Felled By Bureaucracy
Noticed this little stone marker in the corner of a parking lot on a hill on a local university campus.
Wish I Weren't Here
Summer has eluded Wellington thus far. Yesterday I heard on the radio that January has been 10 degrees cooler than average. And that's in Celsius.
Salty snapper
I used to call myself a sushitarian. That is, I loved to eat raw fish but didn't particularly like cooked fish. In San Francisco it was easy to assess oneself in this manner, with sushi bars on every 3rd corner of the city (including a nice one the very block we lived on). In New Zealand, however, sushi is not so abundant. So the other day at the waterfront farmer market when Lillian asked to get a fish from one of the boats that pulls up and sells its wares, I thought why not?
Things that go bump in the night
Last night around 2:10am Minette and I were awakened by a big shake of the whole house. "Earthquake!" we said simultaneously. It was just one shock wave, quite strong but orderly. Thankfully the children slept through it. It's not uncommon to hear of analogies between Wellington and San Francisco, what with all the steep hills and large bay. Sitting on top of a major fault system is another similarity.
Refinement of automount script for LUKS encrypted disk image
In my previous post I showed an automount script for mounting a LUKS encrypted disk image as a loop device. The script was designed to always mount the same loop device, e.g. /dev/loop0. This prevented it from being able to mount multiple disk images, so with some tweaks I refined the script to use any available loop device and thus support multiple disk images.
Configuring automount for LUKS encrypted disk image on SMB share
In my previous post, I detailed how I set up an LUKS-encrypted filesystem on a loop device (a.k.a. sparse disk image file). To make automated backups easier and not have to add commands in my backup script to handle the mounting and unmounting of the disk image, I set up automount to:
- Mount the SMB share when accessing the
/cifsdirectory - Attach a loop device and set up LUKS filesystem access when accessing the
/encrypteddirectory
Encrypted Backup of RHEL 5 system to SMB network share
I purchased the LaCie NAS for backups of the various computers running around at home: a Mac desktop, a Mac laptop, and a Linux server. For the Macs they can just use Time Machine to backup to the NAS, which broadcasts itself as a Time Machine-capable server. For the Linux server, however, it's not so simple.
Taming the LaCie 2big Network NAS
A little while ago I bought a LaCie 2big Network server to use for backups and storage. The drive is simple to use, but lacks the ability for the internal hard drives to "sleep" -- that is, spin down when not in use after a period of time. That's pretty annoying because the drive makes noise and wastes power while running, keeping the disks spinning. I decided I had to figure out a way to tame this little server.
Up, up and away!
"Up, up and away!" reads the "For Sale" sign in front of our house. And after 44 days, we got a mini Christmas miracle by way of a sale! It was a painfully difficult process, so it's a huge relief to have a happy outcome on this whole house-selling hooha.
Carrots. Lots of tiny carrots.
I dug out my little patch of carrots today. I guess I didn't thin them out enough to grow past "baby carrot" size. It was a monumental cleaning job, attending to all those little carrots, but now the job is done and soon they will be cooked with some mustard and honey... ummm.