linux blog, music and life. a day in the life of wayne ward…

its been a while since i last blogged ive been so busy working on a massive project which i will leak in short time im giving no clues and no information but its going to be be special.
works busy and im slowly but surely cherry picking the decent customers I get kinda sick of people who ring and ring and ring and its obvious i cant answer because im on a job or either in a meeting! bloody cheeky! i also hate people asking for my home phone number because they cant get me on my mobile? what so they can harass me on my home phone yes thats clever? and also so bloody cheeky they are the people Im striking off so be careful not to overstep the mark, im a good person but if you take advantage of my good nature i will strike you off with out a thought.
the site stats are all up again for the people who have been fortunate to get a site and optimisation so its al good.
On the music side..
the fretless is back together and now loaded with the EMG’s i just love this bass its amazing – the new status 5 string hasnt had a look in yet I need to get this hooked up and fall into it very soon.
Ive got some 30’s of my bezi mate simon for xmas and im going to load the jaydee up with these like it should be – its been a while its had 40’s on it for ages and i havent used 30’s for about two years – so its great to get back in slap mode !!!
Im going back into the studio to work on the promethium stuff as the b string on one of the bass parts didnt cut it and im making one of the fretted bass parts a fretless parts which i know will be perfect and im looking forward to this as its the first time i got the fretless down in the studio!!

I must say its been an eventful 3 months ive worked hard – dropped a lot of people who really just aint worth the time of day and im buckling down and getting on with my life. If your reading please take the time to understand what im saying i take no hostages im to darn busy. This year im leaving everybody behind im going that little number this year – ive worked so hard for others and lined there pockets now its my turn to hit the big one – so watch this space and learn

watch close for updates – big updates

have a nice day!!

Well im just chilling waiting till 7 to get ready for tonights new year gig at the moorlands hotel with revival then im going to hit rock night at cuba!!

Id like to wish everybody a new year – the linux user group – lancaster computers clients – musicians & family

All the best

Wayne

Well its been a while …
Ive been doing quite a lot of personal blogging in the new journal software I got called macjournal
I found most of the stuff I write about is people i know and them being assssholes! and I didnt really want to make it public!! ha ha… Im going to try and spilt my journals up so I at least get some interesting posts up daily. Ive also split my personal blog with the linux meeting minutes and added the linux minutes to the lancaster linux user group website. Its been hectic over xmas with gigs It all started last week i did my first gig on my own as jimmy usually does it with me as a duo which was pretty darn good I have to admit i liked to hear my guitar but having that second person does bring it along! then the night after i did a gig in carnforth with a old mate and had a great night! I then did the bobstock on the monday with natural thing for macmillan charity best day ive had in ages it was quite nice to see some other bands and realise we aint that good nowadays! but im thinking 15 years is enough time for the band now…..
The night went out with a bang with local band from the ashses – some damn good shit. Shamone.
The next gig was with jimmy at the bowerham which was a stormer apart from i noticed the lights werent switched on half way through the first set so i switched them on only to trip the power :-O
then some drunken prat decided he would try and pickup the guitars and after being told over the mic he proceeded to try and get back on the stage and then stood on the table! knob. He decided to growl at me which was funny as he would have been growling through his wired up jaw if he carried on as the strat was ready to connect to his head. nice
Anyhow the next and last gig was at the yorkshire house with promethium we was supporting d.a.m.
We got to the gig for five but couldnt get into the six to get the gear in so i decided to drink 2 / 3 hoegarden lagers which was fun then proceeded down to ali babas for a cheese burger with noooo mayo (thats another story..) got back and sound checked – sounded shit hot!
Got back home got changed and got the video camera as we was getting this gig on multiple video cameras! went on about 9.15 to about 40 punters and went down amazing!! I was slightly put of the gig for reasons i dont want to get into but it was still 100%
It was a shame for d.a.m – as the punters that came to watch were our following and dispearced when we finished so i stayed and give the lads some support!!
We dropped craig of who was being a pissed pain in the asss and promethium went back to dans to watch the video and drink some wine!! I rolled in around 4 – I cant wait till the next time we play – im going to watch rossi isnt in sweat wiping range haha!
The next gig is new years eve at the moorlands should be a stormer!!!

xmas …
Has been a chill plenty of films and books plus my dad has been round a lot. Fiona got me a burl watch box which im loading with new watches and also got me a pool table which me and dan have made plenty of use of!!

Sad loss to the year was a good friend great friend and drummer for years – R.I.P

Been talking to richard stallman for the past couple of weeks which has been pretty interesting he is the creator and maintainer of the GNU – kind of nice being in touch and talking to someone who has so much status in the open source community – I have a lot of respect for him and some of the things he stands for.

As for work and computers im starting to look more at getting websites and SEO in the new year and im going to run a local campaign to get some more web based work. Computers are a nightmare no ill refrain that computers are great its just the users who get there hands on them – they are basicaly undereducated idiots and are being issued with a tool that is far to powerful for them… and most of them when they break it wreckon they never did anything and its the person that sold them its fault its just a big joke!!

