I bought another Acer X1800 desktop machine today (dual core 2.5GHz, 2GB RAM, 320GB HDD for only $380 from JB Hi-Fi!) with the intention of creating the first node in our specjour/Hydra test cluster. You might recall we name all the computers at work after Transformers characters, which meant I needed to determine which sub-group these machines would live under. We have already used a few of the Decepticon mini-cassette names like Ravage, Rumble and Laserbeak, so I had a look at what the Autobots provided in the same suite.

I found this site which outlines the Autobot mini-cassette characters, and decided our first node would take on Grand Slam’s name. I was sold when I read that Grand Slam combined with Raindance to create Slamdance! These guys sound like the perfect machines to tackle the task of running our automated test suites.

Once again we’re looking for some more full time developers. If you know someone who might be interested, let them know.

Full details are over on The Frontier Group’s blog.

On Saturday I attended BarCamp 4 at East Perth TAFE. It was a really well organised event (Matt and Darcy did a great job) and the content presented by the speakers was really engaging and interesting.

I saw Jessica Ender’s talk on form design as well as Samuel Spencer’s talk on the Australian Bureau of Statistics and their adoption of open data formats for delivering data sets to the public.

My talk was on after lunch, and I think me wandering around in a blue gi drew a little bit of attention (which if I’m being honest, I was banking on) and had people interested. Aaron helped me with the talk and received a few knocks to the head as thanks - his noggin was determined to meet the carpet-covered-concrete as often as it could.

I talked about the overlap I see between my jiu-jitsu training and every day business life, and my hope is that I’ll get the audience thinking about all the areas of their lives, which they may have previously considered insular or separate, and how they might in fact be connected and relevant.

I personally had a great time at the event, and The Frontier Group will be sponsoring it again in the future. I was disappointed that another engagement meant I couldn’t stay for the whole day, but I was very pleased with what I did get to partake in. There were a few of us pressuring Matt to plan for the next BarCamp in 6 months, but we’ll see how that goes.

I’ve uploaded the slides from my talk if you’d like to check them out.

Most people have a team. In Australia it’s likely to be your state’s AFL team, or either Ford or Holden if you’re a bogan, or maybe an English Premier League team if you’ve got an international flair. I don’t have a team.

Or rather, I didn’t have a team, until last week.

When I was in Vancouver a few years ago I saw the Canucks play the Edmonton Oilers (in ice hockey). I had a great time, and made some instant-friends in the process. I picked up a Canucks cap at the game and still wear it with fond memories, however I haven’t watched a game of ice hockey since I left Canada. Incidentally, I was watching NHL on TV nearly every night we were in North America. I think the lack of exposure made it easy to forget.

I decided I wanted a new team, but didn’t want the usual Eagles or Dockers. A quick search showed that the US Major League Baseball season was about to start, so that’s the sport I chose. As a kid I used to wear my grey Cleveland Indians beanie and the Indians are not a super-common team (which was another requirement) so they were a fine choice for this adventure. You can expect to see the beanie in the cooler months.

I decked my Xbox Live avatar out in a Cleveland Indians cap, and bought one in real life (which arrived today, prompting this post and the above photo).

We lost the opening game to the White Sox yesterday, but tomorrow’s a new day, and the season has only just begun! Starting next week, One HD will be showing up to five games live, which might mean a few 6AM wake-ups for me if the Indians are playing.

What’s your team, and what drives you to support them?

Today we bought a new network switch for work. It’s a managed switch and provides a few different ways you can configure it, including telnet, SSH and a web interface. It’s a Cisco/Linksys SRW2024, which is part of Cisco’s small business networking equipment offering.

I’m configuring it to have two VLANs; one for regular IP traffic and the other for our iSCSI network. I managed to lock myself out of the web interface by assigning all the ports to one of the two VLANs I’d created, and not leaving any ports attached to the default VLAN. This default VLAN had the management IP is attached to it.

Thankfully my new Acer Aspire X1800 desktop (which by the way, for $398 is a totally awesome Ubuntu desktop) has a COM port, so I connected up the serial cable and used screen to bring up a console connection:

screen /dev/ttyS0 38400

With this I could log in, then access the lcli command to give me a more meaningful console.

srw2024# configure
srw2024(config)# interface ethernet g24
srw2024(config-if)# switchport access vlan 1
srw2024(config-if)# exit
srw2024(config)# exit
srw2024# show vlan

Vlan       Name                   Ports                Type     Authorization
---- ----------------- --------------------------- ------------ -------------
 1           1                 g24,ch(1-8)            other       Required
 2         DATA               g(1-7,13-20)          permanent     Required
 3         ISCSI              g(9-12,21-23)         permanent     Required    

srw2024#

With that I had successfully removed the port from the ISCSI VLAN and replaced it into the default VLAN, making the web management console available.

I’ve never played around with Cisco gear before, but I suspect that this is similar to how IOS works.

I was happy that, even without any IOS experience, I was able to dig about inside the switch and get it back to being usable again. Now to try and attach g24 to multiple VLANs.