Dean wrote his Cron Commandments a while back but they got some link loving from Simon Willison relatively recently. The one he misses though is Thou shall not rewrite cron. Im looking at you backgroundrb and rufus-scheduler.

If you dont know much about using and setting up cisco routers I humbly suggest you buy Cisco Routers for the Desperate. It was very useful this week when I set up a pair of 2811s with HSRP. I would tell you how but I think you should buy the book instead.

So recently I've backported[1] a couple of debian packages and needed somewhere to serve them from. The current work apt repo scares me so I followed Dean's useful guide to setting one up instead. It worked very nicely and wasn't pain.

[1] post to come hopefully

When I was setting up my Planet I noticed that Chronicle was outputting less that useful titles for the rss feed. Instead of whining I provided a patch which Steve accpeted.

Today I have mostly been hating mailman

That's about an hour of my life im never getting back

I've had a svn repo for a while. Today I installed SVN::Web which gives a useful web interface to it. For example you can see other revisions than the current one. My Repository via SVN::Web.

One reason why i did this is that it gives a RSS feed of the revision log. This means I can use RSS FWD to get commit messages in my email without having to mess with commit hooks.

To help people who upload modules to CPAN lots of people test them. I have been doing this for while following instructions on the CPAN Testers Wiki. However the automation instructions are very specific to dave's set up. So I wrote my own scripts.

cpantest.sh is my script which fires off cpan for the releases I'm testing. autocpantest automates the testing of recent modules. Its not all automated, I still have to approve the sending of failure reports. The script is quite frankly quite bad and would probably be better as some perl. Perhaps when I've taught myself some I might rewrite it.

With all this in place I should start shooting up the leaderboard

If you want to keep up with all my feeds you could use my newly setup Planet. I used Plagger and yet again made my own theme

It was relatively trivial to set up. Then again I had an example to work from

In the pub the other day for the London.pm Social Smylers brought up the stuff he uses to make hostnames a bash command. He also found the time to generate some hate.

I do this another way as I have previoulsy blogged. Dominic Mitchell at the time pointed out that my scripting sucks. In fact my current version takes his suggestions on board.

The other day Deanand I were seeing if a HP PA-RISC workstation Dean had got off ebay worked. We managed to get it powered on going to serial console. Then jury rigged a cd drive to try an install of HP-UX.

It would seem the install cd Dean had didnt like doing the install over serial so we had to connect up a monitor and keyboard. Thankfully IBM use the same funny DVI connector for their servers.

We proceeded with the install, which was a new and exciting experience for me. We got a failure when it tried to install stuff like mozilla and GTK from the second and third install discs. However the main OS install seemed to be fine so we carried on. Even the big FAILURE printed using banner didnt put us off.

So after several reboots we got to a stage where we could login. So we did. Then we found there was no bash and our sh skills are a little rusty. Not having tab completion is pain. Time for some software install using swinstall. We hit a problem here. It would seem that swinstall is network aware and wishes to resolve the name of your host before it will install stuff. We then spent 30 minutes scracthing our heads until we realised that while there were 6 or so nsswitch files none of them was actually nsswitch.conf. So the OS really had no idea what was going on.

After all that we managed to get bash installed from a Porting And Archive Centre for HP-UX package. The relief was great as we could finally tab complete