait for an open source package to download that I heard about. It’s called BackTrack and supposed to be a decent network security suite. I guess we’ll find out. I decided to take a break from watching old 50s and 60s Sci-Fi that my friend has been getting me into lately and play with some software that I’ve wanted to try out.
I’ve been enjoying a lot more traffic on my site. I don’t think anybody is really reading the posts, but my how-tos are getting hit up quite a bit. I’ve been averaging around 10,000 pages dished out the past two months, August there was almost 12,000. Of course, a lot of that traffic is bot traffic from search engines scraping the site, but none the less it’s nice to see some traffic finally and a few comments on the how-tos. I’m new this whole blogging thing, and I really started this website with no direction in mind at all. I wanted it to be a mixture of me being me, and a lot to do with open source stuff, so I think it’s coming together nicely finally. I’m grateful to have a friend hosting this for me at the moment and eventually I’d like to build my own server and host myself, but for now I can’t quite afford that. Ironically though, this very server dishing out this content was my very first server I ever built for my friend when he introduced me to open source, so it’s double the pleasure for me. Technology is fun. Well just another normal day in the life of a geek, so back to geek stuff.