soapbox

Frankly, I don’t think dactyl is in good health and I don’t know what’s wrong. So, if you go to see the blog one day and nothing comes back, just wait a little while.

Dactyl is set to reboot automatically in the case of a kernel panic, but the issue we’re currently having is something less than a kernel panic but something more than nothing. Cron still works when things die, so I’ve set a cron job to reboot the computer at noon every day. It’s not ideal, but at least things will recover.

If you, gentle reader, happen to be up at Dartmouth and have some free time in the next couple of weeks, there are some things you can do to perhaps fix the problems. It would be good if someone could actually look at dactyl’s motherboard and make sure nothing is chock full of dust leading to overheating. Or, for someone supercool, you could connect a monitor to the computer and see what it actually says during a crash.

If you want to help, let me know.

There seems to be a weird discrepancy on the post and comment timestamps.  For example, it is now 8:23pm Pacific, and I see a little note next to the “Save” and “Publish” buttons saying that it was autosaved at 11:23:15pm, but the date stamp is Dec 3, 00:21 am.

No big deal, but just making note.  Any ideas Nathaniel?

This is just a follow-up to the post last week about squirting your web traffic through dactyl. The service is now password protected and is quite easy to use. Details are after the jump.
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I’m not sure what happened, but dactyl mysteriously crashed last night at about 7:30. It’s a little bit worrisome because (excluding the first weeks when dactyl was woodbox and overheated all the time) the machine has only crashed once before. Hopefully this was a random rare event and not a sign that the hardware is starting to die.

As a reminder though, everything on dactyl from user accounts and directories to the blog does get backed up on a daily basis. If something catastrophic happens, I’ll move everything somewhere else in fairly short order.

If, at some point, dactyl doesn’t respond for what you need to do, follow this procedure. 1) (assuming you’re off campus) make sure you can get to www.dartmouth.edu. If the entire campus’s connection is down, dactyl is definitely going to be down. 2) send me an email saying something like “dactyl wtf!”

Jerod was the lucky person to answer the phone this morning and did a quick reboot fixing things, so he gets a shout out.

Let me outline a problem to you using four examples.

One, you’re visiting China and want to blog about oppression you see during the Olympics. Now, the Chinese government has cracked down on internet free speech, so if you want to blog directly, you’re boned.

Two, your work decides that too many people are spending time on Facebook during the workday and blocks access.

Three, you really need to read Phys Rev D, but you’re at home and can’t read the articles because your home network isn’t subscribed to the journal.

Four, you really want to see asian donkey porn, but don’t want it tied back to you or your IP address.

Find out how after the jump.
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I had to renew the ssl certificate for dactyl because it was about to expire. If you’re using dactyl to send email or something similar, it might pop up a warning that the certificate is untrusted since it’s new. Just click the “always accept this certificate” box and it’ll work.

I was poking around yesterday reading about how to save energy with computers. It turns out that, under linux at least, you can do a huge amount to save power just by changing some kernel options.

Dactyl isn’t a powerful computer, the processor is an 800 MHz VIA C3. However, with some of the tweaks I just did, it now hangs out pretending that it’s a 400 MHz computer right up until it has to serve a web page or actually do something. That saves half of the energy it would have otherwise been using!

Side note: for dactyl, this isn’t that impressive… it’s like 3 watts instead of 5 watts.