Lunar_Lamp

Today I set up monitoring of my network on my Be-provided ADSL modem/router. The process was fairly rapid, but is probably not the kind of thing that someone would find easy to work out by themselves if they didn't know roughly what to do before starting, so here I shall document it.

I just installed Nokia Mail 4 Exchange to synchronise my Nokia E61 with the Exchange server at work. It appears to work fine, but the install is horrific. Whilst it's just a case of installing the sis file like any other application (or, in my case, selecting it from the 'catalogue' of installable apps), the default configuration settings are awful.

I've recently been playing around with VirtualBox, and have loved it. I've found that all the operating systems that I've installed in it have been very snappy, and it has been simple to use them. I did however, after setting up a Windows XP box, want to copy files from the XP virtual machine to my Ubuntu host. This was, unfortunately, not quite as simple as one would hope, but it isn't hard.

All that is required is to set up a folder on the host, and mount this as a network folder on the virtual system - bilateral file transfer between the host and virtual system is then possible.

I was playing around with various firmware versions for the WRT54GL the other day and, without thinking, I attempted to flash the wrong firmware. The power LED flashed rapidly, and stayed flashing, when power was applied; none of the normal (simple) resetting methods worked.

I thought that I was in real trouble when the thing didn't respond to ping even - this was suggesting that I needed to use JTAG to recover, which is annoying and requires soldering.

I have just tested out Fonebank to recycle (or sell) my old mobile phones. It's a simple service where you send them your old phones, and they send you money in return. I was impressed.

Whilst I was aware that "ulimit" was responsible for setting the maximum number of files a user could have open in Linux, I had never needed to alter this value. That was until today when I needed to increase it for a relatively niche purpose, and I was shocked to realise that I didn't have a clue how to do this.

I quite like the ISP Be. It's fast due to ADLS2, and whilst I don't get the full 24Mbps, I am happy with the 15Mbps I manage - especially as there is no traffic shaping or restrictions on it's use that I have ever come across. There is one thing that annoys me a lot. You need to use their SMTP servers to send email with your email client (which I am perfectly happy with), but I can never find the details of the server quickly when I want to. So, here they are, once and for all, to aid my memory:

     smtp1.bethere.co.uk

If you want to check out an overview of your DNS setup for a domain, just to make sure you don't have any issues, there is a great website called intodns.com that will list everything you want to know in a simple and easy to understand manner. Further, if you want to go straight to a query for a particular domain, it's as simple as appending the domain onto the base intodns url; for example www.intodns.com/google.com. Brilliant.

I was having a strange issue with configuring a secondary name server on one of my Ubuntu servers. I had configured it (I think) in an identical manner to another secondary name server, but this one wasn't working, and I was getting the following error:

I decided the other day, virtually on a whim, to learn lisp: the programmable programming language. I'm not going to explain myself here, but I have found it slightly tricky to know where to start. Unlike some other languages it can be a tad hard to find a good guide and way in which to learn, so I shall just list a few things here.