Anyway i wish you all a happy new year!!!
This year im starting new all grudges dropped a nice to fresh start
So anyone who has pissed me off is now officially of the hook
Adios

all lancaster linux user group blogs will be blogged on the usergroup site here

http://lancasterlug.org.uk/blog/

I thought it was better to integrate the blogs into the site itself

After figuring out the worn serial number was not XP and vista i proceeded to install vista after making a slipstreamed XP home and pro disk! the serial number wouldnt work on both installs of course with it being a vista serial !
anyway you dont need a sata driver for vista but after the install you will have problems with the wireless network card as there was something wrong with the bios so the wireless shows in device manager after a restore not from a proper reinstall!
anyway booted of a ubuntu disk which told me it was realtek 8187b which is available on the toshiba site with about another 6 drivers which is a pain as you would think it would be intel with the rest of he drivers being intel!!
any way its here
then i just clicked on the flagged video driver and it installed the correct intel video driver and warned me it might not be from the right provider but its direct from intel so go for it! it then updated the driver so happy days

Ubuntu just worked out of the box all drivers and all programs
again linux kills a windows install.

just got round to sending my first email to linux torvald – he is the man who delivered the linux kernel bringing new hope to all computers when all the sheep in the world start to realise they are paying for rubbish and realise there are alternatives such as linux. The world of computing will change. So lets hope I get a reply of him I know he is busy as hell and gets thousands of emails but who knows……

I just got round to redirecting linux torvalds UK domain name to my website !! which is something to be proud of – I might see if he wants it redirecting to his site!!!

Just to let you know we will be running a free linux workshop after xmas – this will be held in the lancaster and will give you free training. Linux history, linux install right through to system administration. Please feel free to email the lugmaster – info@lancasterlug.org.uk for details

If your setting up a smoothwall 3 express and either your snort ids wont update or any errors on snort ids after adding the snort ID key take a look here this works 100% – dont leave snort not enabled it works wonders and stops lots of nasties including tcp port scans and other ways to drop viruses and trojans back on your network.
This fix took me all of one minute.
Look here

what ive noticed so far is smoothwall is pretty closed off and full of features which aint bad updates can be run from inside the gui
without having to download packages to my computer and upload them in. It also offers three options on install closed – open or half open, half open being the default which sounds ok but need to read more into! it has some strange plugins i never seen in ipcop such as sip filter and im filter – which if enabled you can live watch peoples conversations in a console LIVE! talk about snooping! also has a browser based console which could be handy i suppose?.. all the clam engine updates with the update manager and it looks like daily updates are under the hood ill have to poke into this a tad more! snort has been changed you now have to get a code from snort.org which you get after a free sign up and then you enter it when you enable it then it pulls down the latest snort rules. the web proxy has a transparent mode which will build itself into port 80 8080 so you dont have to put proxy settings into all the web browsers! saves hassle and you get a pop3 proxy. all this is passed through clam antivirus and spamassasin. The graphs for useage are live and very nice to look at and very detailed graphs on cpu / memory usage. Ssh is enabled by a tick box and then you have to ssh in using -p 222 switch to access the server, i see you can hack a config file and change this the standard 22 port i dont see much point. I have looked at some of the addons and some look pretty good – ill just leave this as it comes out of the box and install on site and see how it performs then ill expand on top of that to requirements. Ill update this later… Also you can sign up for free to get email updates on packages and the free version is restricted to one processor and I think a gig of ram.

The ipcop basically has the same install as smoothwall as it was a branch from it. I noticed it never asked if i wanted open / closed or half closed so i expect its open?? Its seems very cut down and the packages out of date – infact it was pretty useless till i added the copfilter package were a gained a extra tab with clam & various proxies and monit which emails you problems. The update system could see what needed updating but i had to update the packages manually. Now with ipcop each section has plenty of configurable options which was a bit over the top and if you change something you can quiet easily kill the box. I set this up in a virtualbox with two nics and ran though it for a few days – i then tested it on the box and it was fine – when i came to install on site and use it – it died three times and just ran like a pile of crap? I noticed there are a lot more addons and its very configurable a lot more than smoothwall – but i also noticed as you start adding the functions its starts getting real hungry – i think ill pass on this for a while and come back and try when its a tad better…… ill update soon with some more linux firewalls im testing and the results of the smoothwall in corporate use…

id go for smoothwall so far…..

Im just moving service providers and phone provider and have a 20 day switch over – so I purchased a mifi adapter which I blogged about below. One of the problems stated was it wont let email relay out for my domain name. So ive had to use webmail provided to me from my hosting company. The choices i have are Horde – SquirrelMail and RoundCube. Ive always used horde as being a kolab user it comes bundled with it.. horde it pretty lean and has other features including mail – tasks and its very configurable probably a bit over the top for someone who isnt very technical – one of its good points is a white list and blacklist for killing spam now SquirrelMail on the other hand is very cut down and very lean it comes with address book and you can see your imap folders, you can add a signature and thats about it! id say not very nice to look at but does the job fast. Roundcube now this is basically the same as squirrelmail very cut down with the same features address book and signature and access to imap folders, no tasking or calendars but it looks great – i like the option Focus browser window on new message! so if your looking for lots of features go for horde if you want cut down go for squirrelmail if you want it more pleasing on the eye without all the tasking and other productivity addons roundcube is great. Check out the main sites for more info:

Horde
SquirrelMail
RoundCube