Andy Paton's most Technical Adventure

I'm still running a Lotus Notes LFS Fax server on Windows Workgroup 3.1. I've hoped Year 2000 would kill it, I hoped the p75 32Mb IBM PC would have died by now. But yet its still working! Dam! Well the time has come to decommission it. Of course open source alternative can be found in Hylafax . I've built my test server on a Gentoo distribution (2.6.8 kernel) on a Eversham Voyager, Celeron 800Mhz & 128Mb Memory. Modem is a 3Com Courier V.Everything 56K . Will do the move over Christmas, pending a security risk assessment. Expect the micro "how-to" section soon.

I've been having a few graphics related problems, which turned out to be an intermittent GPU fan on my Nvidia TI-4200 Gainward card. Its out of warranty and no amount of cleaning would make it the fan reliable. I was about to give up when found The Coolingshop , Vantec Iceberq 4 Pro VGA Cooling Kit. Its a direct replacement for my fan and heatsink. (Even has a blue light). Ordered with free delivery and resurrected my TI-4200 within two days!

Install of Gentoo AMD64 on a Sun Java Workstation W1100z http://uk.sunsolve.sun.com/handbook_pub/Systems/W1100z/W1100z.html Install of Gentoo 2004.2 AMD64 Universal CDROM, with a stage 3 install and KDE. Due to time limits I was unable to a Stage 1 or test audio and NVIDIA drivers. Boot from Live CD Gentoo 2004.2 AMD64. livecd root # lspci 0000:00:06.0 PCI bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] AMD-8111 PCI (rev 07) 0000:00:07.0 ISA bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] AMD-8111 LPC (rev 05) 0000:00:07.1 IDE interface: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] AMD-8111 IDE (rev 03) 0000:00:07.2 SMBus: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] AMD-8111 SMBus 2.0 (rev 02) 0000:00:07.3 Bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] AMD-8111 ACPI (rev 05) 0000:00:07.5 Multimedia audio controller: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] AMD-8111 AC97 Audio (rev 03) 0000:00:0a.0 PCI bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] AMD-8131 PCI-X Bridge (rev 12) 0000:00:0a.1 PIC: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] AMD-8131 PCI-X APIC (rev 01) 0000:00:...

Sunday 2nd October, just surfed the web and closed down Firefox, and noticed that my network activity lights are still going. Now, I'm paranoid when it comes to my computer. Sygate firewall is installed on the W2K box, so checked its logs and c:\winnt\system32\drives\npt.sys was sending constant requests to the network (port 53 DNS). npt.sys was described as “NPF Driver – Time Extensions”, I doubled checking with Google, npt.sys looked a valid W2K program. Out comes Ethereal network sniffer, simultaneously I logging into my IPCOP firewall and run tcpdump (filtering out ssh traffic). Both programs identify that my PC is sending out DNS requests for “urx.your-getting-rapped.co.uk”.(unresolvable) I do not like this and reboot, just in case it will go away on its own. It doesn't! I run free AVG AV, I download the latest virus definitions and scan the windows directory. No virus found! The DNS requests are happening every second, so I decide to shut down all non-essent...

A micro howto on installing Gentoo 2004.1 on the Sun Microsystems V60x . First of all follow the Installation Handbook at the Gentoo site, its an absolute must. I came along problems after booting from the Gentoo CDROM and not been able to see SCSI Controller and NIC devices. Booted from the Gentoo 2004.1 2004.1 Universal x86 cdrom . Using the default boot Gentoo did not find the SCSI controller and NIC devices. Using “lspci” command I identified the Adaptec AIC-7902 SCSI controller and Intel Corp. 82546EB Gigabit Ethernet Controller (1000baseT). livecd # lspci 0000:00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corp. E7501 Memory Controller Hub (rev 01) 0000:00:00.1 Class ff00: Intel Corp. E7000 Series Host RASUM Controller (rev 01) 0000:00:03.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corp. E7000 Series Hub Interface C PCI-to-PCI Bridge (rev 01) 0000:00:03.1 Class ff00: Intel Corp. E7000 Series Hub Interface C RASUM Controller (rev 01) 0000:00:1d.0 USB Controller: Intel Corp. 82801CA/CAM USB ...