Archive for January, 2012

From x61s to x60s

Sunday, January 22nd, 2012

Well. Once more I picked up some old equipment at work. This time an x60s. I have recently gotten my hand on a x61s. The x61s is a wonderful machine by most standards, especially as I bought a large 8-cell battery and a 64GB SSD for it. One major disadvantage however, is the fan and power usage: Even ad idle, light websurfing it is so hot that the fan has to spin so fast that it is annoying to listen to.

The switch from x61s to x60s took around 60 seconds: unscrew the screw holding the harddrive into place. Swap the drive. Do the same with the battery. And power on. Ubuntu 11.10 booted just fine. No errors whatsoever. But then again. I had forseen this might happen, so I was already running an 32-bit version of ubuntu 11.10. Had I run an x86_64 version I wouldn’t have been that lucky as the cpu in my x60s is on 32-bit.

So to sum up: The x60s is a  teeny weeny bit slower than the x60s, but has marginally better power-envelope, but most importantly is quite a bit more silent to use! I will recommend the x60s over the x61s for the noise alone.

Ubuntu and Cisco anyconnect

Monday, January 16th, 2012

I recently installed ubuntu 11.10 in a laptop. I then had the need to connect that laptop to a cisco based anyconnect VPN. I could have gone the route of trying to install some cisco anyconnect software. I could also just issue

sudo apt-get install networkmanageropenconnect-gnome

And then configure the vpn using network-manager. I choose the latter ;-)

Hurraayyy for OSS

HP-UX filecache_max tunable and system unresponsiveness

Thursday, January 12th, 2012

During work today I tweaked the online tunable called filecache_max on an HP-UX 11.31 box. From 1 to 5%. Went fine. I tested what I needed to test and then decided to lower the value again. So I ran kctune filecache_max=2% and then nothing.

Everything(!) stopped working. Well, the system could be pinged, but the other cluster node started to complain about its sister disapperaing. I littlerally got cold hands. This was supposed to be an online operation. I waited for 4 very very long minutes (being a computer professional have learned me to wait for stuff to finish).

After 4 minutes the system was back. Running as nothing had happened. Everything littlerally just froze up trying to reduce the filecache. I learnt it the hard way. Hope this post will prevent you from getting into the same kind of troubles.

Hyundai i30cw blue

Sunday, January 1st, 2012

For new years eve i rented an Hyundai i30cw blue. Compared to other cars in Københavns delebiler, this is one of the more interesting cars to drive. It feels good to drive. Has what you would expect it to have of equipment and all the room you need for a little family. One of the more peculiar things is the onboard computer that keeps telling you to shift gears. On the negative side, the transmission feels a bit platsic-ish. I’ll give it 3 out of 5 stars.

 

i30cw blue

No cola again again

Sunday, January 1st, 2012

I had a blast with coca cola for 4 months (2011-09-01 to 2012-01-01) and now it is time to stop again. It is not healthy for me. Teeth and weight. So I’ll give it at try of staying ‘sober’ for 2 more years. New target is 2014-01-01.