Quick note – Ubuntu 10.10 – Maverick Meerkat is out. Mark Shuttleworth had already given a vision for it back in April 2010.
Let the “light”ning commence! 
“Maverick Meerkat” is the code name for Ubuntu 10.10, scheduled for release on 10 October 2010. See the Maverick release schedule. A quick sketch-up roadmap is over here.
Samba. Whopping goodness. Here are a few notes that help in the setup – from user creation, to directory settings etc
This blog post contains a few lessons learnt and thus by extension a migration plan from a Windows file server to a Samba-based one running on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS. I look at users, system vs smbpasswd user creation and linking (set that up in Webmin before you start, as well as for groups), share setups, general permissions and some very basic troubleshooting (as there weren’t many troubles, just headaches.) (more…)
Just a quick note (as I keep forgetting, and a cut-and-paste solution is a quicker time to market) – but you knew that already. Installing Webmin is quite simple (download directly, or from the mirrors). Currently, 1.510-2 is the latest version – check on www.webmin.com for further details. As an aside, the book Webmin Kompakt – by Holger Reibold – is available for download!
So here’s a simple step-by-step: (more…)
So the booking system came back online on Friday – late afternoon; after it crashed in the morning, thus shifting online booking advantage drastically… Sigh. And now it’s “Sold Out” in all the good ones. Weren’t they going to release 160 000 tickets? And then it came down to 90 000 tickets…? Perhaps they reported it incorrectly on the news? (more…)
That’s it – I’m out – got to wait for the 14 days now before the account is deleted from Facebook.
As promised, I was asked whether I’m really sure that I want to delete my account – have to enter your password and the 2 CAPTCHAs before getting the confirmation:
Last step before account deletion?
Doesn’t quite end there: next, I get an email, Subject: “Account scheduled for deletion”, as below (just that WordPress handles the incorrect <br/> tags sent via mail correctly, corrects, and compensates):
Hi Sven,
We have received a request to permanently delete your account. Your account has been deactivated from the site and will be permanently deleted within 14 days. (more...)
Google.co.za is doing it, Gmail is doing it — resolving to 196.23.168.147 – hosted by Internet Solutions, and reverse-IP’ing to za196-23-168-147.cache.googlevideo.com (which suggests the implemenation of local youtube caching (youtube.co.za is in the offing for some time now)) – full rundown here. Youtube.co.za — registered by MarkMonitor on behalf of Google – was last updated on 15 May 2010, so it’s not far away – well, at the moment, it’s just redirecting to http://www.youtube.com/?gl=ZA&hl=en-GB They weren’t that lucky with gmail.co.za though
While we’re on domain names – did you know that whois.co.za is no longer functional? You need to browse directly to http://co.za/whois.shtml – I’ll put a little something together for that…
Just kind of interesting
So more tickets went on sale today. Or did they? When I visited the http://lmsfwctickets.fifa.com/LMS link yesterday, I got an IIS7 welcome screen (Welcome to IIS7 — is that the new Icelandic Soccer Federation? which was then fixed about 30 minutes later. That was after the IIS7 ASPX BSOD about their web.config file. Bad omen. This after previous hitech hitches…
So tickets went online today at 9am SAST. Connection timed out. Connection error. But that has been fixed 3 hrs later:
How disappointing… Sigh… At least there’s consistency in terms of ticket day launches…
Perhaps there may be another few tickets on the horizon at some stage…
The counter at the top of the page shows that there are 18 days (and 9 hours) to go before kick-off to the world cup. Have all the tickets sold out? Well, currently, there are signs that some matches are currently unavailable, but in the last 30 minutes, the selection screen has dropped down – from all matches, to just the first 14, to just the opening match in Johannesburg – which has not tickets currently available…?
No options, no tickets, no sales… Hm…. I guess that’s one way of creating a demand…
The entire ticket purchasing system is not available at present, please try again later…
“SEACOM’s backhaul service provider link is down from Mtunzini to Johannesburg due to an unusual failure on both primary and secondary routes due to circumstances beyond our control. SEACOM is in the process of reprovisioning customers onto a tertiary route.” is what SEACOM announced today. Some ISPs confirmed that SEACOM connectivity was restored at around 15:24 SAST, though links were only stable around 16:20 SAST.
So – there are mixed reactions to the World Cup Song.
