Saturday, May 31, 2008

tfd update from external ip

The tfd update page had ip restriction, so N got access forbidden when he tried to update tfd from home. PB says easiest way to do would be to add the required IP address in the database. Not so easy for me to do....

firewall at the studio, krishna's booting trouble

Last week we moved from iptables running on Linux boxes to a firewall box. DLink DFL-210. It has an added feature of intrusion protection in addition to the greater uptime for studio net users. When the servers go down for maintenance, their browsing need not be interrupted. Fairly straightforward setup, but we wasted a lot of time "troubleshooting" a network cable which was not plugged in!

Related development - krishna not coming up after reboot, probably due to incorrect master-slave setting on extra hard disk or bootable flag or something like that, added to the fact that hotplug or kudzu is not installed, so it needed to drop to a root shell, then we edit /etc/fstab to remove the offending hard disk's entries, then it boots.

Saturday, May 24, 2008

flash flames

Wanted to demonstrate why using flash for a plain text page with a Next button is a bad idea, googled "misuse of flash". Got both points of view in the first few matches:

Pro-flash: http://anthonyfranco.wordpress.com/...cations-rias/

Anti-flash: http://tortus.com/news/flash_flashy_isnt_always_good

To be honest, the "anti" page is not anti-flash, just against its misuse. And the pro page lists many ways of doing things, which are not really done the correct way by our people, so it really is a pointer to flash misuse at our end once again....

Friday, May 09, 2008

miscellaneous vacation stuff

Doing "re-clicking" of old photos using a Kodak EasyShare DX6340 - 3 Mega pixel. The camera should be in the "Close-up" mode for best results.

Got video out working from the laptop, for seeing on the TV. S-video to composite Cable made with the help googling, diagram at
http://www.epanorama.net/circuits/svideo2cvideo.html , S did the soldering.