Pesto (by alaric)

I like Pesto sauce with pasta, and so does Sarah - as long as it's freshly made pesto, as encountered in restaurants. I'll tolerate pesto sauce from a jar, which she won't, but I still vastly prefer the fresh stuff.

One day I'll set up the resources needed to make it, but in the meantime, today we found a way of reviving jar pesto... we were having gnocci with sun-dried tomato pesto, but were both craving garlic, so I decided to liven the pesto up by pouring a bit of oil into a pan and frying a crushed garlic clove, then adding the pesto, then the gnocci.

The result was YUMMY. Not in the way that freshly made pesto is, but in a different way; the garlic somehow took the bitter edge off of the pesto's taste, and made it lovely instead.

I plan to experiment with doing this to other types of pesto and seeing what the result's like - but I'd still like to make my own fresh pesto sauce one day.

Cat bouyancy (by alaric)

Cats naturally tend towards the highest point they can get to. I presume this is to do with the ease of defending a high point and the ability to easily survey the most terrain, but either way, they seem to enjoy lounging in places they have to climb up to...

For ours, when they're indoors, the highest point they can reach is the top of a box, which is on top of a bookcase about two metres tall, in my office (which is upstairs to begin with). It's also a rather awkward place to extract them from when we put them out for the night, which I think they've realised too. But by climbing up on my desk, I can get them down anyway.

Anyway, as I came back to my desk after lunch, I realised that both of the black and white cats were curled up together up there, and made a cute picture (although I only had my mobile phone to hand, so sorry about the quality):

VLAN update (by alaric)

Ok, suspecting that the MTUs might be a problem, I put an fxp ethernet card into the single PCI slot in my home server (ousting the SCSI card), since that card can support the large Ethernet frames required to have a standard 1500 MTU plus 802.1Q VLAN tags.

But, alas, things were little better. From a desktop machine wired into the same switch as the server I still can't do DAAP without iTunes randomly closing the connection in mid-stream, and from Sarah's laptop on the wireless LAN, she still can't do DAAP or reliable SMB file sharing (the connection keeps getting dropped). SMB seems OK from the desktop machine, however.

So I wondered if NetBSD's 802.1Q implementation might be the problem; since the old vr interface is built into the server's motherboard, I now have two NICs, so just put the server on both internal VLANs independently (with no 802.1Q). And it's no better.

I can imagine that iTunes might just be fussy about its DAAP implementation and not like something daapd (an open-source implementation of the DAAP music sharing in iTunes) is doing; but why should SMB also be unreliable? I tried SMB from my own laptop over the wifi link, and found it workable but oddly slow. I'm going to experiment further with connecting my laptop directly to the switch (on either wifi or internal VLAN) and seeing how it responds, I think... something's fishy!

VLAN woes (by alaric)

At our house, we have three LANs; the external one, which is connected to the ADSL router and has a range of six public IPs; the internal one, which is joined to the external one via a NAT router (so using a single public IP) and contains my workstations and the fileserver; and the guest one, which is bridged to wireless Ethernet - and also joined to the external network via the NAT router.

Now, since I've not cabled the place yet, the physical layout of the network is dictated by the lengths of the cables I have. The ADSL router is at one end of the building, near the phone sockets, while the workstations are right at the very other end of the building. Therefore, the NAT router is in the airing cupboard, roughly in the middle of the building; my longest cables reach from the ADSL router to the NAT router, and from the NAT router to a switch in the office from with the workstations and server connect; and the wireless bridge sits in the airing cupboard along with the NAT router.

Even when I have structured cabling in place, I don't want to be having to cable three separate LANs around the house anyway; the natural solution is to use VLANs. That way, you can have switches joined by single-cable trunks, and those trunks carry all of the LANs in one; at each switch, you can either configure a port to connect to a specified VLAN, or configure the port to use IEEE 802.1Q tagging to connect a machine that understands it, in which case that machine can join whichever VLANs it is allowed using the single cable. This saves on the cabling a great deal.

Xen (by alaric)

I'm seriously considering becoming a big user of Xen. As in, making all of my servers run Xen (with NetBSD as the host OS), with everything of import then running in Xen "domains" (virtual servers) beneath.

There's a number of advantages to this. Read more »