Wait – is it just me or is “Waka waka” not a registered catch-phrase of Fozzie Bear from the Muppet Show? (more…)
The latest notification received from SEA-ME-WE 4 indicates that the repair work on the SEA-ME-WE 4 cable is expected to be completed by 22.00 (UTC) on 28 April 2010.
That’s the update from SEACOM. MTN Business gives similar information.
An hour ago, the link was marked as back up – the stability of the link will be shown by how fast / how slow the access on the web via the SEACOM cable is again, after the last few days of slow web access and intermittant internet connectivity via rerouting…
Here’s hoping…!
An update from Afrihost which echos what’s happening to IS-resellers of DSL bandwidth in South Africa:
IS have removed ADSL users from emergency SAT3 backup and thus you will not be able to access international websites via the normal channels.
Proxying is touted here to be the solution. Full background to the story of Seacom’s emergency maintenance is here: SEACOM maintenance extended until 30 April – South African Internet slow.
MTN Business (in their NOC notices) have confirmed what SEACOM had alluded to – the maintenance windows (and hence the high latency and traffic redirection via the SAT3 cable rather than the SEACOM link) has been extended until 30 April 2010. SEACOM in their notice on 26 April:
The ongoing repair work is affecting several cable systems and has impacted negatively on the overall Internet connectivity in many regions across the Middle East, Africa and Asia, which rely to some extent on the availability of the SEA-ME-WE 4 cable for global connectivity. (more…)
There are important questions, and there are more important questions. Wolfram|Alpha positions itself as a computational knowledge engine. Questions such as “What is pi?” are quickly resolved, with a good short summary stating that π is a universal mathematical constant that is defined as the ratio of the circumference to the diameter of a circle. That’s all fine and good. You can ask tricky things, such as “10 nearest stars” and it works it out, and Bob’s your uncle, ask about an ISBN number at it will render the barcode, and give a basic Venn-diagram question, and it gives you a logical and graphical portayal. (more…)
Futher to previous information about the volcano impact on air travel, another update will follow at 21h00 BST, but the latest is below:
Based on the latest information from the Met Office, NATS advises that the restrictions currently in place across UK controlled airspace will remain in place until at least 0700 (local time) tomorrow, Monday 19 April.
Let’s see what happens next…
Update – 19 Apr 2010:
Based on the latest information from the Met Office, NATS advises that the restrictions currently in place across UK controlled airspace will remain in place until 0700 (local time) tomorrow, Tuesday (20 April).
From 0700 (local time) tomorrow, Tuesday, Scottish airspace will be open, and south to a line between Teesside and Blackpool. Mainland Scottish airports will be open.
This is a dynamic and changing situation and is therefore difficult to forecast beyond 0700 local; however, the latest Met Office advice is that the contaminated area will continue to move south with the possibility that restrictions to airspace above England and Wales, including the London area, may be lifted later tomorrow (Tuesday).
The Icelandic Weather Office summarises it nicely:
Kristín s Vogfjörð © Bárður EinarssonPhoto taken west from Reynisfjall towards the sea, off the village Vík, south Iceland. Black ash obscuring the sunlight.
“After a few days of quiet in Eyjafjallajökull volcano, a new and much more forceful eruption has begun west of Fimmvörðuháls, under the ice-cap.
The eruption is below the highest peak of Eyjafjallajökull, at the southern rim of the caldera.
A plume rises at least 8 km into the air. No lava is seen yet but melt-water flows both north and south of the mountain.”
From NATS (which has a temporary page up relating to the airspace over the UK clogged up due to the volcanic ash from the volcano in Iceland): (more…)
clamav finally sent the end-of-life payload yesterday evening – 0.96 is the current version, so it’s been a good run
Possible symptons you experienced:
WARNING: getpatch: Can't download daily-But they warned they’d do this in October 2009:
Starting from 15 April 2010 our CVD will contain a special signature which disables all clamd installations older than 0.95 – that is to say older than 1 year.
This move is needed to push more people to upgrade to 0.95 .
We would like to keep on supporting all old versions of our engine, but unfortunately this is no longer possible without causing a disservice to people running a recent release of ClamAV.
The traffic generated by a full CVD download, as opposed to an incremental update, cannot be sustained by our mirrors. (more…)
www.co.za is all up and running and back in business again after their issues on April 7, 2010. whois.co.za, co.za Domains and the South African Domain Registry in general is all back in business.
But you know that already Well done for all the hard work!