Thought it was time to do a reinstall of my server/development pc (called Ayanami)...

Since it was more of a hassle to do an update (especially with the gcc update from 3.4 to 4.1), I decided to do a reinstall.
I wiped out my very old 2005.0 install cd, mkfs'ed the / and /boot and downloaded the 2006.1 stage3 and latest portage. Installation went smoothly, and it's currently merging the necessary stuff: Apache2, PHP (apparently Gentoo has moved to PHP5 as the default), MySQL5, etc.
Later on, I'll probably install a desktop environment as well, but haven't really decided whether I stick with KDE, or move to another one. The eventual idea is to get a TV-tuner card (probably some bttv-chipset)  ...

Did an upgrade of my Linksys WRT54GL to the latest OpenWRT firmware. These are roughly the steps I followed.

My old firmware was a OpenWRT rc5, default release. For my new firmware, I used the ImageBuilder to create a more customized firmware with a lot of packages (such as ntpclient, openvpn, nas, gpio, ...) preinstalled in the squashfs image. I left the new Webif^2 out on purpose, as it's updated at a fair regular base. The image (which has it's build list attached) is called cad, which is because I originally selected it for use with routers at work.

Anyway, updating my WRT54GL, was not as straight-forward as I had hoped. The upgrade firmware function of both Webif and Webif^2 did not w  ...

For work, I started experimenting with writing C programs for (flashed) Linksys WRT54GL routers.

Basically, the WRT54GL routers are running OpenWRT, a very lightweight linux distro, specifically designed for those type of routers. The router uses a Broadcom CPU, and uses the MIPS architecture. For more information, check the OpenWRT site at http://openwrt.org/.

At first, I was a bit worried about the differences between the full availability of the GNU C Libary, and the very slim version on the OpenWRT distro. Luckily, I quickly found out that the C Library on OpenWRT has the most used functions well covered.

Compiling C programs for MIPS might seem tricky (since you can't plainly fire up  ...

Ever wondered how much disk i/o is taking place on your linux-based server (or workstation)?

Here are some commands:

iostat

The iostat makes a snapshot of each available physical volume, and shows the current reads and writes of the volumes.

dstat -dnyc -f 5

dstat is a more advanced code, and measures both disk i/o as well as network i/o in near realtime.

Got this link from a colleague:
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/9454

It describes the inner workings of Postfix, the well-known mailserver for Linux.

Since it was my birthday, and due to the lack of presents, I found it to be quite normal that I got a present for myself. A quick visit to my computer supplier, delivered me this thing of beauty: a water-cooled ATI Radeon X1950XT from MSI.

It was a bit necessary for me to upgrade the videocard. Although my old X850 was pretty fast, it missed a few things. Since I'm a huge fan of TES4 Oblivion, I thought it would be nice to spend a little to get more out of the game, especially because Oblivion is already a pretty heavy game to run. As it was with my X850, I missed out on HDR, which seriously improves the in-game looks. And of course, 256MB VRAM was a bit tight; the game would often run out   ...