About Me
Getting old, but still much involved, or at least to the best of my abilities, in what’s going with computers. I’m not a programmer, and the closest I’ve come to doing anything of that nature, has been to hack a few makefiles for some ports in FreeBSD that were misbhaving when I was trying to install or update them. And, I’ve written some nice scripts in FreeBSD and OpenBSD to automate certain jobs I needed done on a regular basis. Things like checking to see if any of my ports were out of date and getting them updated, downloading binary package indexes nightly in OpenBSD to see if I needed or wanted to upgrade any I had installed. I’ve done some html publishing in the past, but at the time, I was still working offshore in Gulf of Mexico, 7 & 7, and just couldn’t keep up with how quickly internet web publishing technology was changing. Just about every place I’ve worked at has used me, at one time or another, to fix their computers or software. I started running DOS 4, I think, on an old Phillips 386sx with 1 mb of ram and a 40 mb harddrive. Times have sure changed, haven’t they? Right now, the computer I’m working on is a home-built PIII 800 with 256 mb of ram and 2 ide harddrives, divided up into different partitions for OpenBSD and network storage. It’s strictly for my own use and learning. I have an old Epson scanner hooked to it which works fine with xscanimage, but has problems with scanimage and The Gimp. It gets the job done, though, and I hope to do better with it when I upgrade the system to the latest distro that just came out, 4.0. I can print across my network to 2 different printers. One is an ancient Star 2410nx hooked to my old HP Netserver running OpenBSD, and the other is a HP Deskjet on my PIII 667 running XP. I also have another old relic, a Toshiba 4015cdt laptop, running OpenBSD, in the network loop. All OpenBSD users have cronjobs setup to backup there mail and whatever else they want to save to the XP box’s external storage, using rsync. I have cronjobs setup to cvsup the latest source changes on a nightly basis. On this box, the PIII 800, I can surf the net, do email, listen to NPR and my favorite shows including some really good jazz streaming stations along with BSDTalk’s podcasts. I do most of my blogging from here, too. I use Firefox and Opera for browsing, and XChat for irc. Being old fashioned, I use the email program I started out with a long time ago in the nix world, pine, back when I first installed Slackware Linux for the first time. I think after that, I started fooling around with FreeBSD on an old Gateway PII 300, and I got hooked on BSD. I’d still be running FreeBSD on my old Netserver, but I ran into all sorts of trouble when I tried to upgrade from 5.4 to 5.5. I guess I should’ve gone on straight to 6.1, but I didn’t know I was going to have so many problems upgrading. I never had problems like that before. OpenBSD went in like a champ, and the mp kernel was able to utilize both processors without any hitches, so I stuck with it. It’s out of date now, not really having needed the box for anything lately, but it’s not a problem to upgrade the system. I finally got myself a Unix shell account, and have a gopherspace setup there. I bookmark to Diigo and del.icio.us and have a blog on Blogger and Myspace. I recently picked up a copy of Jacek Artymiak’s book, Building Firewalls with OpenBSD and PF, along with a copy of The OpenBSD PF Packet Filter Book by Jeremy C. Reed, and want to get started learning more about firewalling and security. I love jazz, oldies, old movies, especially Bogart ones, and eventually want to make a trip back to Vietnam. I was there in 1966 with Company C of the 168th Engineer Batallion in Phuoc Vinh, which was up in III Corps area heading roughly northeast from Saigon towards Tay Ninh, past the Song Be river. I’m Buddhist and have learned most of my prayers, sutras, dharanis and others in Vietnamese. I’m putting a list of links on here of some of my more favorite hangouts, but it may take a while. I have so many things going on and sometimes I actually sleep.
