Samantha

I miss her an epic amount. She's sick with the chickenpox and miserable, and all I want in the world is to wrap my arms around her and make her feel better. But I can't, because I'm stuck up here in the frozen wastelands of the north. Fucking visas.

Banana Republic

As many of you will know, I refer to my home country of Ireland as "The Glorious Republic" from time to time. This is part piss-take, part nostalgia for the old country. The current Irish government, along with a long line of its predecessors, frankly couldn't find their own arse with a compass, two hands, an a judicial enquiry costing hundreds of millions.

Recently, a guerrilla artist hung a number of nude portraits of our current Glorious Leader, Brian Cowen, in a number of art galleries in Ireland. RTE, the "national broadcaster", dutifully reported on this. Someone in the current... regime didn't like this, and the next day RTE issued a swift apology.

Ten minutes of economic turmoil, and we're back to the 70s - strikes, public funding cuts, crumbling infrastructure, and infallible taoiseachs. The "celtic tiger" has been for nothing. We're right back where we started.

Sorry Brian, at least Haughey was a charmer.

Edit: Fellow ILUG blogger Donncha has put it better than I ever could.

Cheap network attached storage

I got my hands on a HUR1-SU2LA NAS device today. It basically looks like a large disk caddy; it holds two SATA disks and has an RJ45 socket on the back.

Which is all very well and good in theory, except in practice it's a cretinous pile of arse I had the stupidity to pay $100 for.

I stuck two 1TB disks I had into it, put the (incorrectly documented) jumpers on the RAID1 setting, powered it up, and went about configuring the in-built samba server to my liking. I set up a user, created some shares, etc. Except it doesn't work. The only way I can get smbmount to work is to mount the default share in the factory settings; it seems to ignore any password I specify. Sigh.

So, I move on, thinking password auth for something that's just going to store my torrents is not that big of a deal. Except every time I try to copy files to the thing, after a couple of file creations it stops responding, and smb gives me an i/o error. It seems to be able to copy large amounts of data without issue, but creating a lot of new files quickly in succession will make it bomb out.

As I type this, I'm using dd to create a zero'd file the size of the available space - I'm then going to call mkfs.ext2 on this file, and mount it as loopback. To the cretinous NAS box, it will look like one large file; to my Linux box, it will look like an ext2 fs. The sanity of mounting a samba-shared file as an ext2 loopback is probably questionable, but it's worth a go.