Exhausting

It was a long and draining week at work (actually several months but this week seemed worse). Still playing catch up with schedules. I did manage to work on some of my personal code and I took a bunch of O'Reilly Safari Online classes (node.js, OSCON presentations, Coursera, etc) on my personal time. Then the week culminated with the VCF Festivus Holiday Party at Infoage in Wall Twp. NJ. Lots of folks, plenty to talk about and I spent a little time in the Museum talking about computers with the visitors. It was a nice break.

Mouse was building the PiDP-8/I, a miniature PDP-8/I based on the Raspberry Pi and the SimH emulator. I think it can run OS/8 (and it has a copy of ADVENT AKA Colossal Cave). I'd love to get my hands on one. We'll see if I can order one of the kits.

The rest of the weekend didn't go as well as I'd like. My 20 year old Linux machine's hard drive died (click-click-click). While I had most of the software backed up I couldn't find the start up scripts for tinydns and dnscache (they were custom scripts). So I eventually switched over to dnscache. Then I attempted to use ISC DHCPD and I couldn't get it running in even the most basic setup (dnsmasq was configured not to do DHCP). Understand that my network has a /22 mask and that I have a large number of devices that require special DHCP options. I finally gave up when I couldn't get DHCPD to run on a different machine. I then started working on setting up dnsmasq for DHCP, after a while I figured out about 95% of what I needed. I'll work on the other 5% in the next week. At least my network is up and running properly now. The last thing I need to do is to create set of scripts that allow me to have a second dnsmasq running (probably on a Pi) so if things go south again I can keep the network running.