So what’s been happening lately?
Blake has gone to his grandparents’ place for the weekend. He was so excited. Unfortunately, he is sick at the moment and has been going to bed early the last few nights.
I’ve got the flu the last couple of days. It seems just as I get over it, it’s back again. It could be from the other day when we got our tax done. There was a guy paying his tax bill and his kid was coughing up his lungs right next to me. Yay 
Wednesday was Bec’s birthday. HAPPY BIRTHDAY BABY!! Sorry it’s late but I’ve been busy as you know hehe. I took the day off work and we went to the shopping centre and got our tax done WOOHOO! We had some breakfast there and came back home afterwards as Sienna was tired and cranky. My appointment was at 10:00am but the guy before me didn’t bring most of his info and his wife didn’t bring any papers at all so I had to sit around for an hour before we started. Glad to get it out of the way tho. Got Bec a bedside lamp for her birthday. She was happy cos she really wanted one so she could read a book in bed.
I picked up a couple of old PCs for Blake and I. I set up Blake’s one. The PCs are "legacy free" and so don’t have any PS2 ports at all and no floppy drive. I had to buy Blake a $15 USB mouse and a $20 USB keyboard as we only has PS2 devices at home.
Windows XP installed great on Blake’s one, but FreeBSD doesn’t like PCs without keyboard controllers. This machine has no need for a controller as it has no PS2 slots, so FreeBSD kept locking up on bootup. I tested SuSE and RedHat Enterprise at work but SuSE locked up scanning for a controller. RHE3 worked but kept complaining about the missing controller and at any rate it’s commercial so I can’t keep it. Was just testing 
I tried Fedora at home since RHE3 sorta worked but it kept doing a KERNEL PANIC. Knoppix didn’t like it much either, so in the end in desperation I tried Mandrake 10.1 (now renamed Mandriva). SUCCESS! It worked wonderfully. No complaining. No errors. Nothing. Just a perfect install. WOOHOO! Ten points to Mandrake yet again.
I mounted my FreeBSD drive and copied all the files to the new Reiser3 Mandrake partition. I’m going to reformat the FreeBSD drive as Reiser3 as well. The new server is doing great. I’ve gone from a hernia-inducing full tower with Celeron 433 to a tiny desktop Netvista 6645 with PIII 800MHz CPU ….. and loving it!
I had a tiny bit of trouble getting samba to work until I remembered I had installed Shorewall firewall and it was blocking SMB connections. Soon as I learned how to set that up properly, Samba was working fine and I connected from my desktop.
At some stage I will have to upgrade to the latest community version of Mandriva. In the meantime I might just update my urpmi packages like ProFTP and OpenSSH and Samba to make sure there’s not too many vulernabilities. Might re-subscribe to the Mandriva mailing list on my GMail account soon too.. just to keep up to date with news and info. Don’t use my GMail for anything else. heh. Everyone has one or doesn’t want one. I have 50 invites same as everyone else and you can’t give them away any more. You probably could not even pay someone to take one 
So, I had yesterday off with the flu. Today I still have it so no swimming for the kids. With Blake sick and Sienna coughing it’s probably a good idea anyway.
Oh yeh. The new server didn’t have room for a second HDD. I took out the old IBM 20Gigger and put in my 120Gb Western Digital drive for my main one and installed Mandrake with the cdrom which came with the PC. I went out and bought a removable drive bay and stuck my 200Gb Western Digital in there and jammed the drive bay into the PC. Unfortunately, the drive bay didn’t fit in nicely since the RAM chips are right behind the 5.25" drive bay, so I lifted the back end of the drive bay and sat it on top of the RAM chips hehe. Not a great idea but it worked. Then I just had to shove the case on the PC as best as I could and screw it in.
I’ve still been having fun in Second Life. I’ve started work on a new multiplayer game. All the graphics and card design is completed and some scripting. Next is the game logic then linking to a scoreboard, etc. Should be fun!
